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Kane Carnifex's avatar
Kane Carnifex

The doors to the Internet opened for me with 56k Modem.
I can still hear the melody which allowed me to enter THE Internet.

The game of choice was Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction, first offline.
But soon when my parents left the house the phone line was blocked…
I found myself in Baal-run-34 and soon in  Baal-run-35.

Wanna know how my parents checked if i was still playing?
They called… and guess what the line was in use so they knew what was going on.

I never saw ISDN but after the 56k Modem, once DSL was there..oh Boi
Counter:Strike Source was on the plate.

So this was around 2001, which made me ~11 Years old.
Before that i already got infected with SNES and a cracked PS1 with Resident Evil.

Credit to https://www.reddit.com/user/professionalbadass/

TheGreatestBanana12's avatar
TheGreatestBanana12

My earliest memories of using the internet was spending hours chatting to people MSN and the internet wasn't the quickest, I also used to spend quite a bit of time playing flash games on a site call Miniclip even everyone was doing this in school during their breaks. I also got to play my first MMO which was Guild Wars. Finally there was a fair usage policy with a set data cap which I may have gone over and incurred extra charges a few times much to the annoyance of my Dad.

A
Asim

Okay I have a REALLY EMBARRASING one. So I was born in 1993 so I fully went through the early stages of the internet using a dial up cable to log in and your mum not being able to dial out or take any incoming calls

It must have been the early 2000's, Goku had just disappeared from Dragon Ball Z and was on another planet (This is massively relevant lol)

I really missed him and I used to get up early at like 7am to watch dragon ball z on the weekend. My dad had a laptop he used for work and about 7 or 8 year old me figured out how to go onto the internet and I came across a DragonBallZ forum, I didn't pay much attention to the site about from the "Contact Us" Box

So obviously as a child I thought this was me being able to email the creator or dragonball z. So i went him a long message about how I miss goku and I want you to bring him back to the show early and can you please move the shows to later on at like 8am on a saturday so I can sleep in. I Fully believed the creator of dragon ball z would cator to my request

A few days later my dad gets a response email saying something along the lines of "We believe your son has gotten access to your email address, this is an 18+ website please do not let him on here again"

I must have gone on some Hentai website in terms of dragonballz anime, I don't remember I JUST WANTED GOKU TO COME BACK. I cried when he did

Early internet memory highlights

Club Penguin
Getting banned from club penguin
2007 RUNESCAPE YOU JUST HAD TO BE THERE, pls reply if you were
And also limewire was a classic, we had it easy back then.

Also scrolling through gamespot forums for cheatcodes was a lot of fun as a kid

Shovel's avatar
Shovel
Asim

Hahahahaahahahah

Oh My Gosh Limewire!!!!

FirestormGamingTeam's avatar
FirestormGamingTeam

Earliest Memory?

I think this would have to be before my foster parents did their second extension, our computer at the time was basically a 512ram machine, it was about the best you could get and, of course, had the dreaded "Dial-up" at this point because broadband was not a thing as of yet.

So the very first thing I learned to use on the internet was a chat service called "Virgin Chat" which was essentially a small chat room where people who were fortunate enough to have the internet, chatted and so on and the moderators had little "golden" keys next to their names.

It was literally everyone's goal to get a "key" next to your name and have "power" and after time, the IRC clients were invented. And the chat room situation online exploded. Of course the other memory at the time was sending "images" which would take hours to do so or trying to download MP3's from "fileserver" chat rooms, which again took an age to do so.

And if anyone picked up the phone to make a call as again "mobiles" where not really a thing, the internet would cut out and any progress you had would stop instantly.

My early memories of the internet and using it where rage inducing :P

Rixx Javix's avatar
Rixx Javix

My perspective is probably a little different than most due to my age. If you've ever seen the film War Games then you have an idea of how I spent my High School years, using the phone to dial into networks blindly and wander around. In the early nineties I convinced Campbell's Soup to let us put up some very early banner ads on several BBS servers. And sometime around the mid-nineties I attended the very first Ad:Forum conference in Chicago and met some of the very earliest internet based companies.

