Your first memory of the Internet?

Wow, I feel old.
As a kid I remember my brother getting on BBS boards all day and teaching me how to access NASA's information on this newfangled thing called "The Internet" where professors exchanged information from university to university.
I didn't do a lot of surfing myself until AOL in middle school, which started my lifelong addiction to the Web.
Almost 30 and I really can't remember a time without computers and the Internet, and we live in the sticks.

 

I was in school. One which was continuing to push the curve to go online. Learned a lot about it before graduating, though should have learned more ... such as finding a career in it, for starters.

 

We were one of the first college newspapers (then-SW Texas State) to offer our editions online back in 1994.

Like most of the other responses here, I was dragged in by the attraction of ESPNzone. Off the bat, I wondered how easy it would be to manage the fantasy baseball league I helped co-run.

 

What ever happened to chat rooms? Those were fun ... "Hey ladies! A/S/L/P?"

 

I was a huge chat room guy, mainly on BBS services in as early as 1990. Been online more than some of our part-timers have been alive ... and I'm only 33.

 

I started college in the fall of 1991, and toward the end of my freshman year, a guy who lived in my dorm was getting ready to spend a year in China as part of his co-op program. I remember he wrote his email address on the chalk bulletin board downstairs so that his friends in the dorm could contact him.

I remember thinking, "What the hell is email? And how much does it cost?"

As for the actual Internet, I guess my first experience with it was seeing commercials for AOL and CompuServe and when businesses started putting their web addresses on commercials. This would have been in 1994 or so. As far as getting online semi-regularly, that didn't come until our college paper got Internet hook-ups and email in about 1995, I guess.

For some reason, I remember the Oklahoma City bombing as being one of the first major news events to receive massive Internet coverage. Am I correct in that recollection?

 

Once we had the internet at our house, roughly 1998ish, I discovered usenet. At old alt.sports.baseball.chicago-cubs, a few posters patiently explained to me why I was wrong and that RBIs did not mean that Sosa deserved the MVP over McGwire.

 

1. Nice pull on Gopher for those who have mentioned it. Completely forgot about that.

2. I also remember that the Raleigh News & Observer's "Nando Sports Server" was the standard bearer for newspaper sports websites for the longest time. Seems as completely random now as it did then.

3. I'm sure most on here have seen this by now, but this 1981 report by San Francisco TV station KRON on the "computerized newspaper" always makes me chuckle:

 

Whenever these types of threads come up, I always like to pull out this website. It's a wrestling site, but look at it more from a standpoint of how it's put together instead of what's on it. It's like a time capsule back to 1999 or 2000, which I swear was the last time it anything resembling a redesign. Hell, if you go into the FAQs you can even find items referring to things that were current in 1998.

http://ddtdigest.com

 

Holy crap....the primitive flag gifs. And a Rene Goulet interview.

 

Oh man, everything I ever posted on Usenet is still there and Google-searchable. Looking back at stuff I posted at the age of 16 in 1998 ...

I was every bit as awesome as I am now.

 

I remember doing a couple of things on line in my freshman year of college in 1992, but I really didn't get that much into computers or the Internet until my second senior year, when I took my internship. My roommate used to drag a 50-foot phone cable across the floor to hook up to the school's server, which meant no phone conversation for the night, as I was still about a year from getting my first cell phone. He'd spend half the night trading Gillian Anderson pictures. I don't think he grasped the concept of someone "photoshopping" her head onto the body of someone else, until he saw a picture of her face on a man's body.

The summer after I graduated, we got a computer with a modem, and I spent countless hours on the ESPN site (and porn). The number I had to dial into was long-distance. A $200 phone bill curtailed my online viewing, and sent me back to ESPN (and Skinemax) until a local carrier set up shop.