Your first memory of the Internet?

This.

Also remember NBA.com taking a half hour to load.

 

I remember that for the longest time MLB.com was the website for a legal practice that had a redirect to www.majorleaguebaseball.com at the top of the site.

I forget what year that finally changed, but I'll bet it was within the last decade.

 

1995. Rocketmail.

 

Wow, you were way ahead of the curve.

 

I remember in the late 1990s after covering a game I would sometimes come back to the office to wait for a copy editor buddy to get off work so we could go have a drink and this was at one of the bigger papers in the country and they had two computers in the entire department that got the Internet.

 

How funny to see that ESPNET screen. I definitely remember that around my freshman year at UConn (1994), as well as the address: espnet.sportszone.com

If you haven't already, check out the wayback machine at archive.org. A good way to see how far we've come in design.

 

During my senior year of college, either fall '93 or spring '94, I had a prof who required us to get an email account through the school and use it to communicate with him. The computers to use for email weren't even in the main part of the university's computer lab; they were lined up in a hallway outside of the lab. Those computers also connected to GOPHER an old U of Minnesota system that somehow connected everywhere. I didn't know that this was the Internet. However, it didn't take long to start using it as a time-waster. One of the first things I did on GOPHER was look up the script to "Caddyshack." Found it in seconds and printed it. Less than a year later, I was on AOL and everything started changing.

 

My dad got us a free AOL CD in like '95. We got hooked. And a month later we were on the net. Spent a lot of time on Candystand.com playing games and FreeArcade.com.

Also spent a lot of time in chat rooms getting music from those servers and talking about sports. It was also huge among kids in middle school and we all traded around e-mail address/AIM names and forwarded chain e-mails like crazy. Even through college we still used aim like crazy and often times had big chat rooms with friends.

 

Prodigy in the late '80s. On the REM board, whenever a newb would ask, "Does anyone have the lyrics to ITEOTWAIKI?", there would be mass migraine, usually followed by another newb taking pity and posting lyrics which included the name Lester Banks. :

 

My 82-year-old great aunt does. She didn't have a computer until she was well into her 70s. AOL is great because it has her e-mail, and favorite Web sites are all set up for people who don't know how to use the internet.