I returned from that conference and wrote a White Paper about the future of internet advertising and presented it to the CEO and CCO of the advertising firm I worked for at the time. I wanted to start a digital arm for the agency and get ahead of the coming trends - but sadly neither of them believed a single thing I told them. A few years later our client Adelphia Communications introduced the world to "Broadband" (Fiber-Optic) cable based Internet service and I created the campaign that launched that product.

I have so many stories.

A
AlexGoesTheWorld

Probably the small videogames on the LEGO official website in the early 2000s. At that time we had a old beep beep router doing the classical sounds and I remember we took careful note on when we "logged in" and "logged out" to use internet, I think it was pay on usage or something like that, with a internet provider that is now no more, but those were the early days of internet connectivity.

At the time you could go on days without internet, now... well, not really. Also, I don't even look at a landline offer without unlimited data and decent speeds, how much things had changed XD

Lanah Tyra's avatar
Lanah Tyra
AlexGoesTheWorld

We had a monthly 15 hrs dialup package, and if you went over you had to pay extra. I was taking notes of my time then counted my pocket money and if I wanted more time I had to buy a top up myself XD

Shovel's avatar
Shovel

My earliest memory was way back in 2004! I was 7 years old and would play Stardoll on it - it was essentially a website where you can dress up different celebrities haha.

It was super annoying because the internet back then wasn’t easy to use as it is now! We had something called dial up and it meant that my parents couldn’t use the phone if I wanted to play and vice versa!

I remember also we all had allocated time on the computer (I had 1 sister and 1 brother at the time) and my brother would always go over his time and dip in to mine! Was always so annoyed about it haha but it was fun watching him play games on Miniclip!

Horror and Cats's avatar
Horror and Cats

I was a country boy who was throwing dirt clods at/using sticks to hit my friends till I was a teen. The first thing I really remember about the internet was when I got a computer in my room on that old 56k modem connection. What I was doing was a smattering of things including looking at Cheat Code Central and I was VERY guilty of printing the Internet.

I prided myself of having complete guides and FAQs for every game I loved printed out and in folders.

Man we’ve come a long way.

Sturmer's avatar
Sturmer

At the age of 12, by using social engineering tricks, I managed to obtain crucial data from an ISP technician. Later, I used that data to network map the entire district where that ISP was operating and was able to gain access to their services and some data since most connections during that time were HTTP (unencrypted).

I did that for no particular reason, and no one was harmed. But I learned a lot.

R
Remi

 

 My first memory ever using the internet was back in the 1990’s when dial up connection had just come out. Showing my parents how to sign on through AOL. Waiting in excitement to hear those famous words. “You’ve Got Mail.” The chatrooms for meeting new people. A secret boyfriend at the time, talking for hours. Learning about my first experience in a chatroom called TheKeep that would introduce me to someone and change my whole life.

Scrbzy's avatar
Scrbzy

My first memories involving the internet were all to do with MSN which everyone my age was obsessed with. I remember the cringey long names and nudging each other excessively. Also remember having to dial in to the modem and getting aggy when my parents needed to use the phone! It sounds like a pain in hindsight but it was a simpler time and one that I will always look back on fondly.

My love for the internet only grew when I discovered online pc gaming via LotR: Battle for Middle Earth 2. I played custom game modes like tower defence for HOURS on end, I miss that game so much and desperately want them to remaster it!!!

A
Asim
Scrbzy

oh you've unlocked a memory, MSN messenger was great, felt so cool, especially having group chats and the moving emoticons they hard

Lanah Tyra's avatar
Lanah Tyra

We didn't have internet at home yet, when in one of the sci-fi magazines I saw an article about a Hungarian Star Wars portal and forum, so when we finally got computer classes at school I asked the teacher "how do I go on the internet?" I was then impatiently waiting for her to explain how you search for things on the internet, I couldn't exactly say I have an address already as everyone laughed at me for my obsession with Star Wars. When she left me be I went on the portal but there were so many articles I couldn't finish during class, so I just saved all the open tabs in HTML, copied them to a floppy disk, thinking they would be just text documents. Took me a while to figure out how I can open them in Notepad, deleted the HTML code bit and printed out the rest so I could read them under the blankets with a torch past my bedtime 😅

L
Laser-Bicep

for me it will be the memories of having an xbox 360 and the game ghost recon advanced warfighter two. we we learned we could host large lan parties, we tracked down and bought a large ethernet port that allowed us connect four xboxes to create a lan game . its a special memory as there was around 16 of us with all these xboxs connected to two projectors and two tvs all in a massive room playing vs matches and coop vs enemies.

