What is your first Internet Memory?

[Swizz]

Gizmodo just asked that question, and it was interesting enough that I wanted to ask it here.

For me, it was browsing the AOL message boards in the mid 90s looking for Mortal Kombat II special moves, and the ego strokers who forced you to email them in order to receive their lists. What glorious times those were.

 

[gallandof]

NEtscape, and that god awful dial up tone.

 

[ashykat]

Hrmmm....This is difficult. I had a regional dial-up carrier and connected with a US Robotics 14.4 modem. I had a 1200 baud before that but used it to directly play games with friends, not connecting to the internet. I remember getting onto Kali to play games like Netmech (mechwarrior). Good times.

 

[Martimus]

I remember when me and Al Gore were sitting at DARPA talking about a worldwide data network he was envisioning...

Or back when I had an ISP account and this horrifically slow Useless Robotics modem...

 

[AmneonX]

I remember the day we got the internet. I was only 11 or 12 maybe, and I created my first HOTMAIL address, and looked up cheats for Spyro.

 

[NYCHitman1]

I can't remember that far back but I'm 99.9% sure AOL and Starcraft were somehow involved.

 

[Snedd]

Dialing up on a 1400 baud modem and showing DEC's Alta-Vista search engine to my boss, whose comment was - "This'll never catch on, how is anyone gonna make money out of this"!

 

[Notluk]

Using dial-up and sending email for the first time with Juno.

Man that feels like a lifetime ago.

 

[h4x0rj3ff]

Downloading music with Morpheus 1 to 2 songs a day untill I got enough to fill a CD!!! Ahh the good ole days.

 

[gallandof]

morpheus forgot about that

 

[nigsy]

First time I went online was with a Sega Dreamcast!!
I remember having to type the URL using a really clumsy onscreen keyboard (Not disimillar to the PS3)

56k modem internal on dialup....oh what fun!!

 

[lunatic59]

I was a Compuserve subscriber in the '80s before the web was world wide. I guess my first real Internet memory was browsing UseNet boards through the Compuserve client in the late '80s or early '90s. US Robotics 96k "smart" modem, I think. Can't remember exactly. They say as you age, memory is the second thing to go ... I can't remember what the first thing is

 

[Tom Ace]

My introduction to the internet was through AOL chat boards around '95. Soon after, I was introduced to websites. I remember the first site I visited was a Braveheart fan site.

 

[Yoboebirdo]

I was about 8 when we got MSN dial up with the new computer my dad got. Good ol' Windows 98 and a lemon of a computer. The screeching dial up noises (which i don't really mind), its more ze slowness.

Guess i was lucky, getting started with a 56k modem! Then back in 04 we got Qwest DSL (sucks) and finally our good Comcast internet.

I remember IMing people and downloading webshots.

 

[serpentine009]

"File's Done!".wav from AOL

 

[Notluk]

I was about 8 when we got MSN dial up with the new computer my dad got. Good ol' Windows 98 and a lemon of a computer. The screeching dial up noises (which i don't really mind), its more ze slowness.

I remember that when I got my first 98 machine. I'm trying to remember though how many months they gave for free, seemed like a lot at the time.

 

[DaSchmarotzer]

The dial-up tone. I still remember it perfectly.

I'll be right back guys, I'm logging off to call someone.

 

[Knewz]

Being 13 in adult chat rooms at 2 in the morning.... Ha if they only knew.

 

[tfek70]

Processing military pay documents in 1991 in Italy. It was less than 14k baud. It was on the military autovon phone system. It seriously transmitted about a character per second. A one page document could take all day to transmit.

 

[bbrosen]

Processing military pay documents in 1991 in Italy. It was less than 14k baud. It was on the military autovon phone system. It seriously transmitted about a character per second. A one page document could take all day to transmit.

good God I remember autovon, in the 80's none the less, and stu I and stu II
I did telecommunications in the Air Force, 1A2 key systems, i installed one of the first digital key systems in the Air Force on Andrews AFB in D.C.

wow, went to lots of dead shows too, had lots of free time off..what a gig that was

 

[tfek70]

good God I remember autovon, in the 80's none the less, and stu I and stu II
I did telecommunications in the Air Force, 1A2 key systems, i installed one of the first digital key systems in the Air Force on Andrews AFB in D.C.

wow, went to lots of dead shows too, had lots of free time off..what a gig that was

I was using a Comet PC with about a 4 inch amber screen. Multimate 4 and Enable were our word processing programs.

 

[Bomfy]

4th grade we were the fist public elementary (maybe public school or school) in the county to get a computer lab going. Very small school <150 students and we had 8 Macintosh Classic (I think that was the model) donated partially by a teacher and his father who was dying and thought computers were a needed thing for education.

We had been the first class to get to see the Internet in action and the phone lines hadn't been hooked up properly so no Internet.

Two days later we had it up and running and I recall a student doing something the get us kicked off a BBS.

 

[edthedeadhead]

downloading porn.. Audio files
--ed..

 

[mrspeedmaster]

My 1st experience was using Gopher/Telnet in College.

We had to use gopher to check out library books.

Pine was the mail client used for each and every student. We didn't have to worry about hackers and telnet port was open. I don't even think there were such things as firewall. We'd use finger shell commands to find people and there were no graphical FTP clients. I had fond memories of set binary or ascii whenever I uploaded my homework to my professors.

 

[EarlyMon]

Other experience similiar and identical to bbrosen; early DARPA, bang-routing of email.

Static IP at home in 1993, ran X desktop at home, server apps that I built or compiled in my ISP's weblog and var areas (until they finally caught me pulling that stunt in 95) - on a dial-up modem with SLIP.

EarlyMon is also the DinoMon.