America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.

Playing MUDs on JANET (not exactly the internet but close enough). We played late at night on university computers knowing that this wasn’t really what either the computers or JANET were supposed to be used for but it was still great.

bitftp@pucc

If anyone gets that reference, congratulations, you are officially old.

I managed to blow up the BITNET mail quota right through the ceiling within a few days…

It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.

We didn’t get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can’t remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.

This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.

I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.

Good

I remember downloading grainy Quicktime video files from people’s homepages. We didn’t need YouTube then and we don’t need it now.

2nd hand.

Connecting to a text only BBS at 300 baud who got their content from the internet.

Definitely 2flashgames.com and Newgrounds.com.

Most pages weren’t heavy js bloat. Lots more adware, at least in an obvious way. Google search wasn’t faster than other search engines. Websites (even for well known companies) would actually have downtime for maintenance and there wasn’t such a focus on having six 9s worth of availability. Could also probably hack a lot of what was out there back in the day. I kind of miss it but I really don’t. Nostalgia factor is only just that… very fleeting. Only thing I miss the most is used to being able to watch porn on my 3DS. The sites I used were still not using the weird players they use now and so mostly everything I could play. It would take a hot min to load but would come through eventually. Oh well.

9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.

I remember clicking on a YouTube video and waiting about an hour for it to load. When it finished loading the whole Family gathered in front of the screen and watched it.

Using askjeeves was probably one of my earliest memories.

Around the mid-80s a friend of mine set up a public-access Unix system. You could dial in and get shell access, and from there newsgroups, email, etc. It technically wasn’t a “live” internet connection, his system dialed in to Yale each night and downloaded newsgroups and stuff via UUCP, so there was at least a day’s delay between writing messages and getting a response. I don’t remember exactly when it was but I was around for the Morris worm so it was some time before that.

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

Got dialup as a young teen in the 90s - first with CompuServe, then usenet and the early Web. Usenet was amazing, fun communities, kibology, and great for dialup, and as someone who lives in the country, I still wish sites had more options for downloading stuff in advance to view when out of signal.

A less positive part of usenet was back then it was completely uncensored (or at least, that child me had unrestricted access) . At the time I thought it was normal and good to be able to get porn with people my age, instead of weird adults. But now I feel pretty sad and icky that this was my introduction to sex, and horrible if I think abiut the situations behind those pictures.