We're rapidly approaching a point where more people in the world won't remember a time without the 'net, than those who do. Before that happens, I'd like to collect some early stories of your early Internet experiences. Can you remember the first time you logged on? What did you do? Any memorable experiences from your early online days?

Short answer to a great question: using Compuserve to find answers to trivia and then phoning the local radio station to impress the DJ. It worked. Loads a freebies. That would have been around 1989-ish. *Proper* introduction to Internet wouldve been through school and university, so from 89-96.

It was 1988, and I had a green screen Amstrad 464 (the ones with the built in tape players). A local company sold cup modems, so I got my mum to drive me there to buy one.

Back at home, the phone just about stretched from the hall to the back room table where we used the computer. I pushed the phone receiver into the foam cups on the modem and dialled into Prestel, watching in amazement as the text appeared on the screen. Then I dialled into BT's MUD, and for the first time spoke to another human being in real-time over the Internet.

It wasn't until a few years later, using the Terminals in the Glasgow School of Art library, that I started using the Internet more regularly, but the first time was in '88, on a humble green screen 464.

I don't remember the first thing I did on the I Internet, but I do remember wasting hours on Gopher, just looking at what was online. Then I got into IRC in a big way, and would spend hours at night talking to people who genuinely became friends online. I even met one of them when he came over to the UK. My very first website was kindly hosted by someone at the University of St Louis. biodec.wustl.edu, if I remember correctly. It's gone now though. I still have logs of my IRC chats which I religiously printed out at kept.

My dad worked in IT at Warwick University, so I was exposed to JANET at a young age. My earliest memory of the actual Internet, like you Matt, is poking endlessly around Gopher on the dumb terminal we had at home, which mainly seemed to be Star Trek jokes & ASCII art.

With the rise of the PC, I'd go into work with Dad if he had something to fix at the weekend and sit there downloading GIFs from wuarchive.wustl.edu onto 3.5" floppy to later view at home; cheaper than the modem call.

IRC was a big part of my early online experience, too. I learned HTML to make a homepage when it became The Thing to have one as your calling card on IRC: liby099.lib.warwick.ac.uk/~henry.

This is like when our grandparents told us about telly, isn't it?

98-99th. I'm not from US or UK though, where innovations spread quicker. So, Internet needed time till it got where I was at.
Remember registering icq first thing, and using Yahoo. It was first huge communities back then, weren't they? Analyzing things now, Yahoo did screw up a lot, it could become first google, first facebook, but well, nobody seem to understand it back in a days. Now it needs to reinvent itself, and I believe Marissa will do it just right, finally they got a ceo with a perfect touch.

PS: but man, dial-up was one hell of experience 15 years ago.

I received a copy of PC Format in the post (I don't remember the date) which had a cover-mounted CD-ROM, which featured a "working example" microcosm of the internet. Essentially it was a copy of Netscape Navigator with examples of websites cross-linking to each other. So even though it wasn't an online, "real" internet, it was staggering. Followed this up with my first 14.4k baud modem, and seemed to remember most of my time on usenet groups, gopher, and MSN.

I once bought .net magazine as it was the only computer mag at the local corner shop and got fascinated by all these sites you could go and visit. As my family didn't have a computer at the time, I wrote down all my favourite bands' websites from the album sleeve notes and took my notebook and copy of .net to the local library. Once there I got a token to allow me two hours of free internet time and after around 20 minutes, I'd finished the list of sites I wanted to see, I was bored. I didn't know what to visit next. I tried a couple of words ('football', 'cool', etc) with .com on the end but I didn't really get anywhere interesting. I left the library thinking the internet was actually quite boring and didn't buy .net again.

Thanks for adding me to this conversation, Matthew.

My first experience on the internet was a little bit stressing: The connection was so slow nearly 2002 here in my country (Venezuela). I was 4-5 years old, and the only thing that I want to do on those times, was play games such as Power Rangers. :)

After that, I just started learning stuff from websites for kids, and a couple of offline software like 'Pipo'. The things that I do now are so different.

I can't remember the year, but his will probably date me: I went to Future Shop (an electronics big box) and purchased something called the Internet Starter Kit. It consisted of a how-to book and a copy of Netscape. I had been told that Netscape was all I really needed — and for awhile it was.

