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  • Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

  • MSN IM was really popular. I remember it felt really funny to come home and talk to your friends you had just seen.

    StumbleUpon was also really cool before it was sold to ebay. It's how I found cgsociety, but then the website owner shut the site down for some reason and everyone migrated to artstation.

    There were also the video games on YTV's website, and all the other flash games that are hard to find now. Prime among them in my memory was the 3-d missile game. You would guide a missile through a series of spinning obstacles as the missile accelerated. Newgrounds, ebaums world, the original youtube that wasn't entirely focused on profit yet...

    I don't remember using napster, but I did use Limewire until it shutdown. It was really cool to have access to so much music but IIRC it was mostly mp3's of a single song and sometimes it wouldn't even be the full song.

    I also spent a lot of time playing tower defence maps on Starcraft \Battle.net, then it started to be over-run by spam bots and no one played anymore. It was really sad to see that happen, and eye-opening for me when no one at blizzard or whoever controlled battlenet did anything about it. Looking back, that was likely a large part of the reason for my eventual to switch to linux.

  • We took a class field trip to a students parents facility where they made supplements. They showed us a computer connected to university databases of research papers. Up until that point we called BBS servers directly and would rush to download everything before sometime accidentally picked up the phone. This was the early 90s

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote

    The next year I got my first laptop and a 14.4baud us robotics pcmcia card.

  • 2nd hand.

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

  • The first time I got onto the internet proper, I was over at a friend's house for his birthday as a teenager and his dad had an account and he dialed in and the very first thing he showed me was a picture of a lit red candle sticking out of a woman's butthole.

    Prior to that, I had signed on to a local BBS with my home computer, but there was not any pornography available on that BBS.

    It was glorious, though, being like 12 years old and figuring out how to make computers talk over telephone lines, though.

  • It was a lot better back then, then it became about money.

  • I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don't remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.

    After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring's website.

  • One of the earliest things I can remember was encountering a thread on the forums of nuklearpower.com (home of the 8-Bit Theater webcomic) that simply asked, "Religious people, why do you believe in God?" and that was the first time I ever had ever encountered atheist perspectives or questioned what my parents taught me. At the time, there was very much this idea of, "Nobody ever changed their mind from an internet argument" but the internet exposed me to a lot of different views that I would never have encountered otherwise (see also: queer people).

    Other than that, I used to gather around with friends to browse icanhazcheezeburger and failblog and stuff. I stayed up late grinding levels in RuneScape. Newgrounds and flash games were a big thing. Some of my friends were into 4chan in the early days when it was more about edgy shock humor than straight up Nazis. There was social media like MySpace and Facebook but I had no interest in them bc I was a nerd. There were a lot more random little websites that passed around by word of mouth.

  • I have vague memories of using Prodigy on Windows 3.1 but I don't remember much beyond the login screen.

    My earliest clear memories were of AOL 3.0, during the era when the app didn't even have a URL bar because they wanted you to used their walled garden "AOL keyword" system. So I'd login, minimize the program, and immediately open Netscape so I could get to the real internet. Didn't do much online though, other than go to Nick.com to play games.

    Didn't become a full-time internet user until 1998. Probably because that was the first year I went to a school with internet-connected computers in every classroom, where my parents couldn't restrict my online time.

  • Gotta find the Netscape disk. Gotta get mom off the phone. Gotta wait 5 minutes for the space jam website to load.

    Getting booted from your game because Mom got a phone call.

    720p video was a straight up luxury that most of us didn't bother with because it took way too long to buffer lol.

    It was a very different time.

  • 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.

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