When did you first use the internet?

1994 -- got first email address via college, only used it to communicate with my friends bc i didn't know what else to do with it, had never heard of the internet
1996 -- went to Colombia for study abroad and heard that we would have email access but no one else I knew had email addresses and I didn't have a computer so I used payphones to communicate with my friends and family
1997 -- wrote my senior thesis with the help of newspaper websites I learned about while I was in Colombia (and wouldn't have had access to otherwise), graduated from college with honors for using the internet in my research (weird but true!)
1998 -- finally got my first computer and AOL dial-up account. The first band I discovered on the internet was Belle and Sebastian <3

In the late 90's I had friends with computers and knew about the internet but didn't really care about it until I bought my first Mac in 2001, it was an iBook G3.

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.

I guess so? As with being a writer I think someone else has to call you that first... Phil Lapsley's Exploding the Phone book details much of the 1970s era of phreaking/hacking that I grew up in (along with Steven Levy's book Hackers). I was really into amateur radio and building my own electronics then, I was too young to read the infamous 1971 "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" Esquire article when it was published, but it seemed like a lot of people knew about it. I obtained free subscriptions to both Byte and Creative Computing mag and by the time I entered high school in '79 I knew enough to build blue, red, and beige boxes - basically enough to find an exposed phone box on a vacant building and then use it to your own ends.

I was acquainted with the people and events in The Hacker Crackdown but I was mostly out of the scene by then. I hung around the LA 2600 crowd for a few more years and finally left when the Kevin Poulsen/Agent Steal stuff was going down and DEF CON became a thing.

Needless to say, WarGames means 10000x more to me than any of the Star Wars movies.

Thanks for sharing that history.

That early phase is something else - the ability to make free calls and such just by sending a certain tone down the line is so steampunk (for lack of better phrase). Also, things were so wide open that if you had the knowledge it was just one big playground. That sense of exploration for exploration's sake distinguishes it from later eras.

Or maybe I'm romanticizing it.

In elementary school in the late 80s, I was friends with a computer nerd (he was very excited about Lotus 1-2-3 and Printshop). One day we went across the street to his neighbor's house (a grown man). He wanted the man to show me some computer-related thing that I didn't understand. So the guy goes over to his computer, makes us look away while he enters his password, then eventually he is logged into a BBS with the image of the Pillsbury Doughboy as its frontpage. Then he immediately told us that it was time for us kids to scram. So I guess that was my first encounter with the online world, although it seemed about as exciting to me as Lotus 1-2-3.

By 1994-1996, in high school, I was getting in on the tail end of the BBS era, overlapping a little bit with my parents' AOL account. This is when I actually started using the internet.

But then I went through years of alternately using and not using it for a while until the mid-2000s, after which I haven't logged off too much.

the image of the Pillsbury Doughboy

Meant to include that it was an ascii image of the Pillsbury Doughboy.

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Impressive to hold out until the mid-2000s. I think by around 2002 at least it was already getting inconvenient not to use the internet in day to day life?

It's reasonable to characterize my life in the early 2000s as "inconvenient," often of my own making.

Elvis, I'm envious. I used to drool reading over the old stories of Captain Crunch and that whole history from the black box gang. Such amazing stories and people involved.

oops blue box

and yeah, Wargames is one of my favourites.

And if anyone hasn't read that Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box", I suggest you do it now.

When I was 5, my stepfather was using a modem from his Commodore PET. A few years later, my father was admin'ing an entomology BBS called Bombus. By age 11 I was dialing into BBS's on my own, mostly to play TradeWars and download ASCII animated movies made in TheDraw. I remember in 1990 my brother was into hacked game BBS's and once left the computer on the phone overnight so he could download King's Quest 5 (15 megabytes of data). There was a lot of dialing in to try and find new hacked games... more than once I dialled "long distance" (our area code was small) to download something and got in trouble. I had my first e-mail account at age 12 through a local BBS called Wang's Studio, the address was 30 characters long. My first time using Netscape was age 14 on the school computers. By age 15 I was mostly using BBS's for message boards, I never got into Usenet or anything. I got a Rocketmail account that same year for which I am still registered and my Mail app is still sync'd to it

I think by around 2002 at least it was already getting inconvenient not to use the internet in day to day life?

feel like this depends massively on what line of work you're in.

i was a liberal arts student in 2002 and even in that decadent and internetty lifestyle, there were tons of days i would have had no need to use the Internet, though i probably did every day because i wanted to chat with friends on AIM, or see if i had any emails, or read Pitchfork reviews and crappy webcomics first thing in the morning. in terms of being isolated or unable to get things accomplished, it was a wayyyyy bigger problem when the phone line went out (which happened whenever it rained, due to faulty wiring at the house my friends and i were renting). that meant not being in the know about parties and shows, not being able to call work if i was going to be late, etc. there was also a period in there where we went back to dialup AOL for a brief time, the worst of all worlds. i got a lot more done in those days, at least in terms of hobbies and creative projects.

I did like that BBSes were a very local thing back in the day, but on the flip side, you had to watch out if you were a) using your government name or b) flaming someone cos you had a non-zero chance of running into somebody in real life.

like one of my friends in high school who I still keep in touch with, was posting on the same BBS as me when I was a Freshman (and he was in 8th grade), and he used his gov't name. He was asking people where he could get hemp paper.

two years later, I'm a junior in high school and the men's ensemble choir is getting ready to rehearse and the teacher calls dude's name and it's the dude from the BBS, and I reflexively look at him and go YOOOOOOOOOOO, were u the dude on Bobby's World BBS asking for hemp paper? and he turned beet red.

a few months later he wrote to Guitar World, talking shit to Billy Corgan, and they printed it, and I razzed him about that, and he said "I'M NOT GOING TO POST ANYWHERE WITH MY GODDAMN NAME ANYMORE"

lol u all r OLD!

I don't recall ever using it before law school in the late 90s.

People who can't easily be identified from their gov't names should check their privilege.

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.