My dad, as a photojournalist, had always been interested in the quickest way to get text and pictures across a wire to someone far away. Running his own business, I got to see him using a very early IBM AT-compatible PC to send copy over a modem link...possibly using Compuserve? I remember having to type odd strings of characters to make this work. This wasn't the Internet though.

To be honest, I don't remember my first Internet experience. We must have had it at home because when I started University I sent my first email home...I remember that well! Logging on to a green-screen Wyse terminal and running Pine. There was a room full of Windows PC's upstairs where you could run Netscape, but they were limited in both number and performance.

Thanks for the invite, Matthew!

Thinking back, my first real exposure to the internet would have been in 1998 when I'd just started my degree in Graphic Design at the University of Lincoln.

We had Yahoo! as the default home page which, in turn, lead us to primarily using Yahoo! products such as Groups, Messenger, Profiles, Mail, etc... and even a tiny foray into the world of HTML courtesy of GeoCites' free web space.

Funny how, some 14 years later, the nuts and bolts of online communication hasn't actually changed that much. Yahoo! had nailed mainstream social networking before the term was even coined.

On hindsight, Yahoo! (for us Uni students at least) was *the* internet. What went wrong, eh?

I was born in 1989, and my first experience using the Internet was looking up cheat codes for my video games, probably around 1997. With no Google, and no good search engine, it was like the wild west trying to find websites. You had memorize the actual URL you wanted to visit. I later began to use it for school projects, research, etc. Also remember chat rooms, website "hit counters", terrible graphics, and the dial up sounds.

My parents have a picture of me on their WebTV when I was about to. I still to this day have figured out what they're talking about.

Later on, I remember booting up into my mom's Compaq Pasario running Windows 95, and figuring out what Internet Explorer was.

In France, around 1982, we had a "fantastic" tool which was the MINITEL {en.wikipedia.org. It was a Videotex online service as Wikipedia says. It was awesome! ; ) At the beginning it was more like Yellow Pages on a little screen, {ina.fr but guess what, after few years, of course, SEX brought a huge success to this service.... It became popular with the '3515 ULLA' (or similar); 3615 Ulla became a sort of generic term, like "refrigerator" for colloquially fridge.

But at least, I was ready to dial-up, wait the connection {youtu.be, and GO on Netscape, Yahoo, Msn, Icq, Myspace : )
This is why it makes me smile when people are complaining about the speed of their network on their iPhone...
Merci for the invite!

My first web experience was using a Netscape browser. The first thing I did (well, actually my mother did whilst I was looking over her shoulders) was open a Yahoo mail account. After that, I went to search for my favorite cartoon shows.

Unlike most people here, I was the first in my family to actually show some interest on the internet and I remember waiting for the connection beeping sound so I could browse the seemingly endless list of teen chat rooms back in the day. Our 56k modem was blazing fast.

^indeed it was fast. and the telephone is rendered useless once we connect to the internet.

Fairly late, I think around '94. I was copying words out of books on Roman mythology for a school project at the local library, who was having an 'internet week'. There were three banks of computers, mostly empty.

I got on one, was really confused and didn't know where to start. I eventually found a Nine Inch Nails fansite which listed every single bit of equipment used on Downward Spiral and I was hooked. I then tried to chat up a girl who was looking at Hole fansites, unsuccessfully.

Back in 1993 I was given a computer by my very first boss. He told me there was this "thing" called the Internet and that it was like a "really big yellow pages". Compuserve got me on it. I could only find plumbers in America.

Early 1997 from memory. 28.8k modem built into our Windows 95 machine. Compuserve I believe was who we used. When it was like GBP15 a month and then pay per minute! Used it maybe an hour a week as a result. These days probably 50hrs a week sometimes!

Took an hour of fiddling with the settings to get it to work but I'll never forget when we got the old modem crackle and beeps and then got connected.

Spent most of the first few years on stuff like yahoo chat rooms. I think the net was more social then. I definitely used to "meet" new people a lot more often and formed one or two friendships I have to this day with people I would otherwise not have met.

Seems rather quaint now with nearly ubiquitous broadband on PCs and even your phone.

Mine was ferryhalim's wonderful (albeit Flash) games.

My first time connecting was probably through Compuserve sometime in the 90's. But, my first "experience" was the first iteration of TheRemediProject.com--around 1996 or 97. It changes my perspective about what the Internet could--and would--become.