[Lunatique]

I was just thinking about my first time on the internet, and I was curious what your experience was like.

My frist time(no, not THAT. Sicko):

It was 1997, and I didn't even own a computer. The only computer experiences I've had prior was messing about on an old Apple playing old adventure games(the one where you play a detective that has to go to the zoo, and you get thrown into the toilet if you used swear words. Can't remember the name)around '85, then one semester of Desktop Publishing on an Apple in '90, and messing around with D-Paint 4 and making 2D sprite creature animations for SSI(for fun, not as employee)around '92.

So, in '97, a friend of mine came by with a laptop and left it at my place for me to play around with. It was a 486 with just enough RAM to run Windows 95. He ran a local ISP, so I got to surf for free. He showed me some important functions of a PC, how to use search engines, and then left me on my own to explore.

Man oh man. What an experience it was! I was in heaven! I'm a very curious person, with a deep thirst for knowledge, so being on the internet was like a dream come true. I spent every waking hour on the internet for about 2 weeks, only prying myself away to do some penciling for comics and shower/eat. As for sleep--I had forgotten what sleep was at that point.

Back then google didn't exist. I used mostly yahoo, lycos, altavista..etc. I'm a google man 100% now.

The kind of stuff I surfed for were mostly art and music related. I distinctly remember feeling an overwhelming sense of joy when I found some sites for the following:

Inomata Mutsumi
Kimagure Orange Road(this site still exists!)
New Order
Cocteau Twins
Jennifer Connelly(so is this one!)
Pre-Raphaelite
J W Waterhosue
Bouguereau
Sargent
Dennis Mukai
Alessandro Dell Aqua
Morikawa Miho
The Sundays(and this one!)
Loads of Screenplays and movie posters
etc etc.

It wasn't till a year later that I bought my first computer--a PII 400, 128 RAM, 9 gig Ultrawide SCSI HD, and Hitachi elite 750 19" monitor. A year later, DSL became available in my area.

I'm on my 2nd puter now, purchased 4 months ago, and of course, it's blazing fast as all computers are these days.

So, what is your internet history like? What kind of stuff did you surf for during your first days of browsing?

[Socar MYLES]

Two words: THE PAAAAIN!

...but there wasn't much to see online in those days....

[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: Socar MYLES ]

[Rat]

The first time I went on the net at home (I'd done it at school before), I don't really know what I did. I think it was during the time of "Pokemon." I remember searching for them. But that was when I actually had to ask before going online. (It was also when we had to wait for the goddamn computer to connect and block all phone access.)

The first time I really went online was at school to get my results in a bike race. I think I came in fifth. That was before we got Internet here (at home).

[Giant Hamster]

In late 93: I was playing Doom...nothing but Doom. Doom...doom...doom...doom...doom...

In 95: I logged into my dad's compuserve account at work and looked up pictures of the movie, "Showgirls". Hmmm...First exposure to online porn. w0o!

Sometime around 97: My father handed me a new Compuserve disk he picked up at work. I loaded it onto my 486/66 dx2, logged in, and tried to play someone Duke Nukem and, of course, couldn't figure it out. later that year I ventured into download.com(I think it was just C|net still...not download.com yet) and downloaded piles of screensavers...w0o.

[[Shizo]]

I was in Helsinki (Finland) hotel in 1997. They had a touchscreen computer on the first floor but i wasnt sure what it was so i started playing with it HEHE. I just tried to login on Hotmail about 10 times (all in vain) so i concluded that internet is this lame blue Hotmail window where you can't even login

[Impaler]

'94, on Windows 3.1. It was bizarre, run in DOS, and text-only.

A few months later, I was at my neighbor's house, he had AOL. We logged on.. very slowly.. I gave up after his 3600 baud modem took 8 minutes to connect and download all the start page graphics.

The next year, I was at my grandfather's house. The internet looked completely different then to me. I went to Toyota.com, which was the only site I could remember.

[Pat]

OMG, Socar. That's would be funny if I didn't own one of those too.

Pain is right though. 300 baud and you had to dial on the phone and swap the cord into the back of the modem. Man that beings back some memories.

