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I’m old. I used the Internet before there was a “World-Wide Web” - so no web pages. I used telnet to connect to other computers, where generally I had to have a login. At home I only had dialup, but the school computers had Internet access. Those connections did include Usenet discussions, which were kind of like a primitive version of Lemmy.
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I remember something about a fully naked Pamela Anderson and a 30 day ban from using the school’s computers, but other than that… Kazaa and MSN, I think.
A remember a few images like that with resolution so low it was just one step above watching scrambled Cinemax after my parents went to bed.
MSN was massive, almost forgot about that. The best place to talk to the girls you ignored at school all day!
I was a limewire kid, would not recommend
Their latest video was great, cured my crippling weed addiction
Oh btw I later moved on to DC++.
I’ve been online longer than gmail. Its like asking me to remember my birth.
I’ve been online longer than Google. 💀
Founded in 1998. Yeah, I’m from the pre-google times as well.
I’ve been online longer than the world wide web.
I remember connecting to the internet frim a Windows 3.1 pc using Trumpet Winsock that I downloaded from a BBS to get on gopher and look up the song lyrics to a Kate Bush song, Running Up That Hill.
I know this seems trivial but at the time it felt like a superpower.
The amount of effort we put into using tech was definitely something. There was struggle, but it was rewarding.
That struggle is what built a generation of competent tech users. The prior generation largely just never picked up on the new tech, and the younger one didn’t have the struggle, so neither of them really know what’s going on with their devices in most cases. Us nerds that struggled through the earlier years of all this between probably the 1970’s to 90’s are overwhelmingly the tech literate ones in our respective families.
That’s a really good way of putting it.
What also really didn’t help was bigtech trying to ultra-simplify everything in their capitalistic favor as much as possible to capture the largest audience, so most technology just became stuff-consumption devices to sell attention, rather than sophisticated tools you could learn to wield.
Mainly email, research, eventually Napster, irc chatting, and entertainment. Things were not fast on 14.4 or 28.8kbps dial up. When I got 56k,it took about an hour to download a 5MB mp3. Those were tough times. File downloaders were necessary apps, which would recover and continue your download after your modem connection quit halfway. It was also unheard of to have to log into a website. HTTP wasn’t the only show in town, some other older nerds may remember Gopher (you can still browse it, too).
The pain of downloading the demo of Bio Menace on 14.4kb with the fear the file would just stall for no reason. When download managers came along it was a game changer.
Web games :3
That’s my choice too. Honestly I actually forgot as I think I first accessed the internet when I 12 and our country only just starting to install broadband and having GPRS mobile phones or something like that
I was… younger than 12 back then. But I remember playing games on my mom’s facebook account back when they had web games on there lol
I remember that, though by that point I already have a Facebook account. I didn’t have one until I went away to college. Had friendster before because that’s what was popular in my country lol
Yeah I was definitely too young to be on social media back then lol. I did eventually get my own account to keep my own progress in games tho :3 and I only used facebook for that for yeaaars without ever touching any of the social features hah!
Neopets and Webkinz in my case
Boobs. But they took 15 minutes to load.
And it was worth it
I remember setting my wallpaper to a huge gaping asshole bc why not and the computer froze and I couldn’t get it to turn off and forgot about it for a while. Needless to say my mom definitely saw it.
My first access was AOL. So, I did AOL things, I guess. Been a minute.
A/S/L?
Lots of IRC then hunting for images. I was so fascinated with computerized pictures.
It is absolutely trivial now, but it is kind of amazing that we can do it. Figured out light sensitive chemicals and that make a sensor, that can then be encoded in a fashion that can be transmitted the world over. Very cool.
Opening a telnet connection to a friend’s workstation who had started studying at another university.
Using the UNIX “talk” command to chat. Yes, I am old.A/S/L?
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Let’s say Usenet.
When I gained access at university, search engines hadn’t really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn’t know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)
However, the university also provided Usenet access.
Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.
Usenet was so awesome. I wonder what it and the broader internet would be like now if it was still as standard as e-mail. Something would have had to change, because spammers would have overrun it, drowning out all useful content. Internet forums kind of took its place, now that I think about it. And I guess things like Lemmy too.
Early Usenet was awesome - so pissed that commercialisation killed it.
I’m really old, so it was in the mid to late 1980s, for work, and I’m struggling to remember the details. I had a Tandy device that fitted over the handset of a landline phone, you dialled the number and the data (from an electronic word processor) went chirping down the line. I once had to do it in a public phone booth, that was fun. Several times I was in a hotel room and had to ring reception first to explain I was going to make a data call, and please not to interrupt it.
My fun skill when I was in college was that when a modem/fax called I could whistle in a way that made it think it had reached another modem and connect. Couldn’t do anything past that, but it was funny.
When I was a kid I would dial the phone number to the news station and the weather would come up on the screen!
It was early enough I don’t remember. I started out on disk computer games, like as soon as I could use a mouse, but there was always an internet connection. It would have had to be after I could read.
I’d love to know what my first search was. I’m also curious if I ever used Netscape; it could have happened, although I’m young enough it seems like an old-timey thing.
flash games as a kid. I also remember my dad looking up some science stuff for me because I was curious.
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