Your first memory of the Internet?

I remember using a search engine called HotBot in 1996 or '97 on Netscape 3.0.

 

Oh, and Netscape, the supposed miracle browser. I hardly ever used it; was glitchy as hell for me. And it led a lot of people to lose a lot of millions

 

Did anyone ever use the iWon search engine?

 

I think some court decisions loosened what is required of the porn providers to make sure kids don't access it, so that killed Net Nanny and Adult Check.

 

I bet that pissed off a lot of guys who had upgraded to Adult Check Gold

 

Gopher and Telnet. Maybe 1992?

 

Aside from being amazed that we could transfer our files electronically to the printing house 45 minutes away, my most important first memory of the internet was downloading in Newfoundland a same-day picture from the Oklahoma City bombing.

It came line by line and took almost three hours to come across on the one Mac Classic that was hooked up to the modem.

I watched every line.

 

1992. Freshman year of college. Sent my first email. Didn't touch it for another year. Then the J-profs started pimping the Web as a research tool. Oh, to have back some of the hours I piddled away reading other cities' newspapers (!), Web-stalking high school ex-girlfriends, and looking at Internet dating sites...

 

1980 or 81. I had a friend in junior high who was a bit of a computer nerd, and had a computer with a modem he used to log into bulletin boards -- including a dating bulletin board. We invented some red-headed bombshell named Victoria to see if anyone took the bait. They did, which as two dopey 13 year olds we found endlessly hilarious.

 

I never understood how chat rooms worked in the mid-90s and I never went back. In a way, I'm glad I remain stupid about those and have no desire to seek them out.

UConn had GOPHER, and I hadn't thought about that in years. I also remember that we had to check our e-mail on these mainframe computers (our e-mail addresses were @uconnvm.uconn.edu) that only had orange or green text. We also had internet jacks in our dorm rooms but they weren't hooked up ... so if we wanted to check the Internet in our rooms, we had to have some kind of dialup service.

Wasn't compuserve the e-mail service where the prefix would be a series of numbers and you couldn't select your own? Sounds familiar.

 

Fall of '93. College paper newsroom watching a guy with an AOL account dial in.

My college town had multiple schools and in Spring '94 I remember getting into an argument with the editor of the paper at one of the private schools and they had a website. It might have been the first college newspaper website in the country.

I thought it was a complete waste of time and he said otherwise.

He's now one of the editors at the NY Times and rising fast. I don't think he's an AME yet, but his name will be on the masthead before his career there is over.

And here I am. *sigh*

 

I remember back in the mid-'80s, watching hearings in the U.S. Senate about sticking warning labels on music albums.

I spotted Al Gore sitting behind his wife Tipper.

I couldn't help but think that he had better things to do with his time.

Perhaps he picked up my vibes and set to work on his invention.