I guess I’m curious about generations (namely GenZ and Alpha) who didn’t live in a pre-Internet time. Like,
- How was the concept first explained to you, or when did it click?
- Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library or university — one search away? That it’s absolutely insane you can engage in a real-time conversation with someone on the opposite side of the world? That you can find niche communities in an instant?
- Were your parents super strict about internet usage? How quickly did you find workarounds?
So I was a weird kid and loved reading and so I found out about the internet in like 1992 or 1993 in the Encyclopedia Britannica my parents had. I then begged my parents to get it since we had a computer and eventually my dad broke down and got a CompuServe subscription.
He would let me hang out in chat rooms and play the Neverwinter Nights MUD but only under supervision (I was like, 8). This was basically like how AOL worked and wasn’t the full WWW experience. Later when WWW became the main thing, the common fun thing to do was just type in random URLs and see what you got.
When my dad got Quake, I got into online multiplayer. I fucking sucked because I only knew about mouselook as a press and hold modifier so the best I would do is get somewhere high and then use the FOV command to zoom and and snipe with the shotgun. I didn’t learn to use a mouse with the keyboard until Tribes 2 made it the default.
But I basically use it the same now as I did originally; just hanging out in chat rooms and forums or playing multiplayer games.
That game got banned at my school pretty quickly. Turns out everyone trying [name].com had bad results.