What's your earliest memory of the internet?

Andy Kaufman

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2000 or 2001 I was 6yo, watching over my mom's shoulder as she was using MSN-messenger to chat with colleagues. I remember really liking the emoticons because there were so many and since I was huge into Pokemon around the time, I imagined them to be similar, each of them having special abilities and such.
 
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JihyoParkXX

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2008, dad brought the family laptop to a restaurant with free Wi-fi, one of the first sites I discovered was YouTube and I binged Fun With Akatsuki every time we went there. I also remember watching a troll Pokemon Ruby Let's Play that had a bunch of swearing in it, Prof. Birch was called Prof. Bitch and when he first talked to May she said something like 'wanna see my chest?' but couldn't find that video anymore today.
 
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VelvetApe

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Most of my early memories are of newgrounds games and animations shown to me by my older brothers. We had dial up internet and I remember right clicking and zooming way up on the loading bar to make it look like it was going faster lol. Also a ton of playing this silly online rpg, Adventure Quest. View attachment 4366
Me too!

I had a look at AQ recently and damn it's unrecognisable.

Also, kingdom of loathing; though that's stayed the same. Big nostalgia from that image.
 
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JihyoParkXX

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My earliest memory is a time when my parents were working late when I was 7 or 8, and I was home alone. I went on mums computer to look up cheat codes for my PSP game. Unfortunately, my mother checked her history the next day, and I got a grilling from her... not so much because I touched the computer without permission, but because I was cheating in a game.
I googled cheats for the GTA games on PSP and wrote down the results I got from GameFaqs too. Damn I even developed the muscle memory to execute them quickly
 
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gorilla squid

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My family got a Compaq PC in 2001 or 2002 I believe. My earliest memories of the internet are playing those old flash games on nickelodeon.com

And there was a beyblade forum/chat room I used to frequent. I really miss that place. Wish I could remember the name. If by chance any of you guys here were on that forum, my name was dragoonblader (yeah, it's cringe but I was also 8 years old)
 
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the-dude-abides

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What's your earliest memory of the internet?

Here's mine. I was like, 11 or so and my parents were really against internet access, but I had to do research for some school project, I don't remember what, and we couldn't find books for it, no idea why. So, they let me use the internet to do the research. I had a little bit of an idea how to use the internet because I'd seen teachers use it, but it was really confusing at first. When I got the hang of it I remember being really amazed by how much easier it was to learn things, I could just click links within wikipedia and get even more information on a specific topic, or google something to find even more than that. I didn't have to ask a librarian to help me, or try to find a certain book, or ask the library to order a book then wait weeks for it to come in. All the information was just right there. It was really nice.
trying to find porn on youtube in like 2009.
 
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M0nkshood

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I think my earliest memory of the internet involves TV news rather than the internet itself. There was a story running on the Google search engine or Facebook or something. My parents showed me the front page of Google because I asked what it was. Didn't search for anything though.
My first usage memory involves Youtube. My father wanted to show me the music video to one of the popular songs playing on the radio then. I barely comprehended what was going on and it felt uncanny.
 
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handoferis

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Got a few fun ones:

Joining AOL chatrooms in 1997 when I was 100% way too young to be in chatrooms
This weird AOL kids story thing where you'd write a bunch of variables in and it'd generate "your" story
Making angelfire sites that were pretty much just scans of pictures I'd drawn (that were really bad, cause i was a kid)
Spending a bunch of time around 2000-2001 on a Stargate SG-1 RP forum

Not really an earliest memory, but starting out adding 20 years to my age when asked, then 10, then 0. Felt weird.
 
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punishedgnome

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In 1995 or 1996, I was 11 or 12. We were in the school library, and the librarian was talking about how a nearby university had two computers you could dial into to get online. They had human names, I forget what they were now, but one was exclusively for university use and one was opened up to the public. She dialed into one and had Netscape Navigator opened up and was explaining how the stars flying past the big letter N meant it was loading a page. Then she showed us a couple websites. I remember it took forever to just load a page of text.

There were about 30 computers in the library running a DOS shell on a local intranet they had set up, but only one computer had access to the big I Internet and it was running Windows 3.1.

