When and how did you meet the Internet?

[Kitsa]

I'm older than many of you, so you might find this funny or not at all funny, I don't give a shit.

My high school didn't have internet access. We had Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia on a computer in the library and that was it. Everyone thought it was the shit, the way that you could click on a video clip and actually see the cheetah running as the whole system practically ground to a halt, trying to keep up.

If you wanted to watch a movie in school, it was filmstrip, VHS or laserdisc.

Some kids in the high school figured out that they could print out dollar bills by scanning them on the computer lab's flatbed scanner. They didn't look real, but they were real enough to fool the primitive coke machines. Kids were walking around with free coke and the machine was stuffed full of copy paper.

My parents were, for some reason, convinced that my brother and I were going to do something evil on our computers anyway. They weren't sure what, but they decided to network the dot matrix printer and put it in the linen closet so that anything we printed could be checked at any time. I found this to be one of the dumbest things they'd ever come up with.

When the time came to get a dialup account, they decided it could only be in my junior high school aged brother's room . If I wanted to get Netscape going, I had to gain entry into my brother's room. I was not very happy about that.

When I said I wanted an email account, they wanted to pick the name. Then my mom had my grandmother call me, crying, telling me that I didn't understand that the Internet was full of predators and that whatever username I chose would have a double sexual meaning that I didn't know about. I mean, seriously, they did this.

Anyone "from the Internet" was automatically evil, for years. I bet a lot of people's parents were the same way.

[Otto]

I still remember my mother freaking out when she found me looking at Anarchist Cookbook textfiles on some shitty BBS a hundred years ago. I also remember my dad, who was a former hippie, taking me aside and handing me a paperback copy of the real thing, telling me not to let my mother see it.

Also, in regard to the vending machine thing: I wish the kids at my school had been that intelligent. The hick kids in my town just violently shook the machines, or sometimes banged on the window with rocks and homemade clubs. It was like fucking Lord Of the Flies High. I was so fucking happy to transfer to a boarding school.

[Chojin]

i used AOL for the longest time and kept talking a lot of shit about how awful the internet was

to be fair, at the time we had a 2400 baud modem and every website really did suck ass compared to AOL and its access to games, MUDs, chat rooms, and other shit.

[Colonel Flagg]

I am old enough to have only memories of using a mainframe computer in high school and for most of college. PC's became in vogue during grad school where floppy disks were 10" square and held a whopping 128 kb of data. I wasn't fully connected to teh interwebs until I was well into my 30's. (sounds like a history class.)

It has been neat watching the information age morph into the networking age.

[Pentegarn]

My C64 had a modem I think, I almost never bothered with it though.

My friend and I used to download bikini pics and games from various BBS when we were preteens.

Then I lost interest in the whole online thing until the Dreamcast came out

[Wiffles]

I had my first taste of internet back in 1997 when I was a wee tot. I remember having a Reader Rabbit game too, but the internet was much more fun!

[Fathom Zero]

I got an America Online account when I was ten or something. I went on eBay and bought trading cards with whatever money I couod scrounge up and give to my mum. That and I went on the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network websites and dowloaded all of their Shockwave games.

[Supafly345]

I had 2 friends who had internet when I was 10 or something, both had AOL and spent every spare moment of computer time in the roleplaying chatrooms pretending to be "vampyres" and using digital dice to do fights in IM windows. I didn't quite understand it and thought it had to do with movie monsters and made a wolfman character that kept me entertained for an afternoon.
Usually what would happen was I would play their playstation while they spent the afternoon describing specifically how their character would drink a beer in the virtual pub. My only memories of the game 'brave fencer musashi' is with a background noise of 2 preteen boys discussing the particulars of their entrances to bars.

All I wanted to do was download wav files of simpsons quotes and look at naked women.

[Fathom Zero]

Oh yer! That too. I remember the best part of the internet being that whenever you started your computer, it would play the 20th Century Fox theme wav.

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

We got AOL. I joined an online wrestling league called O.W.L. as Bill Alfonzo in the geocities. I won the title with "The Fonzy Drop" which was a Death Valley Driver while blowing a whistle.

Then me and two friends made 3 Stupid People. It stands to this day.

[executioneer]

i vaguely remember going over to my uncles house where he had a ti-994a (with the type of modem that had a handset as part of it) and playing a cracked version of pac-man that he must have downloaded off of a bbs

the first online interaction with other people i had was via MUDs (thunderdome! which is still around!) at school. I got yelled at a lot for doing systemwide messages in character

[Zhukov]

We didn't have internet at my school, and we only just started to get computers. My nan got the internet before my family did, and I used to go over to her house to 'use the internet for homework' while actually using it to look up the female cast of Home and Away in bikinis.

I-mockery was one of the first places I visited when my parents realised that not having the internet would be detrimental to my younger brother's education. Also my mum divorced my dad and we moved off the farm and into somewhere that had proper phone lines.


Back in 2003 I was still listening to music on tapes.


I don't have a car.

[Fathom Zero]

[Sacks]

Originally Posted by Supafly345

I had 2 friends who had internet when I was 10 or something, both had AOL and spent every spare moment of computer time in the roleplaying chatrooms pretending to be "vampyres" and using digital dice to do fights in IM windows. I didn't quite understand it and thought it had to do with movie monsters and made a wolfman character that kept me entertained for an afternoon.
Usually what would happen was I would play their playstation while they spent the afternoon describing specifically how their character would drink a beer in the virtual pub. My only memories of the game 'brave fencer musashi' is with a background noise of 2 preteen boys discussing the particulars of their entrances to bars.