It was also a time of playing early days online single player so it was a really special time. the excitment of playing with or against people was a first in those times.

A
Asim
Laser-Bicep

That sounds incredibly cool! Reminds me of playing LAN unreal tournament in school on the PC's

JB
Josh B

Napster, Limewire, AOL.

Some of the main things I remember from the earliest days of using the Internet.

I remember just how long it would take to firstly connect to the Internet (and the fight to make sure no one dared unplug it to make calls on the land-line), with the bizarre beeping/robotic whirring noises, then attempting to download a single song on Napster.

I remember sitting patiently, eagerly waiting the moment the song would be playable some 5-10 mins later! If you wanted to make a playlist of music then you needed to expect to be waiting a few hours before it would finish. The likelihood was the Internet would cut out or someone would suddenly need to use the phone and unplug you, meaning frustrations and arguments galore!

If it were like that now it would probably feel like a breach of our basic human rights 😂

A
Asim
Josh B

limewire was great! The viruses were not, I tried to download Limewire Pro using Limewire thinking I would get away with it lol

Konquest's avatar
Konquest

I remember the crackling and dinging alien sounds when the modem was doing its 'hand shake' connecting to the internet.

I remember pictures taking 5 mins to load, but back then it was the bomb. Don't even think about video :P

I remember being able to reach out to strange people on the internet for the first time. Human contact with real people on the other side of the planet, what scorcery is this? using MIRC and ICQ asking random people ASL (Age, sex, location).

I remember late nights pirating music and other things on Napster, downloading mp3s to play on Winamp. Not to mention downloading skins and plugins to pimp out winamp.

"Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass!"

Limal's avatar
Limal
Konquest

i think there is a mod to make win11 to look like that lol

Konquest's avatar
Konquest
Limal

Hahaha. I don't really miss the Ui, if I'm being honest. Though I might try going back to using Winamp.

Limal's avatar
Limal
Konquest

I spent so many hours in Winamp Visualization Studio!

Paul's avatar
Paul

The first time I ever used the internet was in primary school.

The school had just been given computers for the first time and we had a kind of scavenger hunt game to practice using websites and search engines.

We had to use Ask Jeaves (remember that one 😅) and print off the various things on the sheet like animals and different vehicles.

Foolish_Imp's avatar
Foolish_Imp

My earliest memories of using the internet were at my cold-grandma's house (She was called cold-grandma because her house was always cold and after I started calling her that as a preschooler, it stuck with all the adults). She used to babysit my brother and I a lot during the summertime. She had an old desktop pc with one of those huge white monitors. My brother and I would spend hours looking for games to play and watching prank videos. It's hard to remember what all we used to do, but I remember having to wait through a lot of buffering and loading.

Makster's avatar
Makster

My absolute first memory of using the internet was my dad bringing a small laptop (netbook?) home from work and us playing around with it.

I didn't know what a search engine was so everything I wanted to look up ended with .com i.e.
(please do not follow these links as I have no idea where they'd go)

It was a passing interest as there wasn't a lot a 5 year old me would be interested in pictures and text on a webpage.

Shovel's avatar
Shovel
Makster

Hahaha that’s so funny - my husband was telling me a story yesterday how he managed to email a NSFW website showcasing over 18s dragonball material requesting more episodes hahah his dad got a funny email back the next day!

avrona's avatar
avrona

We haven't had internet in our house at all in Poland, so I didn't really learn or experience the internet at all until about 2006. Even then, I barely used the PC as I mostly just stuck with my PS2. So my earliest memories were from school, more specifically reception. I can't remember how often a week, but we were given some free time on one of the two computers in the reception classroom, which we mainly used for either playing funny kids songs our teachers used to play for us, or play some super simple edutainment or TV show-based games on the BBC website. I didn't use the internet properly at home until probably a few years after that, because I had very little use for it at the time anyway.