I used to own one of these too:



Koala Pad with Koala Paint. Best tablet ever!

-Pat

[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: Pat ]

[strata]

I think it was 95 for me... using Mosaic... my brother gave me a three page word file with websites on it... =D

and the first thing I did was check the weather on my isp's webpage...

irc quickly followed though...

[antx]

My first time on the internet was in early 1997. I Just got my ISDN modem and connected it to my Amiga4000. I can�t remember what the first site was I checked out but I guess it was the site of my ISP. Next things I checked were Amiga related stuff, 3D graphics and news sites. I spent quite a lot of time online and my telephone bill proved it.
Currently I�m in Belgium and enjoying a damn fast cable modem connection with no need to go offline.

[balistic]

1992. 1200 Baud modem. 386 DX20. Legend of the Red Dragon.

[Painted Melody]

94, 95 i think.. my friend had this supercool 386 with a 2400 hayes modem to BBSes.. then this amazing thing called PRODIGY for DOS sprouted up.. yeeh! people sharing my love for Super Nintendo and Mortal Kombat II.. my first taste for flame threads inccured.

Ah Prodigy.

Jeremy

[Dr. Bang]

my first time was on 1997, at a college, i cant afford a modem yet. The first thing i searched was "sex", then I learned how to search for the stuff i want really fast. Later, i began to use the more advanced keyword like "pussy" "fuck" ...etc

I remembered I bought about 40 floppies along with me so i could store it and save it to my computer at home.

[[Shizo]]

Lol, i can imagine how advanced your searching skillz are now, after 5 years of practise Dr.Bang :0
Weeeeeeee!!!

[Highfive]

First time I used the internet was at first year uni. Deciding to do a bit of a test, I clicked on the first search engine I could find and entered "x-files". 10,000 pages came up. Cool. What about something a little less popular? Typed "Mr Ed". 1 page.

Nothing amazing but an experience

[balistic]

You know you're an artist when you only download pr0n that's well-lit.

[[666]Flat]

quote:

---

Originally posted by balistic:
You know you're an artist when you only download pr0n that's well-lit.

---

[Bugscratch]

Giant Hamster, I gotta sing the doom song now !

Flat man I can't believe how sexy you really are. You into anal sex by any chance ? ROCK ON !

My first time on the net was sometime in '96 or '97. The local university was having a "free internet day" and of course I had to be there. After waiting in line for ages I finally got a pc and surfed the net for the first time and it was so slooooooooooooow because there were like a million people there and the university's backbone almost couldn't handle the amount of data transferred.
The sites I surfed to were stuff like the lucasarts homepage (back then I was still into games) and some freaky sites like the online toilet which I'd found in some stupid internet magazine. (anybody remember the URL ?)
After half an hour or something I left because the connection was so damn slow and I felt embarassed checking out online toilets and stuff with a million people in line.
We finally got internet at home in March 1998 with 2 ISDN lines. That got really expensive, at times we had $350 internet bills.

[egerie]

Lord of the Red Dragon RULES ! oh gawd how much time I spent on this or that BBS to play my games.. and then migrated on to the net. I think I had a 2400 bauds modem at the time... Erk.. and then got a 14400 as soon as they got out ($$ouch$$)
My first search was on... Yahoo I beleive, and was about a french singer then searched for Elfquest.. Hey I was rather young ok

Also being a very curious person I would often start a search on something and get led totally elsewhere on my cyberquest and forget what I was looking for in the process Only realising that something like 4 hours after...............

Ooh I feel old all the suddent *looks at her Pactor UHF modem.. sigh*

[ken]

quote

Quote:

i concluded that internet is this lame blue Hotmail window where you can't even login

THERE'S MORE?!?

oh. right. first time was about 1997 at home. as soon as i signed up for the account i zoomed home. couldn't figure out what to do after dialing in. eventually found win95's fantastic internet explorer 1.0. then couldn't figure out how to go anywhere. went to the homepage of a games magazine, they told me to get netscape 2. w00t! that had frames, or something.

-Ken