Ask Lemmy

America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.

Early CompuServe. I don't remember the exact timeframe but it was rather early. The first time I enjoyed the internet? Probably unreal tournament in 99. Me and my friends used to play and listen to Korn, Rammstein, limp Bizkit, P.O.D., slipknot, static-x, rage against the machine, etc. whoever was last in GoldenEye, played unreal until they came back in again.

A/s/l?

Prodigy, then AOL, then real internet. Also eWorld, which was like AOL but for Mac users. It was kinda pointless.

Compuserve back in like ‘91.

Probably Neopets. I heard some of my classmates talking about it at school so I used my dad's computer to create an account. Still have login access and all my original Neopets are still there 20+ years later!

modem dialing sound

I was a simple kid back then. I remember having seen 3D renders of south park characters back in the 90s. Marvin the Martian fansites. The #Trivia room in TalkCity.

Gotta find the Netscape disk. Gotta get mom off the phone. Gotta wait 5 minutes for the space jam website to load.

Getting booted from your game because Mom got a phone call.

720p video was a straight up luxury that most of us didn't bother with because it took way too long to buffer lol.

It was a very different time.

Playing Star Trek in my high-school counselor's office on a teletype machine that was connected to the local college's main frame. The teletype used a roll of paper. Type in a move, and a new "screen" was printed on the paper. I must have used miles of paper playing that game.

bitftp@pucc

If anyone gets that reference, congratulations, you are officially old.

I managed to blow up the BITNET mail quota right through the ceiling within a few days...

Spent most my time going down bulbapedia rabbitholes . Pokemon websites . Watched pokemon YouTube sideshows , found out Cascada thru that . Once saw video of someone showing their splice portfolio , one splice was articuno but just the (head|tail) so lꝏked like sperm , kid me thought it wasz funny

Oh and don't forget this masterpice

Didn't get my own personal device till 2009ish , funnily enough didn't run into porn on that shared pc

At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.

At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn't really very useful.

ascii dicks on irc

Not being able to get online because my dad was using the internet at a wholly different location for work.

Also the screams of a dialup modem through the tinny speakers of a first-gen, puck-moused iMac.

Earliest I can recall would either be, from what I can remember, some odd ass yt videos from early yt. Videos that are probably long gone due to things like copyright and other bull. They were the joke videos where they edited shows like Ed Ed n Eddy or Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog. Only a single video from that time that I can remember is still up.

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

6th grade computer class. I grew up playing video games and liked medieval era stuff despite not knowing how to spell it, so I thought I'd try to type "midevil(dot)com" into the URL bar. At the time it was some kind of BDSM site with a black background, red font, and multiple cats-o-nine-tails slapping to and fro like animated gifs (were they gifs? idk). My blood ran cold and I closed the window. I wasn't caught thanks to the teacher also not knowing that browser history was a thing.

Cartoon Network games! I remember one set of adventure games that I loved to play but I couldn't understand English very well yet so I'd always make my dad play with me and translate. Resort something. I look them up on the Wayback machine once in a while.

I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

The earliest thing I remember with certainty it's correct was my friend across the street, who was older than me, asking me to look up "naked girls" for him.

Got dialup as a young teen in the 90s - first with CompuServe, then usenet and the early Web. Usenet was amazing, fun communities, kibology, and great for dialup, and as someone who lives in the country, I still wish sites had more options for downloading stuff in advance to view when out of signal.

A less positive part of usenet was back then it was completely uncensored (or at least, that child me had unrestricted access) . At the time I thought it was normal and good to be able to get porn with people my age, instead of weird adults. But now I feel pretty sad and icky that this was my introduction to sex, and horrible if I think abiut the situations behind those pictures.

It was a lot better back then, then it became about money.

I remember clicking on a YouTube video and waiting about an hour for it to load. When it finished loading the whole Family gathered in front of the screen and watched it.

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

We didn't get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can't remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

building websites on GeoCities. I had one that had "haxing tools" and how to use them. the different phreaking boxes and how to make them. etc.

around the same time I was war driving phone numbers and telnetting into whatever I connected to.

I found an unprotected early porn site with questionable content. I deleted their entire server.

I stopped doing it when I accidentally connected to a state police server.

skip forward a few years and I was on Napster, Limewire, a couple others I can't remember now.

skip forward a few more years and I was hosting my own online forums and websites.

few more years I was hosting VPN'd LAN's for Xbox tournaments between friends when we couldn't get together(this was long before xlink kai). the lag was terrible sometimes, but made for some epic kills.

now I'm a full stack software developer and get paid to build and break shit.

CBBC website

Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.

Dial up

Good

9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.

I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)

simple static personal websites with a single tiled image as background, dubious color palette, and a guestbook

Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.

9600 baud connection. IBM PS2 running win 3.1. prodigy service, i think

MSN IM was really popular. I remember it felt really funny to come home and talk to your friends you had just seen.

StumbleUpon was also really cool before it was sold to ebay. It's how I found cgsociety, but then the website owner shut the site down for some reason and everyone migrated to artstation.

There were also the video games on YTV's website, and all the other flash games that are hard to find now. Prime among them in my memory was the 3-d missile game. You would guide a missile through a series of spinning obstacles as the missile accelerated. Newgrounds, ebaums world, the original youtube that wasn't entirely focused on profit yet...

I don't remember using napster, but I did use Limewire until it shutdown. It was really cool to have access to so much music but IIRC it was mostly mp3's of a single song and sometimes it wouldn't even be the full song.

I also spent a lot of time playing tower defence maps on Starcraft \Battle.net, then it started to be over-run by spam bots and no one played anymore. It was really sad to see that happen, and eye-opening for me when no one at blizzard or whoever controlled battlenet did anything about it. Looking back, that was likely a large part of the reason for my eventual to switch to linux.