Zeref_Vermilion's avatar
Zeref_Vermilion

I first got to know the internet when I was in elementary school around 2008-2009 maybe, I got to know the internet for the first time at an internet cafe, there I learned how to create an email that I would use to create a facebook account, my first email was created using a yahoo domain. I created facebook because I wanted to play various games such as ninja saga, farm vile, criminal case, hotel city etc., not only facebook but my email is used as a login for online games such as seal online, counter strike, ran onlin, point blank etc., yes I really like playing games and until now my yahoo email is still active even though it is no longer in use 😂😂

Juuni's avatar
Juuni

I guess the first time it wasn't technically the actual internet as we know it. The first time I had access to a piece of it was an email service hosted on my local town's BBS. I would dial in on my blazing fast 33.6k modem (i couldn't afford a 56k yet) and go to the mail module the Sysop installed to be able to create the message and the service would queue it up to be sent that night when people weren't calling in to keep the line busy so all the day's messages could be sent.

It was probably 3 or 4 years later when I actually signed up for my first legit ISP and was able to connect via my new 1.5Mbps DSL and Netscape the night away!

I can't imagine trying to use the bloated web of today on the connectivity we had back then. I'd bet the ads would still load fine but nothing else would! LOL

Sturmer's avatar
Sturmer
Juuni

we are too-old.jpg :)

Nine's avatar
Nine

I still remember the first time I used the internet, when I was little I created an email for my friends.

They use this email to register for Facebook lol XD, and also for elementary school assignments.

When I come to an internet cafe, I always open Facebook, YouTube and web games. Most of the time I always play web games, after that I try playing FPS games like Counter Strike & Point Blank.

Makster's avatar
Makster
Nine

There wasn't an internet cafe near mine but there was a local library that allowed you to get onto the internet. I remember sometimes at peak times where you had to wait to be seated.

I only really used it for walkthroughs to get through Link's Awakening on GBC

Nine's avatar
Nine
Makster

owhhh on your contry, you can use internet on local libary ?

Limal's avatar
Limal

Modem, weird crackling sounds, telephone unavailability when someone was connected to the internet, bit-by-bit loading pictures, and you never knew if you would get the whole thing or if loading would stop at 68%, forcing you to guess the contents or reload and waste precious bytes.

Was it bad? Nope, but during that era I had a strong feeling that the phrase "going to the internet to check something" meant you were actually going somewhere far away.

Sturmer's avatar
Sturmer
Limal
Makster's avatar
Makster
Limal

My mum telling me to get off the internet as she needed to call someone is burnt into my memory

CelestialFlea's avatar
CelestialFlea

For me, the first time I really got to use the internet extensively was in college between 2000 and 2001 in the days of msn, msn+ and aim. Who remembers nudges?

It wasn't really readily available at home because it was expensive and speeds were insufferable for doing anything meaningful with.

I joined a site called GameADay, which gave away a game each day for the best post. It was one of my fondest memories of using the internet and one of the earliest communities I remember joining. It was a small, close-nit community like this one. I was lucky enough to get about 8 or 9 wins under my belt.

Then I discovered the joys of flipping domain names at the height of the .com boom for silly amounts of money compared to cost price. I still dabble from time to time but it's just too saturated now. It was a good few years before I was able to use internet reliably at home.

Gaypengwing's avatar
Gaypengwing

I remember creating music videos using video star with my friends, they were god awful and the effects looked awful but that’s when my love of creating videos started. Even with these limited effects and tools at my disposal, I had so much fun creating and at the time, I thought they looked so cool. Sadly, these videos have now been lost to the void, I wish I could rewatch them sometimes when I forget what having fun with content looks like

AirGaram's avatar
AirGaram

I don't even remember when my first time using the internet was, i know that i was young when it happen, maybe it was 2008 during elementary school? And since i don't know anything and all i've ever heard about was google, i wrote the url as 'googledotcom'. I don't remember using the internet much anyway, maybe playing flash player games since my friends were using it as well i think. I've only ever played with PS2 and lego bionicles during that time after all.

T
Toyah

terribly slow dial-up and parents who couldn't call Grandma if we were busy asking someone their ASL. 

Ah, the good old days.

And mum yelling at you to get of because of the phone line haha

A
Asim
Toyah

I feel like kids these days don't believe this when we tell them you couldn't use the phone hah

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