Internet Memories

[Dr. Zaius]

Those were the days...

[flash=200,200]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1A9lYC3g-0[/flash]

I never used the internet until 1996. Is this characterization of early internet usage accurate?

And what's up with the "no swearing" and "put downs"?

 

[Dobbs3K]

Really interesting. Like you, I did not get on "internet" until early '96 or so. But this does look fairly accurate...mostly newsgroup activity it looks like.

 

[Sabre]

28.8k modem FTW

 

[Vitamin X]

my first modem was a 2400 baud (meaning 2.4kbps) modem using Prodigy. We moved on to some other local ISP and then Earthlink for a while, but yeah the net was a weird place before the dot com explosion. I remember using Mosaic and trippin out because there were images on the web pages. And they took fucking forever to download.

 

[Aero]

My family didn't get a computer until July 2000. Before then, my first internet experience was when we got WebTV in March 1998. Going into the wrestling chat rooms at the time was the best thing ever, at the time.

 

[bps21]

I remember the first time I entered a chat room through Prodigy and being amazed that there were people from all over actually talking in that little box.

I don't even know what year that was.

 

[Obi Chris Kenobi]

Whatever happened to all those tacky looking websites that pro company used to use as their official websites. I miss those.

 

[luke-o]

I first used the internet at my school in 98.

It wasn't until we got it at home the following year that I was amazed by how great it was at getting me porn.

 

[Kinetic]

Like many of you, I first got online in 1996. I primarily used the internet to read about wrestling and look at fake Gillian Anderson nudes. Little has changed.

 

[Vitamin X]

haha, I remember when the fake Gillian Anderson nudes were a huge net phenomenom. Of all the celebrities to spoof nudes of, why pick that one? I never understood that. Also, funny enough, for some reason my friend and I never got the idea of looking on the internet for porn until we saw a news report one day that talked incessantly about how young kids are getting on the internet for porn. At the moment, our 12 year old eyes practically popped out of our sockets and we went to each other, "YOU CAN DO THAT?!" and I remember yelling to him, "DUDE GO TO BOOBS.COM OR SOMETHING!" The next few hours were pretty fucking incredible. Thanks, dumbass media!

For some reason, in all my gaming and warez sharing I never came across a porn site in the mid 90s like you do now, where they just pop up everywhere. You actually had to go out and look for em yourself.

 

[daileyxplanet]

It is weird hearing them simply calling it "Internet" instead of THE Internet.

 

[NoCalMike]

Yeah I remember back when I first got the internet, it was before companies started to even advertise that they had a website, so you kind of just had to take a chance and type in web addresses manually and see if something came up....

Also, realplayer 1.0, the birth of winamp.......winnuke was hilarious.

All sorts of memories. Websites with FRAMES.....wow.

 

[Adam]

God, FRAMES!

I used to use them in all of my websites.

Damn.

 

[Fökai]

I remember a big chunk of 1998 where I was obsessed with getting each and every wrestler's entrance theme.

And the wrestling newsletters that came to your AOL Mailbox....and the GrandStand boards where I first met MikeInSC...

Good times.

 

[Adam]

Ah yes. I remember putting the Nation of Domination theme tune as my voicemail message.

 

[sfaJack]

I was first exposed to the Internet in '97 when I went off to college.

Oddest story of that first semester--when I spent way too much time in the computer lab--was chatting in some random chat room with a bunch of other college kids and finding a chick from my school in there. And not only was she at my school, but she was sitting exactly three computers over from me in the lab. And not only that, we would discover later that she was one of my roommate's friends.

It wasn't until the next semester that I discovered the vast amounts of porn available.

The next year, my roommate and I built a shitty Angelfire webpage dedicated to our campus sports news. It was pretty horrible, but we had a steady base of about 30 readers.

 

[Dr. Zaius]

Like many of you, I first got online in 1996. I primarily used the internet to read about wrestling and look at fake Gillian Anderson nudes. Little has changed.

I remember filling up many a 3 1/2" floppy (1.44 MB!!!!) with Gillian Anderson pics.

 

[Adam]

God I used to love those discs. Not having the Internet at home, I had to copy and paste into notepad all of the cheats for games I had and take them home via floppy. I had thousands of them.

 

[luke-o]

I needed to copy something from my laptop to my friends PC the other day and the only thing we could find was a floppy disk.

Something which my laptop doesn't have.

 

[darthtiki]

I remember being 13 and a friend and I stayed up in the AOL chat talking to some "girl" or going to the Sacramento Public Library to explore Yahoo and look for stuff on my favorite tv shows and movies.

 

[daileyxplanet]

Like many of you, I first got online in 1996. I primarily used the internet to read about wrestling and look at fake Gillian Anderson nudes. Little has changed.

I remember filling up many a 3 1/2" floppy (1.44 MB!!!!) with Gillian Anderson pics.

Only nerdier. In seventh grade, I used to collect Dragonball Z pictures on floppies. That was about the only thing I did in 1999...

 

[Vitamin X]

I needed to copy something from my laptop to my friends PC the other day and the only thing we could find was a floppy disk.

Something which my laptop doesn't have.

you can still find externals for cheap these days.

 

[wnyxmcneal]

I first started using the internet in 1993 or 1994. Prodigy and Mosaic!

 

[Agent of Oblivion]

 

[Haws Bah Gawd]

I remember in the early 90's when my Mom got a trial edition of AOL from a friend on floppy disk. The trail was good for a whopping 6 hours! We didn't do much with it though, just chatted with people in various chat rooms and such. I seem to remember a relative having a version of Prodigy that was all bright colors like purple and yellow. Really quite ugly. I too used to go around saving disk upon disk of Dragonball Z pictures, especially the little animated gifs that people took from ROMS of the SNES games.

 

[Damaramu]

I started using the internet at school in like 99 and then got it at home around 2000 or so. So I wasn't really there before the .com explosion or what not. Seeing the screens with no graphics where it was just newsgroups is kind of weird.

I do remember using AOL at a friends house and how thinking back now I think of how slow it was and how basic and kind of cartoony most websites looked.

When did the internet really change from the text based newsgroups to what we had after to what we have today?

 

[DrVenkman PhD]

I'm not sure why, but "I can indulge in all things Thai!" gave me quite the laugh.