One of the earliest things I can remember was encountering a thread on the forums of nuklearpower.com (home of the 8-Bit Theater webcomic) that simply asked, “Religious people, why do you believe in God?” and that was the first time I ever had ever encountered atheist perspectives or questioned what my parents taught me. At the time, there was very much this idea of, “Nobody ever changed their mind from an internet argument” but the internet exposed me to a lot of different views that I would never have encountered otherwise (see also: queer people).
Other than that, I used to gather around with friends to browse icanhazcheezeburger and failblog and stuff. I stayed up late grinding levels in RuneScape. Newgrounds and flash games were a big thing. Some of my friends were into 4chan in the early days when it was more about edgy shock humor than straight up Nazis. There was social media like MySpace and Facebook but I had no interest in them bc I was a nerd. There were a lot more random little websites that passed around by word of mouth.
I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don’t remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.
After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring’s website.
I remember downloading grainy Quicktime video files from people’s homepages. We didn’t need YouTube then and we don’t need it now.
Playing MUDs on JANET (not exactly the internet but close enough). We played late at night on university computers knowing that this wasn’t really what either the computers or JANET were supposed to be used for but it was still great.
For me was using AOL free internet CDs cause we had to pay providers for time online…we used to walk around neighborhood looking for AOL CDs to get online and get to chatrooms pretending we were adults. After a year or so I had a real experience when Internet started to get popularized so I created an email account, an ICQ acc and downloaded a song from this website.
Piczo websites
Chatrooms on ilse.nl
Simple webpages.
No ads.
Dial up noises.
Altavista was the search engine. Astalavista was the search engine for pirated material.
“Get off the internet, I need to call grandma!”
And literally not knowing which websites exist out there and having no search engine to look em up
America Online. Chat rooms. A/S/L? Beware sexual predators.
flash games
A/s/l?
Compuserve back in like ‘91.
CompuServe was a large part of the lack of parenting I received during the 90s. 3-5 hours a night, plus work/school and sleep means I didn’t see my mom much for more than a decade.
Prodigy, then AOL, then real internet. Also eWorld, which was like AOL but for Mac users. It was kinda pointless.
modem dialing sound
That, followed by the unmistakable “uh-oh” icq sound.
Early CompuServe. I don’t remember the exact timeframe but it was rather early. The first time I enjoyed the internet? Probably unreal tournament in 99. Me and my friends used to play and listen to Korn, Rammstein, limp Bizkit, P.O.D., slipknot, static-x, rage against the machine, etc. whoever was last in GoldenEye, played unreal until they came back in again.
