pine?
No, I think the desk was some kind of hardwood, maybe oak.
The first cool image I saw was a screenshot from the then upcoming Star Wars Special Edition. So this must have been around 1995. This was such an exclusive, because I saw it on the day the pic was released, and didn’t have to wait and buy an official magazine to see it (which would’ve been months away from then, as all international magazine deliveries still are).
I was very very excited. Then I could take part in the newsgroup discussions about it!
Porn.
My dad told me that you could use the internet to find information for things. The next day at school, I went to the library and went to AltaVista.com, and typed in a search for Pink Floyd, in the hopes that they’d have at least a few articles I hadn’t read. I got something close to 10,274 PAGES worth of hits.
Been an addict ever since.
My first networked computer experience was logging in to a CYBER system during a summer program in 1986. It also supported an up to four person chat. Something about email and live online chatting was immediately addictive, even though all the users (my classmates) were actually sitting in the same computer lab. Because we knew we could be doing it from any other room with a terminal… Or even at home with a modem (I got a 1200 baud modem to attach to my Commodore 64 just to experience a remote connection from home for the first time).
As for the true internet, I got a login on a SunOS UNIX machine at college in 1989 and discovered (a) the thrill of emailing my high school friends at faraway colleges around the country instantly, and (b) USENET. Everything I like about the SDMB was true back then about USENET, which hadn’t yet been taken over by spammers: intelligent and witty discourse on almost every topic under the sun, and in multiple languages, with contributors from all over the world.
And then soon afterwards, yes, I discovered the binary newsgroups with the p0rn. What’s a college sophomore whose roommate moved out and who has a computer in his room that’s hooked up to the campus Internet supposed to do after discovering free porn?
In 1990 I discovered online MUDs, real-time, multi-user text games. As a former Infocom game addict, this was the next level of addiction. It was fantasy online text adventuring mixed in with online social chatting. Oh baby. My GPA took at least a half-point hit from this.
I remember seeing a Netscape browser for the first time in 1992, my senior year, and wondering what the heck the point was. I had everything I needed with Telnet, FTP and Gopher services… And all those graphics would take forever to load and render over a modem, the only people who would ever be able to use it would be people on a University campus!
When we got the internet at work we had T1 lines so everthing was fast. The first thing I looked up was pictures of Mars in stereo. I thought that was really cool.
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Went over to a house party - the hostess showed how, just by following links, we could surf around to find out about castles in Albania, or some such - from Albania, with pictures.
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Had a college paper to do regarding the Anchorage Earthquake. Did a search on Yahoo. (What? This is free?!?) The first link that comes up is “CG’s Alaska Page”. Hey! I’m CG! How did they know?!? …Okay, turns out it was pure and utter co-incidence. But mindblowing at first glance.
My English prof introduced us to GOPHER, in about 1991 or 92. I could access all these forbidden “alt.” newsgroups through UT Austin, 2500 miles away, even though the groups were banned at Georgia Tech. I thought it was heaven!
Joe
In 1989 before the WWW, as a college freshman, I was able to chat with other like-minded sports fans online on Usenet. I thought, “This is way cool!” When I was able to download pictures via UUENCODING/UUDECODING, I was like “WHOA!”
My first fun net (pre-Internet) experience was about 1975, when I was a grad student at Illinois. We logged in to Stanford over the ArpaNet, and used the Parry AI program - a simulation of a paranoid person. The game we invented was to create the minimal string that would make it hang up. We got it pretty short.
For the real net, in about 1993 I was on a Mike Oldfield mailing list - pre-Web. A lot of the people on it were from Europe, where he was more popular. I was going to Madrid for work, so I asked on the list where I could find stuff there. So a few weeks later I dragged a guy who worked for me who came along to this obscure street in Madrid, where we went into a CD store, and I bought some cool bootlegs. Zeroing in on a place I would never have found without the net really impressed me, though I had been using it for mail for years.
Who the hell used an IBM PC XT in the mid 90’s?? That was a 10+ year old computer at that date!
