Being into marvel superheros, i tried spiderman.com, and it brought mento a spiderman website. pretty straight forward i thought. next i wanted to see xmen stuff, but i typed in xman. there was a big difference between xmen.com and xman.com

Me: hi!!!

Guest816371: a/s/l

Me: what does that mean???

AOL Keywords.

Anyone remember brands putting their keyword in all their advertisements, like they do for a hashtags and @ signs today?

My first memories were just getting the damn thing working. We had to add RAM to our Packard Bell 486 and buy a modem. Getting email working on it was a chore but that was for my parents so I did not care until Hotmail came out a few months later when I could get my own. Then I essentially signed up for spam. I read a lot of PC World and looked through Yahoo’s categorized websites which were a lot of Geocity sites. I’d use WebCrawler to search for SimCity 2000 sites and since I was 12, boobs. That last one was risky because closing Netscape Navigator took a good minute to close out so there was no quick switching to something else if someone walked in. I would also hit up chat rooms and forums, generally PC or N64 related ones. Many of those probably should have had a lot more moderation than they did. I think I remember Tom’s Hardware’s chatroom/forum exposing me to things that a 12 year old and even adults should probably not be exposed to.

Overall, there was a lot less moderation and a lot less centralization. You had to seek out what you were looking for because there was not a ton of tracking and your interests would not be constantly bombarding you and reinforcing your views.

This was probably 1997ish. My godparents had a computer with AOL, and I remember being blown away by chat rooms and being able to instantly communicate with people from all over the world. A year later, my family joined got our first internet connection.

My parents bought a Tandy hooked it up real early, without understanding what the internet was. I was given access to it at maybe age 9 and I got my first dick pic sent to me VIA SCANNER. Pre-digital camera era. Someone literally put their hardon in a scanner, closed the lid, and sat there while it scanned. Just to send it to 16, f, California.

I started pwning noobs online in Quake 3 Arena on my family PC. One day my older brother’s friend saw me playing and was like “… you do know you can use the mouse to aim?”

I did not know.

I somehow had mastered controlling the character like a tank with my keyboard.

Fidonet all the way initially (At the time it was faster to write your terminal program than to load it off tape every time you started the computer. Was only like 5 lines.)

But the with the “Internet” I was the first (I think, never saw any others) to write and release a Windows 3.1 program for Finger

Pre proper internet but I was a fan briefly of playing L.O.R.D (Legend of the red dragon) on BBS.

One of my earliest memories of the internet is Yahoo games and playing Lenny Loosejocks.

irc chatting ~1988, lynx via a BBS was my first browsing

“Dad, Of everything out there, it had to be a CNN website 😣”

Ha, using the internet to get pictures of Pokemon too. :D

If Gopher counts, 1993, downloading Wayne’s World and Ren & Stimpy clips at the university’s biochemistry lab on a Mac IIsi. Otherwise 1996, looking up Green Day lyrics on Webcrawler.com and posting on Usenet from a Sun SPARCstation in the computer lab.

Does anyone remember Freenet? It was community dialup where as long as you had a modem you could dial in and use the Internet without your telecom being involved. Anyway I found my way to telnet talkers, which predated web browsers, and you had to telnet into a specific IP address to join a text based chat room. This was the earlier 1990s.