When did you first use the internet?

around age 10, 1995 probably. my best friend's family had had a computer since maybe 93, which was rare among people I knew, and they got I think aol online a couple years later. friend and I didn't really know what to do with the internet but iirc the main 'portal' thing when you logged on made it super easy to join chatrooms, so that's pretty much all we did.

sometime around 1997 my own family got a computer and internet. I racked up a huge bill (metered dialup!) downloading Simpsons gifs/images (or at least that's what my parents claimed, in hindsight could have been a cover up for one of their own (lbr, dad's) seedier bandwidth uses). I think we moved to fibre not too long after.

probably 1982, dial-up modem connections to a university server where we could play ACSII variants of Donkey Kong

(high school)

1987. I was 22 and an undergrad in college. Was already pretty experienced at BBSing and computer communication in general.

If we're counting BBSs then 1994 for me. I already had a home PC, and then got a 14.4k dialup modem and tried a few BBSs but it felt weird and disconnected. Also had a go at those short lived pre-internet protocols like Archie. Then I got an email address and unix access thru college just as WWW/mosaic and all that tok off. I remember browsing Polyester Records website via a TEXT browser in Linux. And getting into arguments with neckbeards on the RMIT boards because I wasnt a compsci student so how dare I be allowed on their turf.

I find it hard to believe anyone was on any forums/using dialup modems in 1982 though!?

Like, that feels like its even pre "War Games" and that was using one of those old coupler devices.

Yeah are we counting "walled garden" computer services that were only connected to other computers in a BBS or subscription service? If so, then highschool with Qlink on a Commodore 64.

For the "real" internet as in connecting to anyone anywhere, then college.

In grad school in 1995, I remember searching for information useful to my thesis. In the 80s, I knew a friend who would log onto a BBS but I don't think of that as the internet per se.

I find it hard to believe anyone was on any forums/using dialup modems in 1982 though!?

I don't specifically recall any forums in 1982 when we did the dialup stuff (we were definitely on phone modems though, 2600 baud fuck yeah), and yeah this was a password-protected university server, which to me counts as "the internet"? My mom was sending actual email through ARPAnet in the late 70s and my dad definitely had a Compuserve account by '82, it was all happening.

Dunno what these schools are tbh

I would guess at my aunts house in 1995 aged 13 or 14 and i remember the scenario but not the items searched - v likely some video game walkthrough or cheats etc

Discovered IRC in January 1993 while in college.

Some college-aged neighbors took me to the university in the very early 80s and we played Eureka and some other early games on the university mainframe, but I don't know if it involved the Internet at all.

Was exposed to Compunet on the Commodore 64 in the UK sometime around 1986.

First got email at work in 1995, then internet access a year or so later.

Earliest non-work use of the internet that I can remember was the All Music Guide.

sadly since I used my gov't name, my entire embarrassing high school USEnet history is preserved in amber for all time, including this nugget:

whoever wrote the message above, I have this to say...I am a Christian, but
Christian rock doesn't appeal to me. Why? Because Christian rock just
doesn't cut it for me. It doesn't sound like rock. Dc Talk in my opinion
sold out when they quit rapping. My problem is at my church, everybody likes
the same bands. They just like them because they're Christian. As for
Christian metal, it DOES exist, and it's very good, however, none of the
bands listed by the guy who wrote this message are metal. Some Christian
metal bands are: PRecious Death, Mortification, Bride, Jesus Freaks,
Strongarm, Klank, and many more.....

Christian pop, however, sounds just rightfully fine. It's the rock music
they don't do right. And their categorizations sometimes are wrong. One
time I saw Jars of Clay listed as an alternative band. Got me mad. Jars of
Clay is acoustic rock, and they play the style of music which has been played
for decades. ---
--
|Fidonet: <REDACTED> 1:363/309
|Internet: <REDACTED>%3...@satl✧✧✧.o✧✧.o✧✧
|
| Standard disclaimer: The views of this user are strictly his own.
| From C.F.Satlink +1-407-240-7781 (ANSI or Vt-100 _required_).

lol amazing, when is that from?

according to Google Groups...1997!

