When did you get on the internet?

[Valka D'Ur]

Sometime around 1996 my sister started ordering those free AOL floppies... Initially it was just 15 free hours... I remember chat rooms were a big appeal, since they were still a novelty at the time.

Eventually some creative types started using those for various craft projects, like making mobiles or coasters.

My first internet experiences were at the library at the local college, in the late '90s. I'd just gotten hooked in the TV show The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, saw the movie it was based on, and during a search for Star Trek stuff, I stumbled across a Crow fanfic (someone had novelized the movie)... and was hooked all over again.

I didn't get online at home, though, until sometime in 2004, when I jumped into gaming forums. I came here when someone on the other one mentioned this was a good place to find out some tips about Civ II. It wasn't until later that I meandered down to OT and decided to stay (I still post in Civ II occasionally).

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Sometime in the mid-eighties I got a 300 BAUD modem. AOL at that time had a competitor called Prodigy and I briefly got a membership but I was in a podunk nowhere town and the nearest access was a long distance call. Those "on-line services" in retrospect probably don't really count as "the internet." There was a local "computer club" running a bulletin board service on a top end machine in someone's basement where the club paid for a second phone line, but it wasn't connected to any sort of grand internet. It was basically a forum where if someone else is posting you get a busy signal and your modem redials. Everyone typed up whatever they wanted to post in advance so they could upload it and get off the line.

 

[elmurcis]

Not sure about exact time but it was on elementary school (it was countryside school without direct (good) phone line), so got connected pretty late from tower 2 miles away - maybe 2001-2002 period?). And it was after I was already playing Civ2 on school computer (didn't have my own until age 14, so all "good times" were on school - exchanging good grades/writing documents for some teacher vs time on computer, including some time on my own during Saturdays as I had access to school keys

 

[Gorbles]

Early high school, pretty much universally because of Neopets. 17th of October, 2001, on what I can only assume is a criminally-insecure account (completely different username to what I go by, based on my old high school ID number). Thanks to Chrome for letting me dig that up!

It would be a while longer before I was inducted into any real Internet community. I played a bit of Counter-Strike throughout high school, I wasn't amazing, but I wasn't terrible. We had some pretty good players (who actually played online / vaguely competitively) over the years, but we rarely did anything more than LAN. Can't remember if that was firewall restrictions or not. My first real community came along in 2006, towards the end of high school. I'd gotten hooked on Dawn of War (for the uninitiated, a Warhammer 40k RTS) for a good while before that, and a good friend introduced me to an online community, with its own IRC server, forums and gaming nights. I couldn't do much with that until university, because my parents strictly limited my computer time at home, and school was a continual balance between wrecking the IT systems and not getting suspended.

Funny, in hindsight. I was / am such a by-the-rules person, but I hated the restrictions people put on the IT systems at school. I went to a damn impressive school, and it had computer rooms for days. Usage wasn't the problem, despite that being the general rule for "not messing about / playing games" - you'd potentially be depriving someone of a workstation. As someone who basically lived between the library and the IT rooms for the entirety of high school (so cool ), let me tell you. Apart from exam times, nobody was deprived of anything.

My aptitude for computing only really came through this extracurricular messing about, and my time with Dawn of War lead me to take up games modding, before I even knew I wanted to do programming properly. Really made me the person I am today, hah. But that wasn't so much to do with the Internet exactly, as supposed to me not being allowed on it. Definite irony if any former teachers of mine come across this post (odds are one in a million, but still)

 

[Birdjaguar]

Prodigy and AOL in the early 90s, then things got real and I switched to Pipeline in 1995. I kept my Pipeline account for many years as the company was acquired. With the release of Diablo 2 in 2000 both my kids and I began online gaming with friends. In 2001 I joined CFC because of Civ 3. One of my son's friends, who lived down the street and who played Diablo with us, told me about it.

The Pipeline was purchased in February 1995 by PSINet,[6] which expanded Pipeline service nationwide.[7] Another feature introduced by PSInet was flat pricing for unlimited Internet usage.[8]

In July 1996, PSINet sold its consumer Internet operations, including the Pipeline, to MindSpring.[9] MindSpring discontinued the use of the Pipeline brand, although former Pipeline customers could continue to use their e-mail addresses in the Pipeline domain. Three years later, MindSpring merged with EarthLink.[10] Earthlink, too, allows former Pipeline customers to use their Pipeline e-mail addresses.

 

[Truthy]

AOL in the early 2000s when I was in kindergarten or first grade. I played some games like Neopets and Runescape, but transitioned to mostly just reading Wikipedia articles and things in elementary school.

