What was your earliest experiences with the Internet like?

America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.
- 19/f/Cali always

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.
- CompuServe was a large part of the lack of parenting I received during the 90s. 3-5 hours a night, plus work/school and sleep means I didn't see my mom much for more than a decade.

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.
- I also played this in High School. We thought it was fantastic.
- Holy shit. I never knew teletype ever became a civilian technology. I only know of it from my military training. Though it was old technology by the time we trained on it.

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
- You're still young if youtube already existed in your first memories of the internet.

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

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.
- I remember early YouTube, but that was years after I was playing with Photoshop and throwing up pics on AOL chat rooms. I even still talk to a girl I met on there nearly 30 years ago.

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.
- Those had good speakers
  
  eh, for the time I guess.

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.

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.

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

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

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.

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.

CBBC website

Errghhh ooo oo uh uh oh uh uh.
Dial up

Good
- AND HOW IS IT NOW, FUKKFACE??? (I am totally joking, peace)

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

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

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 :)
- Omg I forgot about the letters. Also made me remember those characters you could customize with clothes and backgrounds and stuff. I guess the prequel to bitmojis but they were like, edgy and cool.
  If anyone remembers what I'm talking about can you remind me the name?

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

Quake online

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

VT100 terminals on Solaris (SunOS) reading usenet, chatting with ytalk, elm (email), Gopher (and searching Gopher with Archie), DartMUD. It was great. Pretty much once we got PC and Mac based clients that stitched together downloads out of usenet posts and could run multiple terminal sessions at once, we were set and the Internet peaked.

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.

Definitely 2flashgames.com and Newgrounds.com.

I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!
Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They're still around, in fact!)
So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn't find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.
I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.
- Mod files played with tracker software. They were awesome at the time (and still are).
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
  
  Oh yeah right! Mod files. I remember thinking when pdf came into being, it was to postscript like mod was to midi. A pdf is ps with fonts and whatever else embedded in it so that you could render it in a self-contained sort of way. The mod file was midi + samples to make them self-contained as well. I don't know how accurate that is, but that's how I pictured it in my head.

Gen z here. Coolmathgames.com was fire. I actually bought a shirt from them last year and it gets a lot of compliments surprisingly 🤷‍♀️

AOL keywords, AOL chatrooms, free AOL minutes on a disk, dial up modem sounds, slow af connection.
- a/s/l?
  
  ☝️✋👇👈✌️👆🙌

Day of defeat on steam with a download speed of 56k modem... Took like 4 hours for nearly 700mb? And oh my, was it worth it !
ICQ for instant messages !
- Day of Defeat was so good! That and team fortress are the only team FPS I ever played. I do love shooting me some Nazis.

The games on the PBS kids website over dialup

Around the mid-80s a friend of mine set up a public-access Unix system. You could dial in and get shell access, and from there newsgroups, email, etc. It technically wasn't a "live" internet connection, his system dialed in to Yale each night and downloaded newsgroups and stuff via UUCP, so there was at least a day's delay between writing messages and getting a response. I don't remember exactly when it was but I was around for the Morris worm so it was some time before that.

Kinda limited, in the sense that I didn't have my own computer until about 2006 and just had a "family" PC before then, which my brother and dad used.
One of my earliest memories from the late 90's (I would have been about 8 years old) was making a website on MaxPages, which was one of those build-your-own-website services. Mine listed video game cheats and passcodes. I didn't have much time to add to my page as my computer skills were limited and I didn't get much time on the computer, so I got bad reviews just for not having much content. Some asshole on one of their public chatrooms hacked my account and defaced my site a few weeks later. I think his name was Ray.
For reasons I'd rather not go into, I had a more limited exposure to Flash games and didn't really get involved with Newgrounds until my late teens. Cartoon Network (at least the US/Canada site) used to have a great selection of Flash games though.
By my teens I was playing RuneScape actively (2005 - 2007), then World of Warcraft (2007 - 2012.)

