I have vague memories of using Prodigy on Windows 3.1 but I don’t remember much beyond the login screen.

My earliest clear memories were of AOL 3.0, during the era when the app didn’t even have a URL bar because they wanted you to used their walled garden “AOL keyword” system. So I’d login, minimize the program, and immediately open Netscape so I could get to the real internet. Didn’t do much online though, other than go to Nick.com to play games.

Didn’t become a full-time internet user until 1998. Probably because that was the first year I went to a school with internet-connected computers in every classroom, where my parents couldn’t restrict my online time.

I remember downloading the Hubble Deep Field on our shared family computer, filling up the entire hard drive, and barely even being able to open it. I distinctly remember this because I had to do it multiple times due to people picking up the phone halfway through.

I have older memories of computers (Amiga & Commodore) but this memory was specifically internet related.

AOL - ISP. Not sure order of operations here… I was also on Mozilla/Netscape (1991/92-?)

Bulletin Board Channels: There was at least one gay one in San Diego (ca. 1992-1995). We would chat and post online, then once a month, meet at a gay bar with name tags with our handles.

IRC - fun chat site (at least into 1997 for me)

LISTSERV - this was less useful for me. signing up for ‘reading lists’ or ‘subscriptions’ to ‘butterflies’ ‘sourdough’, etc. (I honestly do not recall the groups I signed on to) when no one really seemed to be there (1992-94?) though I didn’t move with the hip crowd

I got my first “home computer” for Christmas in the early 80’s. A TRS-80 CoCo with 16k RAM. After sending in the warranty information I started receiving nerd junk mail some of which I’m pretty sure I still have somewhere. One is an add for internet access from Compuserve. It cost $7 an hour IIRC. You had to use dial up and call long distance to Columbus, OH which probably cost somewhere around 50 cents a minute using my 1200 baud modem. Young teenage me couldn’t afford the luxury. I also received a slender book of websites. Domain names weren’t a thing so you had to know the ip address of what you wanted to look up. BBS’s were more accessible to me. Sometimes in the early 90’s I fumbled around on a computer at the library and saw weather forecasts and another time I searched Lexusnexus for an article about modifying hand held GPS units to increase accuracy. The public wasn’t allowed the accuracy the military had (US). By the time the internet caught on thanks to AOL I hadn’t messed with computers for ten years but picked it right back up now with a 36.6k modem. I know this is going to sound gross but I remember some of the earliest news reports regarding the internet were about pervs using it to share child porn. Does anyone else remember this? BBS’s were used by mob bookies to take gambling bets. IIRC the Supreme Court decided the owners were responsible for monitoring and preventing the mob from doing this. Obviously this was all quite awhile ago and my memory is fallible

It was the middle of the 90s, I had just managed to buy my new computer after saving for years. It came with Windows 95, and I was so excited to finally get a graphical interface. It also had a modem, which an aunt’s boyfriend came home to configure and show us how to use. I went online and I remember having this feeling of “wow, I can access computers anywhere…” I had learned that sites where in the format www.<something>.com so the first thing I tried was www.china.com, a site in Chinese loaded and I was so excited that I had loaded information from across the globe, it felt like the world had no barriers anymore.

I also remember using a chat that kept writing a comic with what people said, https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat for the new guys out there who have no idea what I’m talking about. And my father trying to communicate with some random person from Italy on that thing because we pushed him to and open something like #italy or similar. Looking back it feels like those parents that put the kid together in a room with another kid and say “he’s also wearing blue, be friends”.

Most pages weren’t heavy js bloat. Lots more adware, at least in an obvious way. Google search wasn’t faster than other search engines. Websites (even for well known companies) would actually have downtime for maintenance and there wasn’t such a focus on having six 9s worth of availability. Could also probably hack a lot of what was out there back in the day. I kind of miss it but I really don’t. Nostalgia factor is only just that… very fleeting. Only thing I miss the most is used to being able to watch porn on my 3DS. The sites I used were still not using the weird players they use now and so mostly everything I could play. It would take a hot min to load but would come through eventually. Oh well.

Web pages didn’t exist. I remember when Netscape began and it was such a surprising idea. We would use telnet talkers, which basically meant opening a telnet session and entering an IP address which you had written on paper, and there were all of these people there, mostly from a university, that you would talk to. I still have several as friends 30+ years later. It was super benign by and large, although there were sex telnet talkers that were sometimes full of pedophiles if you didn’t realize it. Nobody has the Internet at home unless you were in higher education, but there was what was called Freenet, which like it sounds was free internet, which you could only connect to for small amounts of time each week, and it was a question of whose modem got in first. It was super binary and full of ASCII art that was a marvel.

Later when web based social media became a thing, we migrated to Livejournal, and as far as I’m concerned everything that was good about social media ever was there for a brief shining moment, and I still have friends from there and we know EVERYTHING about each other. Nothing has ever replaced those deep friendships. Before it got enshittified it was an absolutely beautiful place. I’m convinced that the earliest Russian forays into weaponized disinformation happened there because it definitely helped give birth to the crunchy parent movement, with mild vaccine disinformation (pre Wakefield), unassisted birth (the wildly dangerous birth stories I’ve read!), and silly things like claiming shampoo was bad and how you should clean your hair with cider vinegar, or things like extreme breastfeeding. I think it was Russia’s first steps into seeing what the west would buy into being manipulated with, and it was extremely successful. The Russian government bought Livejournal as a propaganda tool, thinly veiled by a company called SUP, and used it to disguise what they really do. Reply All did an episode about Russia disinformation on Livejournal.

Using askjeeves was probably one of my earliest memories.

I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

We didn’t get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can’t remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.

modem dialing sound

Around the mid-80s a friend of mine set up a public-access Unix system. You could dial in and get shell access, and from there newsgroups, email, etc. It technically wasn’t a “live” internet connection, his system dialed in to Yale each night and downloaded newsgroups and stuff via UUCP, so there was at least a day’s delay between writing messages and getting a response. I don’t remember exactly when it was but I was around for the Morris worm so it was some time before that.