Your first memory of the Internet?

Were you working fast food then, too?

 

I wish. I was lazy and unemployed back then. I should have been saving up some money.

 

Now I really feel old.
I have had the same AOL e-mail address for 20 years. Before that CompuServe served as a valuable information source for several years, as we were amazed and delighted by the ability to see AP news and sports feeds.

Funny that tripleoption34 mentions SWT. When I was there, we used manual typewriters and carbon paper.

 

I posted this on the Radiohead thread by accident first...let's put it where it belongs:

I remember Prodigy in 1992, which would have been my sophomore year of high school that fall, downloading the 49ers football roster...which was AWESOME! I could memorize the whole team..not just the starting lineup showed at the start of the game (which I would tape and pause to look at).

The day the 'net became "real' to me was not until Aug. 31, 1997. The day Princess Di died. It was the first story I remember only needing the Internet to get info from. I was at my college radio station all day on Yahoo looking up info.

 

We'd just got it at home. I was talking Super Bowl postgame (Denver-Atlanta) on a Lycos chat board...first chat board I'd ever seen...and suddenly I get a private message from some girl saying 17/F/Fla. Come sleep with me!" First, the loud ring sound of a PM made me just five inches out of the seat. Second, I felt like I'd just been hit on by an underage hooker. I guess I had... Creepiest feeling I ever had. After mentioning it to someone on the board (I didn't know until then how to do the PM thing), he gave me an idea (and introduced me to what ISP stood for. I then told her I was a cop and we were running a tracer on her ISP and would be arriving at her house with either a juvenile officer or a cop. She logged out.

 

Outing alert: PC is Anthony Michael Hall.

My first memory is circa 1995, using my old-as-dirt laptop (which had an external modem) to access the 1on1Sports message board (anyone remember that old network?) via 28.8 dialup so I could argue with some asshat Cowboy fans.

 

Yes. Good times.

 

It would have been mid-1995 when I went to work in a PR office and they were "on line" mainly as a research tool. My first thought was that all that computer stuff in the sci-fi books I read when I was a kid was finally coming true.

 

This was an extremely disappointing ending. I mean, c'mon, you went online after Broncos-Falcons. The least you could have done was embellished the story and said you hooked up with the girl and got arrested.

 

When I had graduated from college and was unemployed, I remember driving to Kent State (when my dad lived in Ohio) and to IUPUI (when I moved to Indianapolis) to find the few public PC's that allowed internet access so I could look up E&P's online job site.

I also remember an early iteration of an ESPN message board (I think it was ESPN, it might have been the primordial version of nfl.com too, I forget) where you could sign in and you had a helmet identifying which team you followed. This was long before membership vetting, passwords, etc.

I signed in once as a "Bears fan" and started all of these fake self-loathing posts about the current Bears of that time and the Bears of the 80s. Other Bears fans just jumped all over my ass. It was trolling 101.

I was later banned when I signed in as Warren Moon and bragged about being the NFC Central's leader in wife-beating, or some such thing.

My internet career did not begin auspiciously.

 

It's funny reading through some of that old wrestling stuff. The Internet is what really smartened me up to wrestling.

Obviously, I knew it was a show, but until 1996 or so, I'd never really had read about any behind-the-scenes stuff, and I didn't know how the wrestlers or promoters put matches together. Reading the first few wrestling stories on the Internet smartened me up in a hurry.

 

I think it was my freshman year in college when I was introduced to the Internet (1995-1996). My soccer coach was also my American Government teacher, and we were in the computer room. Had to click on Netscape and go to infoseek, lycos or yahoo. Then I remember spending a lot of time in some MLS chat room where a lot of people who knew zilch about soccer would come in to meet people.