When did you first use the internet?

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.

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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.

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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.