Only had dial-up so insert youvegotmail but then got introduced to bbs and freaked out when I realized I was actually typing to a real person who would gasp! respond.
Not long after I entered the brave new world of irc and the rest was history. Internet=RabbitHole 4ever!

The first time I got onto the internet proper, I was over at a friend's house for his birthday as a teenager and his dad had an account and he dialed in and the very first thing he showed me was a picture of a lit red candle sticking out of a woman's butthole.
Prior to that, I had signed on to a local BBS with my home computer, but there was not any pornography available on that BBS.
It was glorious, though, being like 12 years old and figuring out how to make computers talk over telephone lines, though.

A local BBS got internet service so I poked around with gopher and lynx. I remember it being slow, there was lots of waiting for things to load.

2nd hand.
Connecting to a text only BBS at 300 baud who got their content from the internet.

We took a class field trip to a students parents facility where they made supplements. They showed us a computer connected to university databases of research papers. Up until that point we called BBS servers directly and would rush to download everything before sometime accidentally picked up the phone. This was the early 90s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote
The next year I got my first laptop and a 14.4baud us robotics pcmcia card.

I dialed into the local university's phone bank and could access fun stuff like... Kermit and Gopher. It was cool in the sense that I could read words in someone else's computer, but content was really sparse, so mostly I hit the outbound network in another city to but porn BBSs that weren't local calls for me.
Eventually I discovered IRC and trivia. And then they invented WWW and DSL and it started to explode.
And now it's all commercialized garbage. I wonder if the internet would've held so much fascination for me if I'd known it would become a tool to view constant advertisements like a brainwash machine in Clockwork Orange.

Grab a 4 free AOL disk from blockbuster, use 3 of them as frisbees. Take the last one home and spend 10 minutes waiting the interface to install. Plug in the phone line and hear a series of beeps and schreeches before being greeted by an early robotic voice saying "welcome!" And often "you've got mail".
Afterwards you follow a guide to sign up for a mail account and a text like document with links to AOL platform tooling like chat rooms and search tools. You started looking for urls everywhere wondering what hidden gems you'll find in the virtual world and what kind of content was on cereal websites or Nickelodeon. There was a massive learning curve for multimedia, but you had a lot of pen pals from chatrooms. So much porn spam. Nabisco had an awesome gaming site

Evolution vs creationist forums as a teen on Win 2000. And of course porn.
Limewire to get early Naruto releases from Japan, subbed by a random guy on the internet one day later. 500MB and took at least an hour.
AOL IM
- The internet is really, really greaaaat !! FOR PORNN !!

@solarvalleys Definitely AOL chat rooms. But also figuring out how to use Netscape Navigator and search for things using a seach engine called Hotbot. And teaching myself how to build entire websites on notepad.
It was neat to see things evolve fast. Examples: AOL sent these loss leader free offers to grow their network, it gave you free time to try the service and was an installer package that came in the physical mail as little cartidges. A short time later as CDs (the precursor to DVDs), with even more time. It rapidly went from “90 minutes free, wow!” to “600 hours free, wow!” and they went from people coveting them to just piling up everywhere and getting upcycled around the house. 🤣 “Honey hand me one of those 3000 hours coasters for my drink”.
Or how fast web development went. I remember how excited we were for hotdog pro, where the html tags had colors and you could push buttons to add tags! A short time later “Hey Netobjects Fusion just stick this graphic here somewhere, i dunno you figure it out, use a dozen nested tables with a single clear pixel in each cell, kthx”
Man now that I think about it, the frequency that businesses and organizations had the word “hot” in their brand name back then was another thing lmao. Hotdog, Hotmail, Hotbot, and I know I’m forgetting some other ones. Because the internet was HOT my friends! 🔥
- @solarvalleys Oh AND: the Fediverse reminds me of it a lot. People were inventing new weird cool ways to use it all the time; the implementations were a jarring mix of professional and amateur; tools and platforms and communities would rapidly rise and fall … It was beautiful chaos, and you felt like you were just seeing people’s minds made manifest. Fediverse has that same feel to me. Somebody better name a new Fediverse tool with the word “hot” and then the vibe is complete!