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It was 1992. I attended a small technical college in Norway. We would telnet to an irc server in NYC to chat. After that: email, ftp, gopher, Usenet, irc, and eventually the www and setting up the college’s first web server.
- First the university bbs, then IRC, bit later Asylum MUD.
Shockwave games
I used it to look at Danny Phantom videos on YouTube and get friend codes for the Animal Crossing DS on a game forum
Back in 95 I used it to chat with people. Then computer games. So much diablo 1 and age of empires. Then Ultima online and started downloading warez… So games and more games. Also IRC which I still kind of use for the same chat room 30 years later.
Same here! Though I think Diablo 2 and AoE 2 were my first online games.
A/S/L?
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Porn
This was back in … 1995 or something, I was one of the first people with a 1Mbit broadband connection, and well, porn it was. However, this is 1995 internet, so porn was really quite hard to find. I vaguely recall barely nbeing able to find anything that was not paid
We didn’t have PC but the family my mom babysitted for did. I used it to look up and print guides and pictures of Pokémon. I fell for every fake guide on how to get mew.
Usenet but via AOL. I was a few months after Eternal September began. I believe “100% certified non-cringe” user MODESTGOD has a post or two that made their way into searchable archives.
I remember connecting to the internet frim a Windows 3.1 pc using Trumpet Winsock that I downloaded from a BBS to get on gopher and look up the song lyrics to a Kate Bush song, Running Up That Hill.
I know this seems trivial but at the time it felt like a superpower.
The amount of effort we put into using tech was definitely something. There was struggle, but it was rewarding.
Probably not the absolute first thing I did, but my first internet memory was downloading the music video for Prodigy’s Breathe. This was pre-napster and I’m pretty sure a 28k modem. Took an hour, was really shitty quality and I’m not even sure if it was the whole video, but it was awesome!
I also have a memory of checking out an rpg game from the aol home page and being really confused why it was just people talking, thinking we were waiting for the game to start and eventually just logging out
Boobs. But they took 15 minutes to load.
Let’s say Usenet.
When I gained access at university, search engines hadn’t really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn’t know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)
However, the university also provided Usenet access.
Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.
Usenet was so awesome. I wonder what it and the broader internet would be like now if it was still as standard as e-mail. Something would have had to change, because spammers would have overrun it, drowning out all useful content. Internet forums kind of took its place, now that I think about it. And I guess things like Lemmy too.
Early Usenet was awesome - so pissed that commercialisation killed it.
The earliest I remember is using gopher on the computer in my dad’s office to try to find games to download.
The year was 1995. My middle school class took a field trip to the library across the street. We had to access a website (yahoo dot com) then attempt to research a recipe for baking cookies or other dessert. Manually typing the hyperlink took about 5 minutes for everyone in the class lol
