I was quite active on the BBS scene and packet radio. But the first time on the actual internets was at the university where my father worked. There wasn’t much. Netscape had an index of sites.
I remember visiting apogee.com to see if they had any new games coming up.
I can’t remember exactly, but I remember exploring some Gopher and FTP sites.
This was at Freenet Finland, around 1993 (I guess?) which was a text based dialup service for school kids. Yeah, they had Lynx. But it was the early days of the Web and a bunch of stuff was still in Gopher and FTP.
I’ve been online longer than gmail. Its like asking me to remember my birth.
I’m old. I used the Internet before there was a “World-Wide Web” - so no web pages. I used telnet to connect to other computers, where generally I had to have a login. At home I only had dialup, but the school computers had Internet access. Those connections did include Usenet discussions, which were kind of like a primitive version of Lemmy.
The first two things I remember doing are visiting the official X-Files website, www.trustno1.com, and looking for cool pictures of space ships from Star Trek.
I remember something about a fully naked Pamela Anderson and a 30 day ban from using the school’s computers, but other than that… Kazaa and MSN, I think.
A remember a few images like that with resolution so low it was just one step above watching scrambled Cinemax after my parents went to bed.
To sail the 7 seas! 🦜
Web games :3
That’s my choice too. Honestly I actually forgot as I think I first accessed the internet when I 12 and our country only just starting to install broadband and having GPRS mobile phones or something like that
I was… younger than 12 back then. But I remember playing games on my mom’s facebook account back when they had web games on there lol
Got on a BBS via a long distance call to AOL.
Typed a bunch of typo-laiden words at someone else.
Opening a telnet connection to a friend’s workstation who had started studying at another university.
Using the UNIX “talk” command to chat. Yes, I am old.I remember what I think was the first time I used the internet. I must have been 8ish. My father insisted that I needed my own email address asap, and got me to choose a handle on his work computer. I also remember my mother gently scoffing in the background, because come on, the kid will never use it! (It’s my main address to this day)
If BBSs don’t count, the Tolkien-based text MUD in the university’s computer labs, and later a Discworld MUD.
Got an AOL CD in the mail with a few hours of free dial-up time and, once I made it past the screeching of my 28.8 kbps modem to a friendly “Welcome!” (no mail yet though), there was a button promising games and I’ve been hooked ever since.
First thing that come to my mind was Caramail (just in French) which was an open chat plateform where you could talk with other people of your age, I was preteen at the time, it seams crazy now, I don’t know how much pedocriminal were there but it didn’t seams to be a big concern at the time
No profil pic, i dont think there was way to send images neither, full binary with blue for boys and pink for girls… but still the first interaction was often “ASV” which stand for “Âge Sexe Ville” (Age Sex Town/Location) …
Yeah… i don’t think I had deep conversation at the time
Probably resolving a hostname to IP address via DNS.
At an application level, not sure. Maybe sending an email via the VAX/VMS MAIL command.
EDIT: Actually…hmm. If it was actually MAIL, it might have been using DNS to do an MX resolution, looking up a mail server for a given domain, not resolving a hostname.