In a mall in 1995. I was 12. Some table set up as a demo for kids? It was public money? Didn't they have any internet at our libraries? How did i get away with using it for like 3 hours? It's hazy. We got a dialup connection i think fall 96.

My first encounter with the internet was when my brother had an acorn archimedes in the early 90's connected up via 56k phoneline connection, presumably to lots of very interesting monochrome bulletin boards. He was working as an IT consultant for something like £2.80 ph for the guy who later was a jailed arsonist and former chairman of Doncaster Rovers and he apparently put out a contract out on my brother to have his legs broken, so I presume my brother probably stole off him!

In the later 90's (something like 97/98) I was playing Quake death match arena on my brother's pc and I thought gee this internet is pretty cool actually. I'm going get me some internet. Also he showed me how you could dl mp3s and that was the final epiphany for me.

Forgot about Prodigy, which I think I used for a while in 1994-5, mainly literature discussion groups. Painfully slow. Listservs felt righter. Never quite warmed to alt.whatever style newsgroups but I am sure there are embarrassing things out there from previous iterations of me.

Really enjoying the variety of origin stories (and realizing that I didn’t quite imagine the possibilities when the idea to do this poll struck).

In Soviet Russia, internet use you !!!!

I had some kind of primitive email account when Istarted university in 1991, but I didn't realise it could be used to contact anyone outside of my university for over a year and I hardly used it. Pretty sure I had no idea it was called email either.

I don't think I used the actual internet until 1997: very limited access at work, then in a library, and then setting up a hotmail account while travelling around Australia. Didn't have my own computer & internet connection until 2004.

mustve been 1994, age 11, initially used it exclusively to email with crushes via Juno free email. i remember a lot of time spent trawling through Yahoo when it was just a literally list of websites. i remember one MST3K site that was just a long text list explaining every cultural reference in every MST3K episode, printing it out to use as a reference. i have a vivid memory of going to a fan site for the sitcom NewsRadio and breathlessly watching a 240x360 photo of the cast slllowllly load across my screen, thinking "i cant believe how amazing this is".

"things you needlessly printed out in the early days of the Internet" might make a fun thread. off the top of my head: FAQ for Street Fighter II (including a heading much mocked by a friend of mine, What is considered 'cheap'?), the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and some editions of an MtG Usenet series called Single Card Strategies.

In college in the fall of 1993, I remember sending an email to a friend at a different university after him telling me his address over the phone, then using gopher with my cousin to finally solve longstanding questions about misfits lyrics

xp which my cousin then printed out on like 100 pages

I was on the 4AD listserv email group in the mid 90s and once I wrote something fangirly about Throwing Muses and a fucking staff member of 4AD replied to me rudely saying I was a shit fan if I couldnt spell Kristins name properly. Mortified.

(It occurs to me with the hindsight and cynicism of old age that the person may not have actually been 4AD staff but their email/sig indicated they were anyway)

Also a few-years-out-of-university "other"; '94, I think, the Toronto Freenet via a modem.

we got dial-up in 1996, when I was 11. definitely remember me and my older brother printing out cheats and walkthroughs, though I don't recall for which games specifically.

my sister got me my first email address on hotmail the following year and I still have the account lol - it's where I send all my spam and FB notifications.

I remember a local college had a dial up that would let basically anyone get internet access (not intentionally) around 1992. This was handy.

Otherwise, local public access unix systems got me USENET access a bit before that.

I went to a large midwestern land grant university in 1993 whose sole internet uplink was a few megabits/sec for 35k students and whose IT department refused to install NCSA Mosaic because 'the web is just a fad'

Mostly I remember multiple acquaintances founding consumer ISPs in the mid 90's. Some still survive today!

My dad got a modem so he could work from home in 1986 and I used it to connect to a random BBS (can’t even remember what it was now). Later, when I had my own computer in 1991, I dove into the Prodigy message boards and that fall in college I was introduced to Usenet.

Actually it must have been 1985 now that I think about it

did u do WarGames

I did a fun lunar landing simulator a lot

Although that was on a Telex my dad would occasionally ring home from work before he got the PC so that predated the modem

the honest poll is how old your introduction was to goatse.

