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I don’t really remember, but almost definitely something to do with games. As a youngling I was on forums a lot. Good ol’ phpBB.
I’ve been online longer than gmail. Its like asking me to remember my birth.
I probably looked up some stuff on the web first, but then IRC, a lot of IRC…
I’m old. I used the Internet before there was a “World-Wide Web” - so no web pages. I used telnet to connect to other computers, where generally I had to have a login. At home I only had dialup, but the school computers had Internet access. Those connections did include Usenet discussions, which were kind of like a primitive version of Lemmy.
DikuMUDs! Back in 1992 it was amazing to chat (by typing) with random players from around the world, and form groups to fight and explore together.
I remember something about a fully naked Pamela Anderson and a 30 day ban from using the school’s computers, but other than that… Kazaa and MSN, I think.
A remember a few images like that with resolution so low it was just one step above watching scrambled Cinemax after my parents went to bed.
My then girlfriend had to look something up for college, so we went to the library and bought half an hour of internet time for that.
Alt.sex.pics And some others.
CompuServe chat rooms. Proto World Wide Web, but after commercial ISPs. One of, if not the, first one IIRC. It was similar to AOL with catered stuff. Games, chat, forums, whatever. I only remember using the chat rooms tho.
Opening a telnet connection to a friend’s workstation who had started studying at another university.
Using the UNIX “talk” command to chat. Yes, I am old.To sail the 7 seas! 🦜
Got on a BBS via a long distance call to AOL.
Typed a bunch of typo-laiden words at someone else.
If BBSs don’t count, the Tolkien-based text MUD in the university’s computer labs, and later a Discworld MUD.
I was quite active on the BBS scene and packet radio. But the first time on the actual internets was at the university where my father worked. There wasn’t much. Netscape had an index of sites.
I remember visiting apogee.com to see if they had any new games coming up.
I can’t remember exactly, but I remember exploring some Gopher and FTP sites.
This was at Freenet Finland, around 1993 (I guess?) which was a text based dialup service for school kids. Yeah, they had Lynx. But it was the early days of the Web and a bunch of stuff was still in Gopher and FTP.
