Your first memory of the Internet?

There were a few early memories of computer stuff, including a TV commericial that showed a stuttering girl talking about how she no longer had to be afraid to talk, because she could talk on the computer.

For me personally, my first experience was in college around 1993, when this one professor kept sending us e-mail messages. Only thing is, we all had to go to the computer labs to look at the messages. We found it pretty annoying that he wouldn't just give us our assignments or our grades in class.

The next year, I ended up meeting my future wife, who took me to the computer lab and showed me how to get on this thing called chat rooms. I thought I was chatting with some other people at the college, only one of them said they were from Argentina. That was a pretty big "A-Ha!" moment for me.

After I graduated, I found a job listing online and applied. The employer calls me back, and asked incrediously, "You found us on ... the Internet? Wow!" (Didn't take the job).

My earliest ESPNzone experience was watching a commercial for it on ESPN. It was about these Christmas elves making toys, only one elf decides to revolt and runs outside. He yells, "Yee-Hah!" then gets run over by Santa's sleigh. The other elves turn back, and continue singing and making the toys. (can't find it on Youtube)

 

Being blown away by usenet's flame newsgroup, and instantly hooked. I had a shitty college job at a veterinary library and would spend the entire shift on a dialup.

 

Ugh, I remember a garbage bag full of Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe promo discs that came in the mail.

My mom bought me a computer in early 96 (I think). We were on our way home when she casually mentioned that she had been saving up. Being the spoiled brat I was, I made her turn around. I couln't wait.

I was online that night -- 14.4 modem. I took two hours to download MTV clips.

 

I kept my subscription for a long time because:
A) I didn't realize you could just get the free e-mail address. They didn't publicize that very well. I still have an @aol.com e-mail address.
B) I figured it might come in handy on the road. I always figured wi-fi signals can be touch and go in the hinterlands. There might be times when you're miles away from a signal and need that dial-up safety net.
Fortunately that's changed and you can get a wi-fi signal lots of places now, but that's really just been in the last year or two.

 

First Internet memory is in college (around 1996 or so), spending hours upon hours in the computer lab browsing ESPN's site, the old Sandbox fantasy sports site and screwing around on some text chatroom I can't recall. Might have been one of the GOPHER rooms someone mentioned.
Oh, and looking at porn. There was one computer in the lab, way in the corner and facing away from a back wall, that was the early Internet equivalent of a peep show booth. My 19-year-old brain was too amazed at the veritable flood of boobie pictures on the screen in front of me to wonder why the J, K and L keys kept sticking.

 

I can't remember what year it was, but I remember talking to a friend of mine from college and who had just joined Compuserve. He kept telling me how great it was and how you could buy stuff like airline tickets through it, and I remember asking him, "Why the hell would you want that?"

Now I feel like the guy who told the Wright brothers, "That thing will never get off the ground."

 

Mid to late 80s. The elementary school I went to had a really enterprising computer teacher. We were schooled in BASIC and some unix, but she also opened the door slightly to HyperCard software. We had to make pages on subjects that interested us and we had to link them together using the hyper text-based program. It was a rather boring exercise, but she told us this would have some sort of application in the future.

I remember doing modem-based gaming in classrooms before that too, but I don't know if that would qualify as the Internet.

 

My freshman year of high school we could get on a server called IDS, that was basically just chat. No graphics, just plain text.

My friends and I would spend study hall in the library and talk to people from around the world. Then one day we got kicked off because someone on the system complained to our librarian that someone in our school was making lewd sexual comments to her. We didn't do it, but we were on so often, the librarian assumed it was us and kicked us off.

The next year we had full World Wide Web, with graphics and all that jazz. I still remember my first password to a member site: Ballparkkansas, which was randomly generated by ESPN's site. My best friend to this day uses his ESPN-generated password for all of his internet activity.

 

Freshmen year in college in 1992. I discovered the usenet message boards and bought three hockey fight tapes for $20. I had them sent home since Christmas vacation was a week away and got bitched at by my mother for sending a check to a stranger. She still refuses to buy anything online.

 

My uncle had a 13k dialup connection at his house and he let me use it once. I spent about 10 minutes waiting for a Cubs fan page to load.

Then in high school, we used it when we were supposed to be learning COBOL and QBasic, and I had my first e-mail (rocketmail, iirc) and logged on to the ESPN Sportszone Chat Rooms.

 

I remember seeing the commercials on TV for AOL from 1995 to '97, then we got a second-hand terminal in 1998 that had Windows 95. Slow as hell, and that obnoxious dial-up sound. I fondly remember the Yahoo home page that was basically a wall of links (still my favorite version of the Yahoo home page all these years later). Remembered playing a lot of Yahoo blackjack. My ESPN default password was wingvancouver. And a friend told me about the Net Nanny and Adult Check links he ran into. Do those enterprises still exist?