I love teaching young millenials that aren't as savvy about Tubgirl.

but i always start by saying "nah, you don't wanna hear about TUBGIRL"

All I remember is hearing about her and everyone saying you don't want to look. I still don't know what she did; I assume it didn't involve bathing...

I had to do an introduction to computers course in the first year of my Psychology degree and they showed us the internet one week of that, so summer 1995. Didn't use it again for a while, got an email account via the uni in 1996 which I used to keep in touch with my friends when I did an exchange term in Ireland later that year, somehow found alt.music.alternative around that time although I don't think I ever posted on it, just read it through 1997 until I left uni then I didn't really use the internet again til late 1998 when I first got a job with internet access. that was the beginning of my downfall

First time coming across email was on a primary school trip in 1991. A teacher had brought along a (huge by todays standards) laptop and showed us how he could send messages back home which seemed like magic to 10 year old Speccy nerd me.

First time browsing the web was in the Internet cafe opposite Cardiff castle in 1995 - mainly downloading guitar tabs and super low bitrate breakbeats to floppies.

lol, the "the web is just a fad" IT people is great. the kind of detail that, if put in a period-set movie, would seem groan-inducingly forced and implausible.

other than BBSs, when I got to high school, I didn't even have a web browser, so that was the extent of my 'browsing'. but I would go over to a friend's house as he had Netscape Navigator.

so being pervy 15-year olds, and being that his parents weren't home, we started doing naughty internet searches. but me being afraid of getting in trouble, I told him to stop and then we looked at benign things like guitar tabs (since I played), or like Metallica sites, etc.

so a few days pass, and this friend sends me a letter in the mail. Mom hands it to me, and I was already anxious cos this dude was seriously WEIRD.

it was porn. he had printed out like 10 porn images and mailed to me, with WRITTEN COMMENTARY below each picture.

I called him and said ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT? I had to find a place to dispose of them or I would have been grounded for a week.

well, since everyone is sharing their pre-World Wide experience, here's mine!

my dad was an old school programmer in the 80s and one day (of many) he took me to his workplace. there, i encountered my first computing machines: the as/400 and what i assume now was an IBM 5200 series terminal station. i was very young and all i remember was being sat on an as/400 for a few minutes and then he instructed me on how to telnet into a mainframe. it was probably the first time i saw a green screen. i don't even remember what was on it, except for a black screen with green text on it and me mucking with it. he later continued typing numbers on it (most likely him coding/scripting something)

roaming through the offices, i remember other computers, which i assume were IBMs but they looked different. i'm sure they were used for different operations but all were connected to some node, for sure, which they allowed me to connect to and browse

i don't remember how many years later (1 to 3 maybe, it's hard to say), possibly 1990, a met a guy who had a computer at home and he was super into BBSs. anyways, he dialed into this one where you could get free games. to this day, i don't even remember if the games were pirated or not. it's hard to say since the internet and computer games worked differently back then (there were a lot of free games). but i remember dialing in and having a huge list of video games to choose from. it was hard to even know what the game was about because they were just titles. anyways, i chose one and i think it took over an hour to download (lol). you were this futuristic white vehicle hovering over this race track and you could swing your vehicle left to right. the race track was kind of like a half dome. i remember i thought about this entire experience for easily a year after it happened. i just couldn't believe it. his family was in the computer manufacturing industry and i remember he made a commercial where it was basically him getting angry with the computer and literally throwing it and breaking it. that was also equally shocking to me

good times

I remember in the early 80's, when you had to spend five or ten minutes loading a computer game off of a cassette tape (the game code was reproduced sonically).

There is a decent chapter of Gretchen McCullough's book Because Internet that attempts a taxonomy of web users based on when/how they first went online. For McCullough, the way people started using the internet is a good proxy for their relationship with technology generally, and there are specific cultural/generational markers for people who started their online lives on a BBS vs., say, AOL or Instagram.

1995ish, had an Angelfire website

I remember years ago on ILX trying to find the oldest existing website still online.. at that time I think I found a Kosovo Liberation Army message board from 1991

I started regularly using in 1997, for a new job... cam girls were a new thing then, like a new picture uploading every 15 seconds or something

I’m imagining it had a guest book, a visitor counter, and a couple of those “under construction” little construction man animated GIFs.

The Kosovo site, that is.

