BBSes. My first modem was for my Commodore 64. All you could connect to were Bulletin Board Services which were simply someone else's computer that was running software. Usually you would get some sort of menu if options when you connected.
CompuServe came not too long after that probably on an 8088 or 386 PC.
I have a very early memory of being showed a grey web page with just a list of blue hyperlinks, extremely rudimentary. I think it was an early form of Yahoo! search.
The first thing I remember doing on the web unsupervised was looking up cheat codes for N64 games on Ask Jeeves.
I liked star trek as a kid, so my dad would download me, I think usenet, messages from a boards discussing it. But he didn’t want me overwhelmed, so maybe only 30 messages a day I could read after school, so I’d get random snippets of people arguing whether Kirk or Picard was better, or discussing the difference in klingons between the two series.
When we got internet for the first time when I was a kid, and I immediately went to the cartoonnetwork website because it was shown on TV between cartoons.
I also remember that there was a vote held between a number of cartoons, and the one to receive the most votes would be shown 24h after the vote. I voted for my favorite one (some girl that secretly travels with some aliens on missions after school or something) and I realized that I could just vote again. So I voted like 100 times haha. Don’t know whether it was my doing, but that cartoon was being shown the whole day after the voting ended.
Heh, my first site was also Cartoon Network. And I remember the voting too, we had them in my country too. I can’t recall if I ever voted myself, but I remember some of the 24 hours days. Sometimes I loved it when it was a show I liked and sometimes I would be like “Well what do I watch today now?” if I wasn’t a fan.
I vaguely remember watching someone demonstrate email around 1989 or so. It sounded like a way to send messages that very few people could read, in a very difficult way, over a very expensive long phone call. Instead of a letter or phone call. Crazy.
But first contact? Maybe 1993, using a dialup BBS at a local library. I noticed it could launch some sort of browser at a link list with a ton of topics.
Also, some FTP sites. Trying to sneakernet some software home over Kermit transfers and floppies. Didn’t succeed most of the time.
There was a Usenet client with even more reading. I’m not sure if there was even an IRC client or did that come later, but some people were playing MUDs. There was an email client as well, and that started to make a little more sense.
It was a keyhole view into a bigger world. And it would only keep growing.
I think it was when my friend showed me how to ping google.com in the Ubuntu Terminal. My first ever OS was Ubuntu but I didn’t used the magical Internet very Mich back then.
Definitely some sort of Christmas Santa whatever 3D animation on yt that made me feel uncomfortable. That was back when my parents thought I was too young to explore the internet on my own. Couldn’t tell you what video it was because that’s too much work for my brain sinc that was around 2008 if I remember correctly.
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