Your First Internet

I vaguely remember having prodigy on our first computer, an old POS Packard-Bell that seemed to never really work quite right. I definitely remember this shit right here, though:


My first experience with the internet was even more basic than most. My parents agreed to let me have one of those free Juno email accounts, this was in the mid to late 90's of course and our computer was in the family room where it was no where near any phone jacks. I had to get a 20+ foot phone line that I would stretch across the entire living room just so I could send and receive a few emails.

Of course, AOL was the big deal once I talked my parents into that. I still had to stretch a phone line across the house to connect, but being able to chat with friends using AIM in "real time" was the best. I was just thinking the other day of one time in particular that was pretty funny.

When I was in high school I was a fairly shy kid, but I wasn't a total nerd/loser. I was more or less friends with a lot of the popular guys but I was not at all popular myself, I never really saw any of them outside of school and rarely, if ever, talked to any of the popular girls. I did at one point manage to get the AIM screen name of one of the girls that was on the pom squad, your standard super hot blonde bimbo type. She was fairly nice though and so we would chat from time to time on AIM.

At one point we were chatting one afternoon when she suddenly logged off. I didn't think much of it, she probably just got bored with me or something. Well in those days you could set it so that you could be online but not show up in other peoples buddy lists, so I was surprised when she messaged me a few minutes later asking why I hadn't responded. Turns out someone else she didn't want to talk to came online, and it baffled me that this hot, popular girl would hide her online status to avoid others but still want to talk to me. It was an exciting day for young Fernanthonies. Not that it changed anything though, I continued to be an awkward virgin for years after that.

 

Well, and I thought that I was going to be the first old fart to post. My first experience with anything online was watching my dad read and post messages on Compuserve, in 1983-85. This cost four times the minimum wage to access, though, and that was only after 7:00 PM (GMT-6). He stopped using it, until 1994 when it had become far more affordable, at which point I started using it too. In early '95 I started corresponding with my cousin via internet email, and checked out Usenet. Then, Compuserve started offering WWW access, and suddenly I had all kinds of time to waste...

 

Not sure exactly how old I was. Young enough to not know I could use it to find porn. We had 56k and my sister had her own phone line so after she left for college, there wasn't much trouble with people picking up the phone while you were on. We had it for a few months before then so if she graduated in 1996 then I'm guessing I was around 9 or 10.

The only website I really remember from back then was Chat House. No one knew about pedophiles lurking in chat rooms back then. My parents were just amazed that I could talk to people all over the world from our computer.

Also, ICQ. That is all.

 

UH-OH!!

ICQ was my first foray into keeping in touch with friends online. My first long-term (albeit highschool) relationship started when I started flirting with a girl from my school on ICQ. And for some reason, I'll never forget my ICQ number.

My first venture into the darker side of the Internet was Geocities Chat. So many horny girls my age back then....at least, I tell myself they were my age. And that they were girls.

A few years later, my mom found the history files and yelled at me for looking at porn. She proceeded to delete the items in the history folder, and the temporary files folder, as she yelled at me. And she said "don't even try to do this, because it won't work."

A few months later, she kept asking why she never had to empty out the history.

 

I did a website on Angelfire. I had the coolest midi files...

And I hung out on a bunch of chat room sites. The Hotel, Bianca's Smut Shack, State of Insanity. Those are the ones I remember. Plus AIM, ICQ, and there was another popular instant messaging service I can't remember.

 

This sound is still burned into my head.

Anyways, I took to computers really early on, but my dad rarely let me use the Internet until my teens (too cheap) so I don't really have a first Internet memory. This was my first computer memory though, at the tender age of 4 or 5:



Word Rescue. Piece of cake game since I already knew how to read. I would always pick the girl because I thought she was cute. Not when my brother was around, though, or he'd make fun of me, because girls were icky.

Around 11 or 12, my friend told me about this sweet website called Gamesages.com where you could find cheat codes for different computer games. I had something like 200+ computer games (my dad didn't let me have a console) so I was all over it. Shortly thereafter me and my brother had our first foray into web design on Angelfire. Sweet CodeCaptors, we hardly knew ye.

Also, please tell me someone remembers this. Encarta MindMaze.

Rodent's Revenge. That fucking game was impossible as a kid.

 

My first internet memories are saving every single picture of Sailor Moon in the world, and then building a website that was literally just a bunch of Sailor Moon pictures with captions like, "This is my favorite sailor because she can do this!"

It was all very professional.

Then I moved on to a chat room built by this one guy who loved Pokemon, and me and a few other people who were regulars would log on and basically invent our own RPGs inside the chat. That spurred a long love of text-based role-playing that still hasn't left me, though I don't get the opportunity to do it anymore. So much fun.

My favorite memory about the internet though is when I became an internet pirate, scouring warez sites for copies of Photoshop and such. The trouble with warez sites is they were more covered in porn thumbnails than the porn stars were covered in cum, and so my little 12-year-old sensibilities were conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted free things. On the other hand, porn was bad. So my logical conclusion was to just come clean to my mother, whom I was sure shared my ideas about the merits of pirating things. I took her into my bedroom where I kept my computer and said, "Mom, I just want you to know that these websites have all this bad stuff on them, but I am using them to download hundred-dollar programs, not for anything weird."

She wrinkled her nose and replied, "Well, as long as you're just using it for that..." and walked off.

I started looking up hentai soon after that, reasoning that as long as it was not real people, no one could get mad at me.

 

I was at a computer swap meet in the mid-90's when the internet was becoming a household term. I remember a guy walking around from CD-ROM vendor to vendor with a blank CD-ROM, asking them if "they could put the internet on the CD for him."

Slightly off-topic, but related to the original post: my kids grew up in the post record album era. All they had seem was CD's. One day we were going through old stuff in the attic and run across my LP collection. My older daughter got really excited and asked all her friends to gather around and she this "This is what they call a record album. Aunt Dianne as this device you put the record in and it makes music!!"

God did I feel old.