Compuserve back in like ‘91.

Probably Neopets. I heard some of my classmates talking about it at school so I used my dad’s computer to create an account. Still have login access and all my original Neopets are still there 20+ years later!

I was a simple kid back then. I remember having seen 3D renders of south park characters back in the 90s. Marvin the Martian fansites. The #Trivia room in TalkCity.

modem dialing sound

bitftp@pucc

If anyone gets that reference, congratulations, you are officially old.

I managed to blow up the BITNET mail quota right through the ceiling within a few days…

Spent most my time going down bulbapedia rabbitholes . Pokemon websites . Watched pokemon YouTube sideshows , found out Cascada thru that . Once saw video of someone showing their splice portfolio , one splice was articuno but just the (head|tail) so lꝏked like sperm , kid me thought it wasz funny

Oh and don’t forget this masterpice

Didn’t get my own personal device till 2009ish , funnily enough didn’t run into porn on that shared pc

Gotta find the Netscape disk. Gotta get mom off the phone. Gotta wait 5 minutes for the space jam website to load.

Getting booted from your game because Mom got a phone call.

720p video was a straight up luxury that most of us didn’t bother with because it took way too long to buffer lol.

It was a very different time.

ascii dicks on irc

At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.

At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn’t really very useful.

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.

Earliest I can recall would either be, from what I can remember, some odd ass yt videos from early yt. Videos that are probably long gone due to things like copyright and other bull. They were the joke videos where they edited shows like Ed Ed n Eddy or Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog. Only a single video from that time that I can remember is still up.

Not being able to get online because my dad was using the internet at a wholly different location for work.

Also the screams of a dialup modem through the tinny speakers of a first-gen, puck-moused iMac.

6th grade computer class. I grew up playing video games and liked medieval era stuff despite not knowing how to spell it, so I thought I’d try to type “midevil(dot)com” into the URL bar. At the time it was some kind of BDSM site with a black background, red font, and multiple cats-o-nine-tails slapping to and fro like animated gifs (were they gifs? idk). My blood ran cold and I closed the window. I wasn’t caught thanks to the teacher also not knowing that browser history was a thing.

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

Cartoon Network games! I remember one set of adventure games that I loved to play but I couldn’t understand English very well yet so I’d always make my dad play with me and translate. Resort something. I look them up on the Wayback machine once in a while.