I’d been on the internet for ages before I really thought about how cool it was. It wasn’t until early this century that I was driving in my car and heard a song I really liked but didn’t know anything about it. I got home, put the only lyric I could remember into a search engine and found the name and artist and lyrics for the song, then I downloaded an MP3 of it and then found the guitar music for it. Within 30 minutes of hearing the song for the first time, I “owned” a copy and could play it on guitar and sing along.
I used to have a computer store then, and we sold secondhand computers. We sold *shedloads *of those XTs.
Reading the synopses of Babylon 5 episodes that hadn’t aired in Ireland yet but had in the US. That was really exciting. This was the first time I came across the world spoiler too.
1994 - Our first computer was an IBM PC XT - got it free from someone who was giving it away in the local paper.
Pittsburgh was in the middle of a snowstorm/deep freeze, and the Northridge earthquake just happened out in CA. My mom and I had just picked up 2400bps modem a day or so before were trying to figure it out. We had read about going online to BBSs, and dialing into other computers to find out information from other people. I remember the excitement of trying to get info before it was being realeased on TV. This was the first day we signed up for Prodigy and from there, we were so excited that there was this world out there that we could post questions and find others with similiar interests. We then scrimped and saved and went to the store a few weeks later to buy a … /gasp 14.4 modem 
My mom was in a small business owner’s association and there were a couple people in the group (omg…some VERY creepy people we found out later) that ran some BBSs and we went there to chat with people too - not a lot of people, usually the Sysops were on.
My dad was really into into the interweb too - he was pretty anti-computer up to this point, until my mom starting doing all this research on the Lone Ranger for him. A few months after he was really getting into the computer thing, he passed away suddenly. A few days after his death a signed autograph came in the mail from the Lone Ranger himself for him. 
From that first day we were so hooked, so deeply hooked it’s been a part of my family’s life in so many ways…
Mars Pathfinder 1997
I’d been online for a few years before that, but in the summer of 1997, Pathfinder landed on Mars and sent back pictures that were released online almost immediately.
So … this probe/robot is on Mars Mars! right now … right now … and I’m nobody … John Q public and in a few minutes I had a color picture of the Martian landscape coming out of my printer and I’m holding it in my hand … [cue 2001 space odyssey music]
The future is now.
I still have the printout.
In '91 we had a course in “Documentation Management” which involved, among other things, an optional visit to the Library to play around with CAS on CDs. The course was taught by the Librarian. He mentioned that you could also consult CAS “online” and that way you got more up-to-date information, but it was slower and more expensive as you basically were phoning the USA.
In '94 I entered grad school in the USA. One of my first courses was in Theoretical Chemistry; there was an exercise where we did an rlogin to a computer in Harvard and used the remote computer to run a calculation on benzene. The notion of being able to connect from a small computer to a bigger computer someone else owned, rather than needing to buy the whole big computer, killed me dead. Love at first sight, oh yeah.
About a year later, my boss (the guy who’d taught the Theo course) came in all excited and showed us our first glimpse of Mosaic. The page he opened included the topological matrix for a complex molecule and - a pic of the molecule! Certainly a cool improvement over “hey, can you give me a server to ftp your pic so I can see it? You guys have guest access, right?”
It wasn’t until April of '96 that I discovered the 'net could be used for play. I was going to Germany as part of a Researcher Exchange program and this guy gave me the address to a MUD. I resisted at first, but the boredom was too much; I finally signed up to the game. I’d been there for only a few hours when someone came in and said
“Sorry for using general for non-game stuff but, does anybody know a page where I can get info on sexual harassment laws in Arizona? I own a business and one of my customers just went and told one of my workers ‘with tits like those, you should be a whore!’, she’s now in the bathroom crying and I want to tell the ass to get his butt out of my store forever before I call the cops on him.”
It took less than five minutes for people to come up with three different webpages.
That incident would have been enough to make me fall in love if I hadn’t already been.
Well, if I’d played 2001 Space Odyssey while holding my Pinky & the Brain list, it would’ve looked a lot more impressive.
One of the first sites i found was The Onion. That got me hooked.