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.
I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha
It was the mid-90s, and just a shell account. Gopher, archie, pine and zmodem.
We didn’t get PPP access for a year or two; this was the days before google - yahoo, altavista, some other engines I can’t remember, and metasearch engines like dogpile that would query a bunch of different search engines and return the combined set of results.
This was the days of mailing lists and usenet for the most part - connect up, download messages for like an hour, then log off, read and reply, then log on and send.
I was there for the original hamsterdance, and it ruled.
America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.
19/f/Cali always
I remember coming home from school, and immediately going on to MSN. The silly gifs were so entertaining back then, and it was very cool to have a gif for each letter - like the letter A in flames LOL. I also used to love Club Penguin and ToonTown. Going into those type of cyberworlds felt pretty magical to me back then :)
Omg I forgot about the letters. Also made me remember those characters you could customize with clothes and backgrounds and stuff. I guess the prequel to bitmojis but they were like, edgy and cool.
If anyone remembers what I’m talking about can you remind me the name?
Lots of blinking geocities and angelfire sites. Waiting for NetZero dial up to noisily connect. Buffering music and video clips.
Day of defeat on steam with a download speed of 56k modem… Took like 4 hours for nearly 700mb? And oh my, was it worth it !
ICQ for instant messages !
Day of Defeat was so good! That and team fortress are the only team FPS I ever played. I do love shooting me some Nazis.
Compuserve back in like ‘91.
CompuServe was a large part of the lack of parenting I received during the 90s. 3-5 hours a night, plus work/school and sleep means I didn’t see my mom much for more than a decade.
The games on the PBS kids website over dialup
VT100 terminals on Solaris (SunOS) reading usenet, chatting with ytalk, elm (email), Gopher (and searching Gopher with Archie), DartMUD. It was great. Pretty much once we got PC and Mac based clients that stitched together downloads out of usenet posts and could run multiple terminal sessions at once, we were set and the Internet peaked.
Playing Star Trek in my high-school counselor’s office on a teletype machine that was connected to the local college’s main frame. The teletype used a roll of paper. Type in a move, and a new “screen” was printed on the paper. I must have used miles of paper playing that game.
Holy shit. I never knew teletype ever became a civilian technology. I only know of it from my military training. Though it was old technology by the time we trained on it.
I also played this in High School. We thought it was fantastic.
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.
I was 1980 maybe 1981 and we all went to a classmate’s house to watch a computer test. Her dad worked for Bell Labs. They placed an order for groceries that the store delivered.
In 1992 I waited for three days to download a single picture off a telescope and knew this was the future
Piczo websites
For me was using AOL free internet CDs cause we had to pay providers for time online…we used to walk around neighborhood looking for AOL CDs to get online and get to chatrooms pretending we were adults. After a year or so I had a real experience when Internet started to get popularized so I created an email account, an ICQ acc and downloaded a song from this website.
