Do you remember the first time someone showed you the internet?

Yeah I do, we went to a site to watch the “dancing baby.” I really only remember going on Napster & AIM though. When did web browsing actually get big?

I remember my dad showing me a picture of Space Ghost on cartoonnetwork.com back in… 1995 or so. I don’t remember how it happened, exactly, but I wound up using the internet a lot from an early age after that. I had no idea what it was at first. I thought it was just a bunch of pictures.

I don’t really remember the first time, but I remember when I was really young getting online was kind of a special privilege. We used AOL dial-up (shudder) and we were allowed to get on when we were upset or as a reward, and we just got on sites like barbie.com and stuff like that. It didn’t really become a commonplace thing until I was maybe seven or eight years old.

Former US Congressman Rick Boucher, D-Va, wrote a 1992 law that gave way for the first commercial use of the Internet and chaired a subcommittee that oversaw the commercialization of the Internet and its transition from a government-owned R&D project. We are friends and from the same part of Virginia. He help “wire” an entire city near Virginia Tech when the Internet was just starting. Everyone had computers and Internet. Amazing times.

I was attending a county board of supervisors meeting when we were all given a demonstration of an Internet type “chatroom.” It was amazing. I remember telling one of my friends that it would be something for rich people to play with but would never take off. People just couldn’t afford computers.

I don’t remember anyone showing me but I do remember finding it. I was amazed that I could chat with a group of people on the other side of the planet. That fact alone has had me hooked ever since.

I watched a public access channel and It was talking about downloading a faster copy of the Mona Lisa…I still thought It downloaded too slow… It inspired me to find the internet on my High schools computers… unfortunately only the teachers had access to the internet…But my college had access and I used all the time I had to look up reboot episodes and info.

I don’t remember, who showed me the internet, but I do remember when I first found wikipedia and porn.

I also remember that I was terrified of chat rooms even though I only very vaguely knew what they were because I heard so many people (including the media) mentioning bad and crazy shit happening in them.

Weird, I just had this conversation, recently. My first real experience with the internet was when AOL first came out. Before buddy lists and emails were an option, and the IMs just magically appeared in the center of the screen. I remember my dad explaining what the internet was.

I’m still afraid of chatroulette. I really want to check it out but I’m afraid.

Yeah: “How do we look for sex?”

What can I say? I’ve grown older, but apparently I haven’t really grown up.

Humans created this mind blowing, elaborate and perplexing piece of machinery that essentially connects us with the entire world…...and we use it to look for sex. We fail at life.

Oh, that’s harsh, @Blackberry. We win at life by… um… looking for sex. And so forth.

@Blackberry LOL

Hmmm…yes, early 90’s, friends got a home PC, the rest is a blur. haha

Given the influence it has had over my life in one way or another, strangely, I don’t remember. I do remember starting to chat. That was like ‘wow’ for me as an extrovert. All these people to talk to. I was quite addicted for a while. I am over my net addiction now. No, I mean I really am… not.

@Bellatrix

Haha..Me too! I remember once being solicited by some pervey guy to role play.
I can be rather gullible.
I decided to go along with it and asked him what he wanted to “play.”
He said ” How ‘bout boss & secretary.” haha

I said ” Okay, I’ll be the boss”...he was stunned, ” Uh, no, I’ll be the the boss”

Said ” If I can’t be the boss I don;t want to play.” lol

Long silence…then I typed back ” Oooh Mr. Secretary could you bring me my coffee.”

He went away. I was too much work. haha

Lol! So, so funny. Picked the wrong goose to play with didn’t he!

UUrm @Coloma, nice beak :D

@Bellatrix at least part of my previous conversation included a story about how I used to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night and wrap the modem in a blanket so it wouldn’t wake up my parents while I tried figuring out my dad’s latest password. My internet addiction started at a young age. ;)

@Bellatrix

Nice squirrel! LOL

Oh that damn noise @ANef_is_Enuf! In the middle of the night, it sounded so, so much louder.

I know… :D Cute huh? He is really a pacifist.

So… how do you want that coffee?

@CWOTUS

Cream & sugar please! ;-)

I don’t mind getting the coffee, but I feel pretty self-conscious about the way you’re checking out my ass as I walk over to get it.

Well that apron isn’t covering much up @CWOTUS.

I just started using it, nobody showed me it.

Everything is a jumble now. I remember when the internet didn’t have a GUI interface. There were all these alt.net newsgroups you could go to and hang out with people who shared your interests, like pornographic photos. There were a lot of photography nuts out there.

I remember when it was starting to get to a GUI interface. It was not easy to get it going because you had to download all these patches that allowed your computer to talk to the www. Then, I think it was Netscape that came out with the first great interface for the internet. Are they still around?

Then Microsoft finally realized how important the internet was going to be and they bundled IE with the next version of windows, and then you couldn’t get rid of it. You had to have it or your computer wouldn’t work. You could still load Netscape, but eventually, it seemed like you could no longer avoid IE.

Then Firefox came along, and Chrome and a number of others, and now there is actual competition with your browser.

Ok. So no one showed me the internet. I showed myself. Then I showed others. Now I do my best to keep up. Some things work for me (Fluther) and somethings don’t (Facebook). Some things use to work for me and now don’t (the alt.net newsgroups). It is an evolving thing.

It’s cold today.

@CWOTUS

I want to see you in a French Maid outfit. lol

We seem to have moved off the boss / secretary scenario pretty quickly.

or maybe not

I want to know my job description, and can I get time off for a haircut tomorrow? It took me forEVER to arrange the appointment with my barber? And I hope you won’t mind if I end every statement with a question mark?

1993, my boss bought a portable computer that ran on Windows 3.X, the size of a carry-on luggage and weighed as much as 20lbs and cost thousands of dollars… connected via dial-up modem to AOL service. I had to learn it and teach my boss how to work it. To date, he’s still on AOL service.

