It was the middle of the 90s, I had just managed to buy my new computer after saving for years. It came with Windows 95, and I was so excited to finally get a graphical interface. It also had a modem, which an aunt’s boyfriend came home to configure and show us how to use. I went online and I remember having this feeling of “wow, I can access computers anywhere…” I had learned that sites where in the format www.<something>.com so the first thing I tried was www.china.com, a site in Chinese loaded and I was so excited that I had loaded information from across the globe, it felt like the world had no barriers anymore.

I also remember using a chat that kept writing a comic with what people said, https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat for the new guys out there who have no idea what I’m talking about. And my father trying to communicate with some random person from Italy on that thing because we pushed him to and open something like #italy or similar. Looking back it feels like those parents that put the kid together in a room with another kid and say “he’s also wearing blue, be friends”.

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.

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.

Web pages didn’t exist. I remember when Netscape began and it was such a surprising idea. We would use telnet talkers, which basically meant opening a telnet session and entering an IP address which you had written on paper, and there were all of these people there, mostly from a university, that you would talk to. I still have several as friends 30+ years later. It was super benign by and large, although there were sex telnet talkers that were sometimes full of pedophiles if you didn’t realize it. Nobody has the Internet at home unless you were in higher education, but there was what was called Freenet, which like it sounds was free internet, which you could only connect to for small amounts of time each week, and it was a question of whose modem got in first. It was super binary and full of ASCII art that was a marvel.

Later when web based social media became a thing, we migrated to Livejournal, and as far as I’m concerned everything that was good about social media ever was there for a brief shining moment, and I still have friends from there and we know EVERYTHING about each other. Nothing has ever replaced those deep friendships. Before it got enshittified it was an absolutely beautiful place. I’m convinced that the earliest Russian forays into weaponized disinformation happened there because it definitely helped give birth to the crunchy parent movement, with mild vaccine disinformation (pre Wakefield), unassisted birth (the wildly dangerous birth stories I’ve read!), and silly things like claiming shampoo was bad and how you should clean your hair with cider vinegar, or things like extreme breastfeeding. I think it was Russia’s first steps into seeing what the west would buy into being manipulated with, and it was extremely successful. The Russian government bought Livejournal as a propaganda tool, thinly veiled by a company called SUP, and used it to disguise what they really do. Reply All did an episode about Russia disinformation on Livejournal.

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.

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 remember downloading the Hubble Deep Field on our shared family computer, filling up the entire hard drive, and barely even being able to open it. I distinctly remember this because I had to do it multiple times due to people picking up the phone halfway through.

I have older memories of computers (Amiga & Commodore) but this memory was specifically internet related.

On university computers, using Netscape Navigator, browsing the information superhighway (i.e., mostly Geocities) filtered through Yahoo and, as soon as I found it, AltaVista (whose user experience was much more similar to what Google’s would be), and reading hardcore erotic stories between classes…

The World Wide Web has only gone downhill from there. It probably died around the time when the blink and marquee tags were deprecated, and we’ve been browsing it’s dessicated corpse since then, like maggots on a carcass already way too rotten to provide any nourishment.

“Get off the internet, I need to call grandma!”

And literally not knowing which websites exist out there and having no search engine to look em up

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.