All I wanted to do was download wav files of simpsons quotes and look at naked women.

Classic Rhydin RP rooms.

We got AOL sometime mid 90s I guess. My first memory is someone in a chat asking if I wanted a 'free gif'. "Who wouldn't want a free gift!?" I thought. That is when I saw my first naked lady on the internet.

[Dingus Knucklehumper]

The Internet didn't exist in it's present form when I was in H.S. and later when it did everything was DOS and there was nothing much out there.

But it got better.

[Kitsa]

Before I understood and hated GOTIS, I was trying to come up with a username for my dialup. It had to be blahblah combo of numbers and letters and in desperation I used a combo that involved "chik" at the end.

Oh. My. God. You'd have thought that the fucking world was ending the way my family reacted to this proposition. I was screamed at by my mom, and then she had my grandmother call me (this is a frequent tactic) to inform me that "chick" is slang for a woman's private parts and I was going to attract all sorts of sexual predators, etc, etc.

Although, with the mindset they had, I'm sure that any word chosen at random might also have been slang for something dirty.

Anyone I talked to online was not "real". It was like this magical world of make-believe where nothing that happened had any bearing on the outside world. There was some hypocrisy to this, though. If someone sent me anything, it was immediately regarded as some sort of token intended to lure me into something sexual.

I can see how it must have been scary to be a parent and be new to the internet, but some of the things they did were quite

[Colonel Flagg]

At least they didn't scream into a webcam about back-tracing your blog posts.

[Pentegarn]

Consequences will never be the same

Originally Posted by Sacks

We got AOL sometime mid 90s I guess. My first memory is someone in a chat asking if I wanted a 'free gif'. "Who wouldn't want a free gift!?" I thought. That is when I saw my first naked lady on the internet.

At least it was free though

[Esuohlim]

We had Windows 3.1 in our house until 2000, then my parents finally got rid of dialup at the end of 2009.

Back in 2000 when I first truly met the internet I was enthralled by ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US and made crappy Geocities sites at 12 with the same sense of humor Pram has now at 34.

[Guitar Woman]

I started giving a shit about the internet in 1998 when I figured out that there were sites entirely about Zelda. I think I also used to go to Cartoon Network's website a lot and play the shitty Shockwave games they had. I remember the Toonami section having every episode of Lodoss War, StarBlazers, and the Harlock Saga, which was the only legitimately kickass thing about the site.

Once I found out about chat rooms I basically never left the house again. Before I joined I-Mockery I got really into Graal Online, which was basically a multiplayer Link to the Past. I'm on the record as claiming it to be 'fucking awesome' even though it was incredibly low-budget and silly.

One time I wandered into a dirty pictures site that caused an endless stream of pornographic popups to flow forth from my monitor. I had to get my dad to shut it off.

[Pentegarn]

Originally Posted by Esuohlim

We had Windows 3.1 in our house until 2000, then my parents finally got rid of dialup at the end of 2009.

Back in 2000 when I first truly met the internet I was enthralled by ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US and made crappy Geocities sites at 12 with the same sense of humor Pram has now at 34.

I got a charge out of the AYB phenomenon too. But internet humor was so much simpler in those days

Also the term 'crappy Geocities' is redundant

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

Originally Posted by Esuohlim

We had Windows 3.1 in our house until 2000, then my parents finally got rid of dialup at the end of 2009.

Back in 2000 when I first truly met the internet I was enthralled by ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US and made crappy Geocities sites at 12 with the same sense of humor Pram has now at 34.

I forgot about the angelfires too
http://www.angelfire.com/anime/op/

GW, this is me when I was your age

Originally Posted by Pentegarn

Also the term 'crappy Geocities' is redundant

That's what I was thinking too.

[LordSappington]

I think we finally got 'internet' in 1999, when my insistence that all those free AOL floppys they left all over the mall had like a month of free trial. Turns out the version we got was something like 2.0, where all it had were chat rooms and pre-set websites; no browsing around the scary internet for us. Then we finally upgraded to 5.0, and I was finally free to play Neopets and look up pokemon cheats.
I think that was about when the computer got trashed, because I had no idea what the hell I was doing, downloading stuff the instant I saw a button saying I could. We took it in to a shop, and it had something like 200,000 shares of the Mydoom virus, and it blew the guy who was fixing it's mind.

[Esuohlim]

Geocities basically exemplifies the whole internet at that time of my life. There was a certain charm about it that I sort of miss. I was a big fan of all the Jixby + company webring Geocities sites, and I don't remember where I first stumbled upon their stuff but they're the reason I found I-Mock in the first place.

GEOCITIES, EZBOARDS, AND VIDEO GAME CHEAT SITES. I was fucking pumped about video game cheats for a while since my only experience were the odds and ends I would try to remember from those cheat books in the stores. Getting immediate access to all of them for any game at anytime was like a dream come true. I miss getting excited about that kind of thing

[LordSappington]

I tried to make my own Geocity site, but I didn't know what the hell I was doing and gave up.
My sister, however, made a fruity Digimon site, and we met our very first troll on it. I remember her writing some scathing comeback and us both thinking "Take that, asshole!", but thinking back now I bet he was laughing his ass off.