I used to be a huge fan of Sailor Moon. Still am, gotta admit, haha. At the school computers, there was internet access, and people went there during free time and spares to go on the net or do homework and all.
This anime fan I knew showed me the ropes about the internet, providing me with some Sailor Moon sites to have fun in. I really didn’t get how it worked at first, but I enjoyed it. I kept bugging that guy like every two minutes about how to ’‘go back’’ or find more sites. However, I quickly got the hang of it. Was looking up all my favourite stuff in no time. Not sure how much it changed my life, but the internet is one of my daily things, so it probbaly did. Then again, I’m sure I woulda found out about it sooner or later.

Not the first, but awfully close. My dad worked at Stanford at the time, and they were rather keen on him being able to work from home. So they supplied us with a computer (Windows 3.1, with a Mosaic browser FTW!) and a dial-up connection.

The first page I ever saw was probably the Stanford home page. My most-visited sites in those halcyon days were a propaganda piece put out by the White House (narrated by Socks, the Clinton’s cat), and a Yahooligans! website about the rain forest.

I remember one time Dad brought the computer to school so that the other kids could see the Internet, too.

Dad says that his first view of the World Wide Web was offered by a co-worker, and featured the Vatican Museum website.

The last time I tried using Windows 3.1, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back off.

I was in a computer class in high school and used Mosaic on PowerMac 6100/60.

Yes. My dad took me into his work one day as my parents couldn’t get a sitter and showed me on his work computer how to search for my favourite bands’ websites. I spent the whole day searching for Abba! I remember using the Alta Vista search engine. I was about 11 or 12 years old.

In 1994 a colleague showed me how to install the Mosaic browser. A bit later we installed the first CERN web server on our intranet. And I wrote my first CGI script.

I think in second grade our teacher gave us a demonstration, and we had an official quiz on “address bars” and “back buttons” and the close/minimize tabs – we had to label diagrams and all that fun elementary-school stuff.

I very much recall the event (though not the year; probably 1993 or 94) when the company I was working for at the time installed an email system. The company tech told me as he installed the client on my desktop machine that I was getting the first install in the company. When he had finished and left my office I sat down and with some interest opened the client and pulled up the “New Message” window and then thought… “Great. Now what? Who could Tom Watson even call before he built the second telephone?”

Even when others had the program installed on their machines and had valid and working email addresses, none of them knew how to actually run the program (everything took training for some – and sometimes multiple sessions), so it was a while until it was a useful thing for us.

….as a follow-up, in 1994 the company I was working for acquired their domain name and by 1995 I created the company’s first website using HTML with hardly any graphics on it…. obviously, the sites back then had to be lean to load right away with 28.8kbps (if you’re lucky) modems.

After receiving several aol discs in the mail I became curious as to what all the excitement surrounding the internet was about. So, I visited my local branch of the library where they had computers set up with internet access. The librarian actually sat down with me and told me about internet explorer and showed me how to surf the web. To be honest it didn’t mean that much to me at that point in time and yes it did take me several visits to the library to get a better understanding of it. In it’s early days the internet did not have a big role in my life. Today it is very important for me both as a source of information and for communication.

The first time we had internet in our house was through a WebTV…. Before that I used to go to my uncle’s house because he had internet and I’d play games on random websites. I can’t even remember what they were now.

Probably the first stuff I ever did on the net was send and receive emails (AOL, naturally). When I was pregnant with my second child, my (now ex-) husband explained how I could actually keep my job but do my work from home via the internet. He helped me work up a proposal to present to my bosses, I did a hard sell on the idea, and I became the first ever telecommuter at that company. Being able to press “print” at home, and have my work printed out at an office across town was heady stuff! It definitely changed my life, that’s for sure.

Yep… It was Prodigy

How old am I? LOL

I remember reading about it in 1993 in the pages of Whole Earth magazine.

We got a 14.4 dial up modem in the Spring of ‘94, and got onto the bbs The WELL at a cost of $50–100 per month.

Two years later in late ‘96 I got on AOL and saw my first web page. I think it took 30 minutes to load on the 5 megabyte memory Mac I had at the time. I decided to stick with AOL chat rooms until I got a decent Windows computer in 1998.

Anyone remeber symbolics.com? What was it about back then?

I was first shown the Internet by a guy at work. It astonished and fascinated me and it still does. I could spend hours exploring online. I remember being puzzled by how searching worked. This was before Google became famous. At that time it was just another search engine. I got a home PC with a dial up connection that charged by the minute. Thank goodness we now have unlimited broadband.

I can’t believe people who used Prodigy and AOL think of themselves at old.

Yes, I remember trying to get Mosaic to work. Was that the first browser or was there one even before that? I’d been emailing and chatting and doing message boards (like fluther) since at least 1986 or so. I started with an Osborne II (which ran CPM) and I think I moved to a PC in 1987. A Leading Edge! I forget when I got windows at home, but I had it at work, where I messed around with the Internet, feeling guilty for wasting my employer’s time.

When the internet became key for my employer, I realized I had not been wasting my time. This happened so many time to me, that I don’t believe in wasting time any more. The time will come when my messing around on fluther will turn out to be very valuable.

@wundayatta “Messing around on Fluther” has already turned out to be very valuable to me. :D

Come on, @augustlan! You don’t have to rub it in! ;-)

It was about 1999 and my brother-in-law next door said he was going out for the evening and why not come check out “the web” – I was really into the British series All Creatures Great and Small so looked it up as a first search. I was torpedoed right away! Carol Drinkwater, the orginal Helen whom I had admired so much, was in Australia posing in the buff…..

It hour is unforgettable, a lot of money wasted for it. First site that i discovered – google.