When Did You Start Communicating Via The Interwebs

95 - mIRC

 

I think its was '91 BBS dialups around the SE houston area. Anyone remember the names of those old dialups? Aadvark park was the only one I remember. I also remember the experience of downloading my first file and the realization of what the future could look like.

 

TVs weighed like 200 pounds in 1997
Thank God I got an LG oled now

Sony trinitron was the OG thou

 

Seemed like a ton of my 'rich' friends got Prodigy in 1992, and I played with it at their houses but I was more interested in girls and partying at the time.




https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/932/prodigy-20-years-ago-today

I didn't have internet full time until I got a Sega Netlink for my Saturn in 1996



I remember jumping on ClutchCity.net in 1996 when I read about it in the Houston Chronical. Eat your heart out, @tinman. I'm a '96er.

 

I was playing online asteroids and **** talking other people in 1995ish. It was called subspace. It's now called continuum and there is a tiny group of degenerates that still play this game 30 years later.

 

I had Prodigy forever ago but I didn't use it much, then AOL in the mid 90's.

I never spent all that much time communicating online outside of college until the release of smart phones made it practical to do on the go. Being stuck in classes, or writing papers was about the only time I'd be tethered to a computer for that long before the smart phone revolution.

 

My first internet memories are filled with “a/s/l?” AOL Chat rooms FTW
That and Yahoo Games.
Using Netscape to sign on
Hugging the computer when I signed on too late to AOL and it made that loud ass signal from the internal speaker

 

traveling way back to the land before time

 

I used to telnet into MUD's in the early 90's - 92 or 93. There were a whole bunch out there, but the one I used most was some server at rutgers.edu. Probably the first online multiplayer "game" - all text. That's actually where my user name came from - my main character in that game.

Before that I had a 2400 baud modem on my atari 800, but I'm not sure those dial in BBS' count as "internet". But some of them were very in the spirit of the "dark web". I'm sure most was bull****, and I was like 10 or 12 so I had no idea what was and wasn't, but I remember downloading a list of phone numbers for various extensions supposedly at the White House and Pentagon and all sorts of other sketchy stuff like that. Also ascii p*rn was a real thing, which was not... great, especially when it takes like a second for each line of text to render.

But it would be like if you had to directly call with your modem every web server you wanted to access. If you wanted to go to a different "server", hang up your modem and dial another number. It wasn't very interconnected.

 

2008 I was probably sending xbox live messages if that counts? 2010 I opened a facebook account on my computer, those were my first online messages outside of computer class emails in school.

I got an Iphone at 11, and personal laptop at 12, neither had any parental controls nor did my parents care to ever check them. So I had free unsupervised access to the internet during my entire adolescence.

Luckily for me the internet wasn't nearly as developed, toxic or predatory in the early 2010's. For me, Youtube was a lot of ray william johnson type comedy bit channels, music, sport mix tapes. Facebook was friends and family. The only other sites I'd access were Clutchfans, RealGM and the Hub. Wasn't too bad of a time.

Instagram, snapchat, twitter, vine, etc came around and luckily I passed on it all. I might be a different person for the worse today if I didn't.

Being a forged by fire internet veteran, my kids ain't getting **** until they're older, and it will have parental controls + an involved personal eye. There's no way I'd have lasted okay going 12-20+ in todays internet, let alone what it will become in the next 5-10 years.

 

When Netzero was giving out CD's for monthly free internet trials. Those cds were like gold back in the day.