When did you first use the internet?

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.

Those all postdated 1991 by at least 5 years.

I'm a very inept sort of Luddite, and always have been. I resisted the internet so much it's hard for me to pinpoint when I started using it. Middle school (mid-late 90s) they started making us use computers in school, but I really didn't want to for some reason; I remember refusing to use PowerPoint in 8th grade and insisting on making a series of posterboards with bullet points on them and holding them up instead.

Got an email address in high school and probably used the internet for school assignments, but I barely remember it. The first memory I have of using the internet to look something up on my own was freshman year of college, writing opinion columns for my school paper. The first thing I used Youtube for was to catch up on old episodes of Monsterpiece Theater because I never watched Sesame Street as a kid.

I think my Spending Too Much Time on the Internet era started around 2004 when I was in Paris studying abroad and didn't have a lot of English-language books with me, and then my school went on strike for 8 weeks and I had nothing to do but go to protests and answer questions about classic children's literature on Yahoo Answers. And read out-of-print trashy novels on Project Gutenberg.

I posted comments to things like Television Without Pity and the Guardian blogs and so on for years, but this is the first online community I've ever been part of. I would write a lot but I always felt fairly anonymous, and I never really got a sense of who anyone else was, either. The whole thing that happened a couple of decades ago where people started making friends online pretty much passed me by, and I'm only now starting to get a sense of what that was like and how cool it was.

aw Lily <3

if u are really going to that Vulgar Boatmen gig I am jealous and want you to say hi to all my friends even tho I only know you from ILX and a Mekons show where we never met

I asked our 36 yr old stepdaughter what the first thing she remembers printing out from the internet was, and she said "dead baby jokes, late 90s"

I used Telnet to dial into a university mainframe (by putting a phone handset into an acoustic coupler) at school in 1980 which qualifies as using the internet, primitive as it was way back then. I remember references to connecting to a remote computer using internet protocol; I didn't hear it called "the Internet" until 1989. I also sent and received electronic mail over the internet at university starting in 1984 (it hadn't been shortened to "email" yet). But as others have mentioned, "going online" in the '80s from home usually meant dialing into a standalone BBS or a walled-garden service like CompuServe, not accessing the fledgling internet. This meant to go to another site you couldn't just type in www.whatever.com or click on a link; you had to hang up the phone and dial a different number. If that number wasn't local to you, you paid by the minute, so people hung up once they were done with their downloads or uploads, disconnecting most people from the online world the rest of the time. Also, most homes had only one, maybe two, phone lines that were shared by everyone in the household, and you couldn't talk on the phone if someone else was online.

In the late '80s to mid '90s "the internet" for me was almost synonymous with Usenet, which was the predecessor of web forums. Many forums (or "newsgroups" as they were called) weren't moderated at all, and those that were still were hosted by your ISP's servers rather than the organizer of the forum. The web didn't go online until 1991, and didn't really start to get big until modern-style graphical browsers like Netscape arrived mid-decade. I worked in IT at the time and remember how difficult it was to convince high-level corporate executives that they really needed to get their company on the internet; they were like "just so a handful of computer geeks in their basements can go online and find out stuff about our company?"

Autumn 1995, 28k home dial-up, Compuserve. I was 33 years old.

Related question: when was your first FAP with people you met online?

Mine was summer of 1993. Met up with a group of about 10 people I met on IRC and spent a weekend getting drunk and having my illusions dispelled. It was good in a way that I learned very early on that people are different online than they are irl.

More generously stated: that my perceptions of ppl online were different than the reality.

A work colleague was really interested in newsgroups in 1994, and I explored a few at his suggestion but didn't post. I think this was via work email subscription rather than browsing iirc.

I signed up to compuserve in 1995, and then the same colleague persuaded me to leave the 'walled garden' and move to a proper ISP - easynet (though the cool kids all seemed to be on demon), and sold me a cheap second-hand computer as he was upgrading. There were a few years of a heavy phone bill until broadband came in the early 2000s.

1995, Grade 3 in an elementary school computer class. Our teacher, Mr Dickson, showed us a website about Jamaica. At this time I used to play this geography game where you’d just name a lot of non-obvious country/city names; following the Jamaica example I didn’t know what else to look for on the internet, so I looked up Dover. Starting out not with a bang but a whimper.

My tech-savvy French cousins had a minitel in the 80s that I used to play text adventure games on.

Then I used email and A-level learning programs at school in the mid 90s without realising they were the “internet”.

At home, when we first got the Internet in 1997, I can’t remember what the very first thing I looked at was, but I did immediately do a Yahoo search for Helena Christensen photos as soon as my parents went to bed

There were a few years of a heavy phone bill until broadband came in the early 2000s.

I lived in a high-rise apartment when broadband first became available, and for several years hence I leached off various other peoples' broadband wireless access points or routers, easy to do with so many homes clustered together. Back then, routers shipped with encryption turned off by default to make setup as easy as possible for non-techies, and many people kept it that way. (of course, I couldn't safely access bank accounts or such with this setup).

Good thread. I definitely knew a couple of households throughout the '80s with phone-in-cradle modems (acoustic couplers?), and I know at least by the early '90s I had friends with access to the rudimentary web. The first time I had an email address for myself was I think when I got to college in 1993, but I don't remember it being a shock or novelty or anything so I think we must have had *something* at home before that.

Started age 13 with 1200-baud bulletin boards (local calls only!), '84. Within six months, there was some kind of a meet-up at a local Perkins (since everyone was in the same area code), so there was a early bridge between IRL and online, literally seeing other posters as humans.

many xps: oh, thank you, sleeve! I really hope I can make it to that Boatmen show. I was so excited about it and now it's looking like the worst possible time to fly + go to a show, but I'm still holding out hope that the peak will be over by then.

same, although I'm not going sadly. sending u an ilxmail with more info

Related question: when was your first FAP with people you met online?

My first meet-up was in 1996, with people from the uk-motss mailing list (which I joined immediately on first getting internet access). The meets continued at regular intervals for the rest of the decade. I’m still FB friends with a few of the people I met.

1989. A Mac-specific pirate/hacker BBS in LA started throwing big Xmas parties and by 1990, pretty much every Mac pirate board in LA/OC followed. By 1992, I was meeting up before gigs with SoCal folks who I only knew from mailing lists.
― Elvis Telecom, Friday, January 7, 2022 6:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Presumptuous question, feel free to ignore, but were you a hacker back then (given your username)? I was obsessed with reading about hackers in the late 80s early 90s, mostly reading stuff like The Cuckoo's Egg, The Hacker Crackdown, and other books on LoD, The Masters of Deception and other hacker groups of the era.

The first meet up with people I’d met online - on a message board or social media, not a dating site, I see these as different things - didn’t happen until this century, maybe last decade? Am probably missing something but Ende Tymes 2014 is probably the answer - I met a lot of musicians, including people I’d interacted with and interviewed, and later learned that various other people were present too and we missed each other.

The first time I *spoke on the phone* to someone I met on the internet was in college, maybe ‘96 or ‘97, to someone who used to post on ILX but hasn’t for ages now.