Your first memories of the Internet

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"Don't let the phone company find out that you have a modem, or they'll charge you extra."

I didn't find it all that interesting until a friend hooked me up with an email list discussion group.

Sadly AOL first client was AOL 3.0

My Family has a CTX AMD K6 with a Rockwell Flux 56.6Kbps Modem and a Matrox Graphics card. When I went over to a friends house they had a IBM Computer that came stock with a 28Kbps they didn't get a 56K so when we had to download something big in Dial-up terms we would go to my House to download it and then split it up onto Floppys and the floppys were AOL disk that came in the Mail.

My first experience with internet was via Aol then Genie and Compuserve back in the early 1990s. I had used computers of one sort or another off and on for at
least 15 years prior to this, ie: time-sharing systems at school, TRS 80s at one place I worked then HP 85 at another and then a mainframe running the Vax
operating system in the mid 1980s......Them were the days. Now I am connected one way or another 24/7. Can't imagine life without it.

My first recollection of it was my first year of university- 1996. I think we had Windows 3.1, there ,with dial up internet.

It was always crashing and would take about 5-10 minutes to load each page.

When a page did load it was an event of great excitement, as sometimes pages wouldnt load at all.

Even so a number of the graphics would show up as broken images so the whole page was often not entirely loaded anyway.

I remember we had a geography lab where we used the internet and email boxes and we spent the entire hour trying to get one email to go through.

Also at home we had internet, and just when a page had loaded (excitement), the phone would ring. Also the dial up was constantly disconnecting itself for no reason, so I would have to dial in again and again.

I also remember ICQ, was exciting to watch that red flower flash green with all the pretty petals different colours.

In the coming two years, first yahoo and then hotmail were the big thing of the moment. Anyone who was anyone had an Email Address.

The first time my dad heard that high pitch modem sound he jumped back thing he stepped on the cat. True story.

seems i was very late to the game compared to everyone else. i was one of the few people at school who didn't have internet and a pc at home so it was always exciting to use it at school. except i had no idea what to do on it.
we got dial-up at home when i was 16 and i spent a lot of evenings negotiating with my brother over whose turn it was to use it, or my Mum when she wanted to use the phone.

my first memories of the internet was when i was in 1st grade and i discovered porn, courtesy of my oldest brother Kevin who now serves the US in the Army, he is going to be a Staff Sergeant next time he gets promoted hopefully within the next few months

but yeah and then i started looking at porn quite often after that starting with my first encounter in 1st grade and i got caught A LOT and got in trouble A LOT lol thats to be expected though

in my last year of college at UTA (1979) i heard there was a service starting that would search data bases for a given topic. so i paid the hefty fee & got a bunch of perforated computer paper (anyone remember that shade of light green?) containing a list of citation forms for everything ever published in scientific journals about Alpha Centauri.

only much later did i understand that must've been ARPANET.

Around 1996. Didn't use it for much, it was far too slow to do anything interesting, and I was far too young to take part in discussion boards.

The sound of a modem dialing up and how horribly it stressed me out. Then, the inevitable busy tone because AOL was always full. And repeat.

University, the mid-90s. I started using Pegasus mail. Then I tried the worldwide web. I think one of the first pages I came across was a site where you could nominate a country to get nuked, and the site would then show you an animation of the deed being done.
I eventually got hooked on yahoo chess.

I was 13... Mostly used it to chat with family when I was sent away to my grandma's to study in another country...

The first website thaat I ever visited was called something like "War of the kittens" and I rember that its motto was "May the cutest kitten win." I think that my brother showed me that site.

Speaking to some woman on AOL chartrooms in 1996 and getting myself littered with pornographic spam.

Late in 1988, the Internet came to Finland. Before that, the servers would exchange messages once a day (or night, actually, due the lower phone fees). This was a couple of years before the www.

But then our country connected online. I was studying at the University of Turku, when I witnessed a deaf persong having a conversation with a blind person, that was on the other side of the world. They were using a speech synthesizer, a speech regocnition program, a computer each, and the Internet. Without that technology, they could not have been able to have a real time conversation.

Then it occurred to me, that people could do new, good things using the Internet. And that is one reason why I work developing new applications that use the Internet even today.