That I was the millionth visitor and I could claim my free iPod.
I remember the “to download this answer this survey and win a free iPad” and being smart enough to know it was a scam but also dumb enough to think it might be real and just enter the info of the vacant house down the road and check it every day to see if it had came
And also smart enough to invent a safe test.
“Under Construction” gif and blinking fucking html.
But really it was “connecting to 087762534 BEEEEEEEEEEE BEEE BEEEE BEEEEEEBEAOOOOOOKSCSHSCSHSVSHSHSVSVSVSHSVSVSVSVSVACHSHHHHSHHHSHSCSCHHHSHSHSHSHSHH…”
Though that was audio.
I can still tell you if the connection is gonna be successful by hearing it.
Easy! It makes for a pretty fun mobile ring signal btw. I get a lot of laughs with that one. :)
The dancing baby
My high school mass media teacher thought it was the greatest thing ever. Looking back, that experience should’ve told me exactly what the internet would become.
I hated it instantly, and I KNEW what Internet would become.
I was not disappointed. I mean, I was, desperately, but you know what I’m sayin.
BBSes. My first modem was for my Commodore 64. All you could connect to were Bulletin Board Services which were simply someone else’s computer that was running software. Usually you would get some sort of menu if options when you connected.
CompuServe came not too long after that probably on an 8088 or 386 PC.
Some pictures loading pixel by pixel, first in very large pixels, then a bid smaller, in finer resolution, and by the time the smallest pixels start to appear, you are already finished.
Dial up modem sound. Followed by the AOL portal site.
I didn’t know what a URL was, so I was stuck with going through the kids section of the site, which I believe was a webcrawler that grabbed sites that had games on them. That was pretty much the internet for me.
What you need my friend, is a web portal!
“Welcome!”
“You’ve got mail!”
This is about all I can remember for my first online experience. Just remember opening AOL and not exactly knowing what else to do except click around random links, looking at whatever websites I came across, all with that classic 90s basic HTML look.
The very first time I got internet, it was by hooking my BBS up to an internet provider in Colorado. Every night my computer would do a dial-up connection and exchange email and Usenet via UUCP. I was the only BBS that was connected to the for-real internet that I know of. Probably the very first things I accessed as I was getting the account set up were Usenet and poking around on anonymous FTP sites for major universities. They had all kinds of random nonsense there.
I moved away from home for the last two years of high school, so I had no internet, but we got email through the high school in my senior year. It was a big deal; among other things it meant I could exchange email with a girl I knew who lived far away instead of sending letters. It was her dad’s email account though. She had no email of her own. You kids have no idea how lucky y’all are.
The first time I messed around with the web was at a summer programming job; it was very rudimentary at that time. We basically didn’t use it; the day to day job was effectively disconnected from anything aside from the work we were doing locally on the machine. Pretty much the only thing I remember from the one machine in the office that was hooked up to the web was the Rome Lab Snoball Cam.
In college first first couple of years I used an extremely rudimentary DSL-type system for accessing email and things from off campus. Text only. Computers on campus were web-aware; mostly Unix machines with Netscape. It was as I was going through school that things like the web started to become really ubiquitous on all PCs, and by the time I’d graduated it was everywhere, mostly the modern version, and all computers were assumed to be hooked up to it.
When we got internet for the first time when I was a kid, and I immediately went to the cartoonnetwork website because it was shown on TV between cartoons.
I also remember that there was a vote held between a number of cartoons, and the one to receive the most votes would be shown 24h after the vote. I voted for my favorite one (some girl that secretly travels with some aliens on missions after school or something) and I realized that I could just vote again. So I voted like 100 times haha. Don’t know whether it was my doing, but that cartoon was being shown the whole day after the voting ended.
Heh, my first site was also Cartoon Network. And I remember the voting too, we had them in my country too. I can’t recall if I ever voted myself, but I remember some of the 24 hours days. Sometimes I loved it when it was a show I liked and sometimes I would be like “Well what do I watch today now?” if I wasn’t a fan.
Besides the dialing sound? Good question. Maybe ICQ sounds… annoyed the hell out of my parents probably
That annoyedme right now, I could hear that uh-oh!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=RhGHerssyk4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The first Internet thing I remember actually doing is my friend helping me sign up for my first email account, on Hotmail… In high school computer lab, so it must have been 96 or 97.
I do remember reading about the Internet and trying to find a way to connect from home on our Packard Bell… But we were remote… It would have been some extreme long distance bills…
Porn lol
A list of usenet groups on my dad’s computer around 1989. Porn groups, I think, but that may be mixed up with another later memory.
Ask your dad when you’re old enough.
Lol, he’s dead
Not as dead as his joke.
LOL, sorry for you loss.
I don’t know what the very first thing was back when I didn’t yet have internet and could only use it when visiting my uncle who did.
But I remember the first site I visited after I had internet myself. I went on the Cartoon Network site to play some of the games they had.
Depends on what you call “online”.
I would say Q-Link on a commodore 64.
