So im pretty impressed but Im pretty sure that one discover card dial up was around in 1995 if not aol. I actually only really started encountering the internet in 1993 but I was in college in a college pretty heavily into that type of stuff. I feel like her 15 year old self is drawn like a grade schooler and I know with my own wife we have this disconect where if I talk about things from being a kid I mostly mean grade school and maybe junior high were as she groups everything high school and before as kid. Maybe even post high school. On the other hand when my father passed away I saw pictures of myself from high school and was sorta blown away. I looked like that at that age??!!! There were skinnier kids than me in high school but they numbered in the like the single digits and we had a large high school. I know I have been called bean pole at that time, not super often, but it happened. Still I was like, oh man, I was a bean pole.
I kid you not there were folks flunking out of college due to irc addiction. Same would happen with the avatar games for the folks who used the novanet/plato system (old internet and usually you had to take a class that still used it to realize it existed at the time)
College had free internet with 24/7 open terminals room all running IRC, some playing MUD and few with some warez FTP downloads. There were no ISP for the home market yet, only dial up BBS.
yup and the 24/7 were in the same building. the basement of every dorm. amazing how many folks were there at 3am on any particular day. it was like being at a con.
Sigh, was so fun taking over a lab and playing a MUDD together with like 10-15 people. Some of my favorite times in college.
Once in a while we had IRC meetings IRL with people from colleges all around the country. Age of the naive internet.