God, I guess 1988 when I started my comp sci major. I had an internet-valid email address (still hilariously tied to a specific machine, @blah.cs.uni.edu.au) and posted to Usenet. Before that (1982 on) I’d used a remote terminal from my rural town to access the state education dept’s PDP-11 via RSTS. And it was a PAPER BASED TERMINAL, no screen at all, just typing and printing. Now who’s old.

In 1971 my high school installed a terminal that connected to a timeshare mainframe at a local university. It did have a keyboard, but instead of a CRT screen interface it printed out all its prompts or responses on green bar tractor feed paper using a dot matrix printer.

It wasn't networked, so it doesn't qualify as "using the internet". A buddy of mine found it fascinating, but I was unimpressed, largely because there was no instructional material available, so you could barely coax it to do anything at all.

Sounds like the setup I was using a decade later. There were tiresome manuals for the keen, and I remember typing pretty dull BASIC games into it. The best was some Star Trek thing.

my brother and I spent a lot of time writing stupid quizzes in BASIC, cos dad taught it to us.

10 PRINT "MY BROTHER IS A DICK"
20 GOTO 10

lol

it was more like

10 INPUT "Are you sliding into first?", A%
20 IF A% = "Yes" THEN 50
30 PRINT "No diarrhea"
40 END
50 INPUT "Did you feel something burst?", B%
60 IF B% = "Yes" THEN 90
70 PRINT "No diarrhea"
80 END
90 PRINT "DIARRHEA!"
100 END

Way before all that I remember reading an article in the late 80's in a ZX Spectrum magazine about a MUD game called Shades. It sounded unbelievable with people all sharing an adventure game online and socialising.

I played Shades a few times! Someone set it up in the school computer room on the BBC Micros around 89/90. it wasn't connected to the internet though, just LAN. it was a pretty fun game though from what I remember

xp Likewise at my school in 1971 or 1972, when I was 9 or 10. We collectively wrote a BASIC program in class, then the maths teacher went off somewhere, inputted it into the mainframe and brought back the printout.

We also had mainframe email at work in the very early 1990s… in fact it was me who installed it. I was a bit pissed off when they replaced it with proper email.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I set up my first email address in 2000, but I didn’t start using it regularly until 2003. My parents didn’t have a wireless connection until …2006? 7?

Oh and as for my first sites, I remember searching for the vampire chronicles on a library computer and finding a fic site, and then I think going on the channel 4 football Italia page in school? I was so into Nesta and Maldini.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The Computer Paper, December 1987, Issue 1

someone has digitized most (all?) of the computer paper here: https://archive.org/details/thecomputerpaper

this was a tech paper based out of british columbia, which then expanded to the rest of canada. the first issue advertised BBSs, which was pretty cool. man, this is such a gold mine

we got prodigy on our 386 ca 1993, i must have been 11 or 12. by 1995 we had netscape navigator.

my dad worked for novell is probably the main reason we had a pc and adopted so early.

started working in an academic library in 1992, a colleague showed me that you could access the text of all Shakespeare's plays at the University of Texas, which he thought was pretty cool. Me, not so much. The first time I realised its potential was a year or so later when Beck released "Loser" and I was trying to work out what he was singing in the chorus...

In 1996, my father was a prosecutor for the city, so he had internet access through the city. I was in sixth grade, so would hop on when it was his weekend to look after us. First thing I did was go to The X-Files website (I had just discovered/become obsessed by the show), and I later sketched out my own X-Files site on printer paper with colored pencils. I recall asking my father where I could submit it so it would be put online.

I did a Twin Peaks rewatch when The Return came out, and after each episode, would go to alt.tv.twin-peaks to look up contemporary reactions. Did the same recently for an X-Files rewatch. It was a lot of fun, and I’d occasionally google frequent posters to see if they were still on the net. (I was surprised at how many folks had their full name, telephone numbers and university addresses in their sigs.)

I probably link to this every time 1990s internet comes up, but The Old Net is great for nostalgia surfing the web as it was. They even have a proxy to enter in to your browser. At a thrift store, I found a 1996 copy of The Internet Yellow Pages (same edition my father had) and have been plugging in URLs to see how many are archived.