Some pictures loading pixel by pixel, first in very large pixels, then a bid smaller, in finer resolution, and by the time the smallest pixels start to appear, you are already finished.
I remember the “to download this answer this survey and win a free iPad” and being smart enough to know it was a scam but also dumb enough to think it might be real and just enter the info of the vacant house down the road and check it every day to see if it had came
The very first time I got internet, it was by hooking my BBS up to an internet provider in Colorado. Every night my computer would do a dial-up connection and exchange email and Usenet via UUCP. I was the only BBS that was connected to the for-real internet that I know of. Probably the very first things I accessed as I was getting the account set up were Usenet and poking around on anonymous FTP sites for major universities. They had all kinds of random nonsense there.
I moved away from home for the last two years of high school, so I had no internet, but we got email through the high school in my senior year. It was a big deal; among other things it meant I could exchange email with a girl I knew who lived far away instead of sending letters. It was her dad's email account though. She had no email of her own. You kids have no idea how lucky y'all are.
The first time I messed around with the web was at a summer programming job; it was very rudimentary at that time. We basically didn't use it; the day to day job was effectively disconnected from anything aside from the work we were doing locally on the machine. Pretty much the only thing I remember from the one machine in the office that was hooked up to the web was the Rome Lab Snoball Cam.
In college first first couple of years I used an extremely rudimentary DSL-type system for accessing email and things from off campus. Text only. Computers on campus were web-aware; mostly Unix machines with Netscape. It was as I was going through school that things like the web started to become really ubiquitous on all PCs, and by the time I'd graduated it was everywhere, mostly the modern version, and all computers were assumed to be hooked up to it.
This is about all I can remember for my first online experience. Just remember opening AOL and not exactly knowing what else to do except click around random links, looking at whatever websites I came across, all with that classic 90s basic HTML look.
Add comment