When I got onto Prodigy in late 1992 and found the Final Fantasy 2 bulletin board FF2* (This was the first time I used the handle fusoya, and it was actually relevant then!)…the first “I love online access” moment was when I found a post of Game Genie codes for the game that let you vastly modify the way the game was played (get access to any item at any time, change the characters in your party, the ability to walk through walls), which breathed new life into the game for me.
First thing I looked for. (Porn, that is. Not oral pooping.)
Good thread!
One of mine was when I emailed an ornithologist with a burning question I’d had for some time about whether hummingbirds sing. (I didn’t have access to folks like Colibri back then!) He wrote me back a very nice and informative email, and I was tickled. I’m a great one for burning questions. That’s why I lovelovelove the Dope so much!!!
Setting porn aside…
After switching to a real ISP from AOL (“You mean we can be online as long as we want and there’s no hourly fees?!”), I found a Tengwar font (one of Tolkien’s alphabets). I mentioned this to some other people online, and a guy from England – ENGLAND! – asked me if he could have it, and I gladly emailed it to him. That was the first real “wow” moment for me, that I could share stuff with people in freakin’ Europe.
That was my reaction too, but then I realized that I was still on a Tandy 1000 (no bloody EX, ST, TX…) until about 1993. I bought my next computer (a blazingly fast 286) from someone that I had met on BBSes.
My first contact with the Internet was in the form of Usenet newsgroups that some of those BBSes mirrored. Unfortunately, the BBSes got their Usenet connections though a local brokerage, so no interesting newsgroups were included. Occasionally, something good would show up in the newsgroup where FAQs were posted–specifically, the wonderful FAQs for alt.folklore.urban and alt.fan.lemur.
When I finally got Internet access myself, it was confusingly different from BBSes (even networked ones). For example, my ISP wasn’t grateful that I tried to find a place on their FTP site to upload a newer version of Netscape than they had provided on their setup disc. They had the nerve to accuse me of searching their site for vulnerabilities!
An addict was born.
It was in 1998, when I found my first genealogy connection online.
I was able to email via the public library before I had the net or even a computer. It was too cool being able to send a letter to a dozen addresses simultaneously—no envelope, no stamp.
One of the first websites that blew me away was olga.com. On Line Guitar Archives—other people had figured out the chords to songs, posted them. I could look up a song I wanted to play, find that someone had put it there three years ago. Amazing.
Mid-1990s, I was the editor of the local newspaper and we suddenly landed a huge travel agency account who wanted a full page of travel stories once a week opposite their full-color, full-page ad. Ordinarily, most of the revenue from the ad would have been eaten up subscribing to expensive story and photo services, but the Internet gave us almost unlimited access to travel sites. One quick e-mail always secured permission to use copy and photos as long as we credited the provider and included their phone numbers or email addresses. To me, it was the completion of a process that started with desktop publishing. DP was still clunky and unwieldy because you had to input everything – keyboarding, scanning, and lots and lots of stuff dragged in from floppy disks. With the Internet, we could import the world into our hometown newspaper with the click of a button. I remember sitting at my desk, looking at the screen and thinking “I’m looking at the future!”
1994, reading stuff about founder in horses from a university in Scotland, which was linked to another university in Canada, then on to a paper published by a couple of farriers and equine vets in Australia.
Love, love, LOVE the net.
The earliest I can remember is getting sound clips from South Park online. That was sweeeet.