We got it at home a year or so later. We had a brand new Windows 95 computer. The dialer was a simple program that ran in the terminal where you put in your username and password. I remember my dad and I not being able to comprehend that the username and password to log onto the Internet were case sensitive, because we were used to using MS Dos where it didn't matter. We ended up calling up tech support to figure it out and I remember dad exclaiming "Logging onto network!" when that message came up on screen and it finally worked.
 
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Lonely_Ghost

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Watching videos of people breaking their legs on youtube with friends in 2006, back when that stuff was allowed.
Man, youtube looks so ugly now compared to it's older designs
 
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Vetusomaru

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The first time I remember using the internet was probably at junior high school's computers at mid - late '90s. And the first image I downloaded from school and saved it to floppy disk was Haomaru's official illustration from Samurai Shodown II (I still have this image at my PC).
 

kimochiidango

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When I was about 9 through 12, here's a bunch of random stuff I remember.... Looking up and printing out cheats and strategy guides for Mortal Kombat, Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy Tactics. Unsupervised access to the internet because I was a little goody goody and my parents trusted me completely. I know my dad knew what the internet was like. He had some porn you would have had to really dig for I found on the pc and sometimes left very unusual AIM windows open after logging off. So I guess he just trusted me or didn't care. I remember cybering when I was younger than 11 which must have been ridiculous and surreal to whoever I was partnered with. Roleplaying in AOL chat rooms. I remember being embarrassed when my dad made fun of me for having my entire aol profile filled out as like a character sheet, as was thee style at the time in Red Dragon Inn and Rhydia. I remember some screen names from people in that scene, Perfodave, Promarie? Also searching aol for free games, and finding some good ones I WISH I could remember the names of. When iwas alittle older maybe 12 or 13 i remember starting to get into porn- mostly anime at that time. I had like no idea where to find any of it, and I used to just go into random aol chat rooms and beg for hentai. People were very obliging. I remember one guy asked me my age and then said he wouldnt send me anything too bad. He sent me some early (kinda rapey) sailor jupiter and dark lady fan art among other forgotten images. Eventually i moved on to kazaa and taking sick daysfrom school to spend all day downloading a couple tiny shitty porn clips. I distinctly remember spending all day downloading one, it finishing like 20 minutes before my parents would be home, i opened it in anticipation and it was A LIE, footage fo banjo kazooie labled as porn! I was so mad, lol. I also remember having to wait for my dad to go on business trips once we got a second phone line so id have uninterrupted internet access and spending days and weeks getting a few albums, Evangelion, Trigun, and Cowboy Bebop.
 
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Healing

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The internet was first introduced into my life when older cousins of mine would repeat that old "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" song, and even taught me it, back when that was fresh. It then transitioned over to YouTube around 08-09, and the first video I watched on YouTube was of some dudes attaching a firecracker on an elmo doll. Not exactly the earliest parts of the internet being a zoomer and all, but still a simpler time nonetheless.
 
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Digital Caveman

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My earliest memory of the internet was when my Mom decided to purchase a IBM Aptiva in late 1995, after listening to some of her coworkers have a discussion about the internet. So the day after she brought it home I spent the morning setting everything up for her, and I helped her set up an America Online account. Before that day, I had never used the internet. Now I had access to USENET in the school library, but my experiences where very limited.

After that day I had access to the internet mostly to research things for school, but I did not use the internet regularly until 1997. That is when my estranged father decided to get me my own computer.

One of the more memorable things from back then was watching a postage stamp sized, and heavily pixelated, concert live stream of Garbage using Real Player over a dial-up connection. At the time this was cutting edge stuff, and I was absolutely blown away at what I was seeing.
 

kekmeleon

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I remember being little in the late 90's and having a really important question i only could ask the internet, i asked my dad if i could use the internet for this important question, he connected me to the web and opened internet explorer 3, i don't remember what search engine it was but i think it was yahoo, the important question was "do girls pee?", like, if girls don't have balls where do they store pee then?
 

Collision

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It would have been late 1997, looking up high scores and cheat codes for Claw with my dad. My family definitely had internet access a long time before that but it wasn't very interesting to me because I was illiterate and more interested in Power Rangers and Beetle Borgs. I still remember some of the cheat codes. I also remember being totally infatuated with AOL Instant Messenger. My dad would use it when working from home and I loved all the little sound effects.
 
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