What's your first experience of the Internet?

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in 1993 or 1994 I used a dos program called telix I think it was connecting to internet at 2400 baud! mostly just e-mail back then as I was used to some BBS's back then but then moved to web surfing more and more.

Actually, the Internet was started up on Oct. 29, 1969, connecting UCLA and Stanford Research Institute. Over the next couple of months, a couple more universities were added, and it grew from there. It was officially known as ARPANET, DARPANET or NSFNET in the early days. The term "internet" was invented in Dec. '74, when the Internet Protocol was created, but it took several years for people to start referring to it as "the Internet."

I wasn't on it in the '70s, but some of the people whose sites I connected to in the '80s had been. One of them even remembered how, in '76, he could print out a list of every system on the Internet, and it was 2 pages long.

Sometime in 1999/2000.

using an AOL floppy disk with a 28.8K modem
that was the fastest available at the time

In the 90s my parents had Prodigy, but I didn't use it. In the late 90s we got AOL, which was dialup. I don't know how I survived then. Around 2002, or so we got SBC Yahoo DSL.

I remember back in 1996, they introduced this mysterious thing called the internet to my school. I was like "what the hell is that?" Little did I know what an addict I would become. I've been surfing the net regularly since 1999.

When I played a game in my dads work place, way back in 1991. We got our own computer in 1995, but my dad had his work laptop at home all the time.

1999-I looked up Siamese cats and found the Siamese Internet Cat Club. Great site!

Around 1999-ish, but I didn't get the internet at home until around 2003 (dial-up). Then I got broadband around 2005 and I thought to myself "HOW THE HELL DID I SURVIVE WITH DIAL-UP?"

Right around 1990. I had played around on the local BBSs with my blazing 9600 baud modem after upgrading from the 1200 baud acoustic coupler for my Atari 800XL when a guy at scholl hooked me up with an account on the local university server where he was a MUD admin. Usenet and email with a side of Gopher to go, please. Then the ISPs started appearing and I ended up dumping $100+ a month on hourly fees until all-you-can-eat came along. I'd say it was the good old days since the content to crap ratio was far superior, but seriously, when moving from the xmodem to zmodem protocol is a major upgrade, your connectivity just sucks.

Around 2000, when I was a sophomore in high school. The computers in the school library where connected to the internet. At lunchtime on the first day I went to the library to check it out. After that everyday at lunchtime I would surf the web and play this online mini-golf game and surf Geocities along with a few other people that did the same thing.

We also tried to find porn, but the school had a program called "Bess" that blocked all those websites. We were always trying to find ways to get around it or disable it. We did find a way though, by opening a website through the world.altavista.com language translation website. It worked... I did that once, the website opened, then BAM, full screen unclosable popup with penises and p*****s and tits and animated gif penetration images all over the place.
The librarian seen it! She panicked, she ran over, pushed me to the side and frantically tried to close it, when she did manage to close it, another popped up, then another and another and so on. She was FREAKING OUT, finally she pulled the power cord. Then marched me away to the office.
I only got suspended for a day for that.

What I don't understand, why wasn't Bess able to stop it? Must have been a one in a million fluke or something.

From my CV:

Dec 1987 - Aug 1988: Private project. Design and implement a Viewdata Bulletin Board System. Motorola 68008 assembler, BASIC.

I ran my BBS for quite a while over that period. Eventually, it used Fido to get mail between BBSs. I had a nice split screen chat that worked a treat (character by character - none of this "line-at-a-time" stuff - you could see the other person correcting their typing mistakes). Various others used my (initially 120 baud) BBS software (early freeware).

Around the same time was the first (and pretty much only) time I've hacked into a system - Janet. I told them how I'd got in.

At this time (pre-90s) the internet did NOT really exist - at least, not as anything that an average member of the public would/could have anything to do with. Back in '83 I was in London, using "talk" (a chat system) between VAX mainframes with a colleague in the States - but that was IGENY - a multinational - and that chat actually went over a dial-up line, IIRC.

getting online to look up the nintendo power website.

Interesting question. I can remember where I was when I heard about Princess Diana's death, but my first internet experience is not something I remember that clearly.

I know I started using the Net at university in 96.

I think one of the first things I tried to do on the Net was play "six degrees of separation" with The Simpsons. I'd read that you could navigate from just about any webpage on the internet to a webpage mentioning The Simpsons using just six hyperlinks.

Then I came across a website some guy had set up with an interactive animation. Visitors to the site were supposed to nominate which country of the world they'd like to see nuked.

Eventually I found yahoo chess. I was addicted to that for about a year, although I used to spend most of my time in the chat lobby insulting people.

It was 1996. I was 14 years old.

The first thing I did was look up Final Fantasy III (VIj) on a search engine It took several minutes for the primitive webpage to load... I remember I used to click on links and then leave the room, go for a jog or whatever, and come back to see if the page had loaded yet. Sometimes it still hadn't. I was ok with that though. It was worth it.

It was in my senior year of high school, and I had to do some research.

Tim

Summer 1981--ARPANet