 

[Zardnaar]

1996 at friends house.

Didn't have my own internet at home until 2003 when I got my first PC.

 

[really]

I remember going to an internet cafe down a back lane with my school friends in 95/96 and not having a clue what I was doing, but being too embarrassed to admit it.

I didn't have much access then till I started college a couple of years later.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

It must've been around 1998. I remember downloading the demo for Age of Empires, taking four hours to download. When I later got the full game, I played it online over the MSN Gaming Network. I also played SimCity Live, the classic version of SimCity that could be played on the SimCity website.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I remember downloading Dragon Ball Z manga and printing it out one page at a time and putting it all in folders while my parents were out to dinner. It took forever. And then there was limewire and kazaa and if you were lucky you could get 1 song in half an hour.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I remember downloading Dragon Ball Z manga and printing it out one page at a time and putting it all in folders while my parents were out to dinner. It took forever. And then there was limewire and kazaa and if you were lucky you could get 1 song in half an hour.

I used Limewire to download thousands of songs. I still have them all.

 

[H4run]

there was limewire and kazaa

dang Kazaa it was a good time! It was before torrent. Things was not as easy as today, but it has its moment.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I remember downloading Dragon Ball Z manga and printing it out one page at a time and putting it all in folders while my parents were out to dinner. It took forever. And then there was limewire and kazaa and if you were lucky you could get 1 song in half an hour.

I remember Napster with a 33.6k modem. I got so excited when the download hit a blazing 5kb per second!

 

[H4run]

I remember Napster with a 33.6k modem. I got so excited when the download hit a blazing 5kb per second!

That's remind me of my Huawei gprs modem, that mostly crawling for 10 kbps at best! Loading friendster page takes an awful lots of time IIRC, the connection also not stable, I remember making a small "satellite" using an old cd searching for better direction (hopefully better connection also).

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I watched bulletin board comments appear at a noticeable character by character rate and thought it was fascinating. It was like watching a really fast typist.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I guess I was 'lucky' to have started at 56k, though my parents were slow to adopt high speed internet. I don't think they got it for the house until 2005ish, by which time I had a job and was paying for my own DSL+phone line for my bedroom.

 

[Hygro]

We got DSL in 1998 or 1999 because my brother in law moved in to the downstairs unit with my sister and they convinced my parents. We would LAN Diablo 1, Descent 2, Starcraft, Mechwarrior 2 and maybe more. I would then play Diablo and Starcraft with my friends on battle.net and made always sure to say the “dot” in between. Mostly however I played myself with strangers as for whatever reason I got more into these things than everyone else.

We got Napster on our now growing arsenal of computers and that plus digitally imported radio got it going on.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I started in the late nineties, just before the Y2K mess. I spent my time looking up medical journals and other really boring stuff. It wasn't until Google really got going that things even became interesting. I was quite tipsy one night when I asked my roommate at the time some questions about Civ4 and he said "look them up", so I found my way here and stayed.

 

[Patine]

I’d like to hear everyone’s experiences of how they first connected to the web and what they thought of it at the time.

I think I first started really using the internet (as in, for hours) around 1997. I was big into SimCity 2000 at this time and there were a few websites I would go to and that’s where I got introduced to IRC chats. I was a regular member of a SimCity IRC channel and not unlike CFC-OT the discussion would often turn to a lot of non-Sim related things: politics, sports, tech, whatever.

I was also active on a few video game boards for JRPGs that I played, but I maybe wasn’t as regular as I was at the SimCity group. I also got into studying PHP and mySQL to build my own site, but even though I could do it technically I just never pulled the trigger on it since I’d be lost for worthy content.

What inspired me to make this thread: I was thinking that when I first registered here (and for years after) I was using an old PC connected to a 33.6 modem. It was slow but the pages eventually loaded! And there was no good search engine either: if I lost a hyperlink to something I wanted, it was basically gone for good unless I spent hours looking for it again.

Ah, the memories!

I was right there in the lab with Robert E. Kahn in 1973 when he declared it was alive, and we have an Internet!

Well, not really, but it sounded good, and it would have beat everyone else here.

 

[IglooDame]

I was right there in the lab with Robert E. Kahn in 1973 when he declared it was alive, and we have an Internet!

Well, not really, but it sounded good, and it would have beat everyone else here.

I was standing nearby when they typed the 'lo' from the first node of what would become the Internet to the second and got a crash, back in October '69.

Yes, even though I was a month old at the time. What of it?