The internet before Google, YouTube, Facebook etc.

[Steve]

When did you first get internet access at home? How much of the early days of the web do you remember?

I distinctly remember one of my friends showing me Google for the first time. I remember when Napster launched. I used to regularly chat with people in Yahoo!'s chat rooms using a third party program called Cheetah Chat.

But pre-1998, I don't really remember anything, other than looking at porn sites where it took 5 minutes for a 10 second low-res clip to load.

[arkei]

My dad pretty much was on the world-wide-web as soon as it became available. The company he worked for was selleing PCs to their employes. A Star 386 cost 5000 euros instead of 8000 which was a bargain back then.

So my brother and I where in the net almost at the start. I recall having a text-file where I would store all the web-adresses that I would access/check out whenever I got the chance to use my dads PC. So in the early time I recall looking for MMA stuff (rented UFC 1 on VHS when it came out in 1996) and was stumbling on Sherdog.com which is the DV of MMA-Websites. Also was visiting the website of "The Ruff" which was a guy from the UK who I ordered vinyl from before the internet was around. Before the website, I would get a mailorder-list by snail-mail, where you could fill out the order-sheet, fax it to the Ruff, he would fax me back the total amount so that you could send him a check to then receive the ordered records by mail 3-4 weeks later. So with his website the process to order records was a blessing as you could order faster etc. In terms of news I was and still am visiting Spiegel.de which is a weekly news magazine from Germany which is really reliable and has an online presence pretty much since the start of the net. That magazine is owned 51% by the employes/writers which I find rather unique in news-media. And of course there were the porn sites. Big shout out to the user "stupid dummy" from D's Forum who was providing free logins for all these sites pre streaming to the scratch community 😁

[Steve]

Oh shit man, Dave The Ruf! I completely forgot about him. I also bought some records from him way back in the day.

[djdiggla]

I got internet in 1997 and remember it pretty vividly. The local newspaper had a sort of early search engine and events site that was good. Remember going to the Playboy site and you could type in random numbers behind the address to get around their paywall and DL nudie pics. Chat rooms were wild too. My handle was PimpDawg lol

Napster was wild. I was in the dorms and so super fast internet + free music was wild. 

 

A friend had internet earlier than that. Pretty wild how sites would just post links to other sites they liked and that was how you found cool sites. 

[Steve]

I only had 56Kbps dial-up for quite a while, so it would take about 3 minutes per MB to download anything. I had to pay per-minute too, so it would be 3p per minute at peak times and 1p off-peak, on top of the phone line rental charges.

The first time I got "broadband" it was 300Kbps, which got doubled to 600Kbps, which is about 450 times slower than what I have now, but at the time it was amazing.

"PimpDawg", haha!

[TBearOne8III]

i never really experienced the internet until fall 1996. thats when i started college.  I spent alot of time in the computer lab or the engineering labs.  They had dedicated T1 lines so everything was fast.  we were on netscape.  everybody had hotmail.  i think the search engine then was miss web. or something like that.  then yahoo made it big. spent most of my time on graffiti.org and okayplayer.  

we had dial up when I got home in '99.  that shit sucked plus i had to basically wait until everyone went to sleep because it tied up the phone lines.  eventually abandoned the internet at home.  only used it at work until around 2006 when we got a cable modem.  

[JHouse]

I started using the internet in College, circa 1993. Initially I was using it for alt sex rooms and such, thus mostly reading sex stories. The summer of 1995 I didn't have net access any longer given that I wasn't in school, but when I switched colleges and got back online after a 3-4 month hiatus, I was blown away by how much the world wide web grew. Now when I did searches, there was a "Next 10" near the bottom of the search results, which was not the case in '93, as there were seriously limited results.

In 1996, after seeing the web continue to grow exponentially, I decided to learn web design. Not so much because I wanted to make websites, but because I couldn't afford to hire someone to build a website for my new venture, The Book Trade. I started The Book Trade at Colorado State University so students could trade their textbooks with each other, as opposed to selling them back to the bookstore for a serious loss at the end of each semester. Or buying books from the CSU bookstore for crazy prices. Back then, it was common to pay $100 per text book, but only receive $15 per book upon selling them back.

Shortly after starting that business, I decided to lean into web design because I really liked it, plus I saw a growing need for businesses to be found online, especially real estate companies. 27 years later, I'm still making websites and still absolutely love it.

[scottie(the)goonie]

My mom got AOL back in '97.

I think I was in middle school at the time.  We had a 14.4k moden and the slowest Pentium 1 PC ever.

I immediately got my kid's account warned and then banned for typing this into chat: ( . Y . ) BOOBS 

It was my first emoticon ever used.  My Mom yelled at me and from then on I never used a kids account again.  

[savwar]

I think my first experience of the Internet was going to an internet cafe in Belfast when visiting my sister when she was at Uni. Downloading Steve Vai Guitar tablature was pretty much all I was doing. I remember setting up a geocites site, can't remember what the content was, probably Vai or Pink Floyd shit.

Then we got it at home in about 95 or 96, I remember a short while after there was one other dude at school a few years above who also had command and conquer red alert, so we used to play over the modem.

 

[djdiggla]

Remember that dancing baby that made the email rounds circa 1997ish. 

I remember in maybe 1995 there was a foreign exchange student from Spain at our school He was pretty funny and wild. He was explaining to us "virtual sex" which I guess was sexting in chat rooms but he made it sound way cooler than was possible. 

GeoCities. That was something. MySpace was the worst. And interesting. It was more about how many "friends" you can acquire than actually having any sort of online presence. Interesting stage for society to realize maybe you don't want to be friends with Tia Tequila. 

So in the dorm circa 1998 my floor played a lot of Warcraft 3. The same idiots also liked sending "prank" viruses. This one I got permanently turned the wallpaper into this 70s necked chick with the absolute biggest bush you have ever seen. I didn't want to reinstall Windows especially since external storage was so limited so I just delt with it. Was eventually able to figure out a way to change the wallpaper but the giant bush would still appear when booting up so I would have to close the laptop as much as possible when that was happening. Sometimes in class tho I would forget or it would crash and restart which was always super embarrassing. 

[Steve]

I remember when those fake viruses were popular, especially this one: -