Does anyone else remember the early days of the internet?
 

The internet started to become mainstream around 1995-1996, does anyone else remember those early days of the internet?

This is the days of dial-up modems, when it took 10 minutes to load a single page, when watching a 5 minute video took 1 hour to download. This is before youtube, facebook, myspace, twitter, tumblr existed...there was no social media.

The days of geocities and yahoo chat rooms, ebay was just starting up. Anyone else around from the very beginning? When the internet was slow as hell and everyone was trying to start up their first website? Its hard to believe many of us were able to survive those days.

The idea of it taking 1 hour or more just to download a 20 minute video sounds absurd now, but back in those days that's what it was. There was no streaming, you had to use quicktime or realplayer.

Yes. No matter what it is. Yes.

Given my age, yes. Wish I had a screen shot of my old Geocities site. :lol: I don't even recall what I used it for now, I only remember Taurus symbol.

I can't express how weird it was last summer to realize I'd had my eBay account for 15 years.

Yes, there's still plenty of things I recall about those early days. I first used the internet on a regular basis towards the end of 1993, when I started university. Didn't get to experience the pain of dial-up until graduating though, as the speeds at university were pretty fast by comparison!

Kids these days... if they had to deal with not having their own phone and you have to fight between who gets to use the phone line - the person who wants to use the phone or the person who wants to be on the computer - or the pressure put on you that someone isn't going to be able to call through because you're on the computer all the time... lol

With elderly grandparents at the time that were often a worry, my parents eventually got a second phone line for the computer for a while just in case something happened and someone needed to call.

Man I forgot about that, when someone would call on the phone your internet would disconnect. I remember sitting there clicking a page and nothing would happen because the damn phone was ringing. That was nuts.

Yeah, that too. Fun times.

Although what has it been replaced with now? The occasional outage of BOTH internet and digital cable.

Seriously, well now what do I do?? :lol: Has happened a couple times in the past week or so, but only late at night, forcing me to get off the computer and go to bed (ok, fair enough), but now I can't even put the tv on!

I put a DVD in (I'm not the sort that just lays in the dark and goes to sleep), but I had the realization that this is one big down side to people eventually getting rid of DVD/Blu-Ray and fully embracing movie ownership via digital purchase. Internet and digital cable out and want to watch a movie? Oh well, guess who can't access it? lol People may need to get back into reading more.

Yeah. The first website I ever went to was Furby.com, and going into aol's chatrooms. Guy's were always like a/s/l. lol!

No, Cubed, I don't remember any of that. I'm ONLY 38, after all, LOL! :-P

Ahhhh, so you had that there "Wind-Up" internet, before dial-up. Where you had to turn a crank and ask "Sally" to patch you through. :tgrin:

Pshhaw, you kiddin? My family's first PC was a TI 994A. Slightly better than the old Commodore 64.

Come to think of it I don't think I even had an e-mail address until the early 2000's. Then again I was just a kid at the time so I guess it didn't matter.

Yeah, I'm not even sure when other email services started to pop up. For a while my family had one shared email address through our provider. I'm not even sure if it was so easy to get another.

Not even sure how old my Hotmail account is at this point, I've had it a long time.

:lol: Was it also party line internet?


Edit: Actually, I guess a party line version is closer to today with stealing wireless connections and public security issues. lol

Every line I'm on is the "Party Line", guuuuuurl! :tgrin::tgrin::tgrin:

I knew I was graduating, and thus lose my university email address, so I had a search on Yahoo (yes, this is pre Google) for free email providers, and signed up to Hotmail. This is BEFORE Microsoft bought the company.

The big browser contest was between Mosiac and Netscape at the time, I tended to prefer the later. And what happened? Microsoft bought the former and turned it into Internet Explorer heh.

I had access to both Windows 3.1 PCs (even though W95 came out before I left, the PCs weren't updated by then) and Unix machines. I loved those mothers, so fast by comparison, especially for computational stuff, and I even got to learn a bit of Unix in the process. My IRC client for reaching out to all those strange speaking Americans was on that server too, wasn't Windows based :lol:

Early days as in the mid-late 90s? No, I wasn't using the internet at the time and had no idea what it was. I didn't get the internet at home until the year 2000-2001. We had dial-up for like 2 months but hated it so we switched to broadband and it felt like heaven.

Oh hell yes, I remember. We had dial up, and I hated it because it was so slow and nobody could call you on the phone. My first e-mail account was a Hotmail one, but then I switched to Yahoo and have been on Yahoo ever since. Then I went to college and that's where I discovered this site as well as the other sites I go to. We never use the home computer anymore since Mom and I now have laptops. I actually love broadband for the most part except for the data plan, but not much I can do about that.

Going back further than the internet for a second (or at least public knowledge of such a thing), does anyone old enough remember (appropriately for this site) the "Turtle"?

http://i.imgur.com/dqKCDJ1.gif

(Enlightenment! It's all so clear now, it's always been turtles, it's the natural order!)

Probably my earliest computer-use memory from around third grade. That little green triangle on a tiny Apple computer with a black and green screen and ran Turtle from a big floppy disk. :D

And what came in following school years, well that classic Oregon Trail game of course. :)

I had no idea what the Internet was either in the mid 90s, though it was mentioned in a few comics that I got at the time. I first browsed the Internet for a few minutes every now and then at school in the late 90s, but my first real experience with it was when I got a Sega Dreamcast and used its Dreamkey internet browser from 2000 to 2002. I switched to using a laptop in 2002.

We had dialup for years, but I thought it was good at the time, since I didn't know about broadband. It was much harder to discover new music, as there was no Facebook, YouTube or iTunes back then.

Yeah. It sucked.

Its actually hard to believe youtube didn't even start until 2005. The idea of a website entirely based on watching videos that load in seconds (instead of hours) was unheard of before that.

Kids today will never know what it was like to wait 1 hour to download a 15 minute video.

I remember back in the day when we used AOL dial up at my parents' house. I had to be so patient waiting for images to load, especially animated gifs. Back in 2004 I would go on Mikey's TMNT forum, and people would have like images over an MB long, so I'd have to wait over 10 minutes for a single page to load. It was a pain in the butt, though I made it a habit of lurking around the forum until all the images were saved and memorized onto my web cache.

Or waiting 30 minutes or so to download an mp3 file.

It's so weird seeing all these people saying "I had no idea the internet was a thing in the 90's" because I BEGGED my mom for internet access back in 97 probably, and I was only 6 years old.

We got our first internet service, AOL, probably in 1998 or 1999. I used it to look up stuff about Pokemon and Digimon and almost nothing else. I became obsessed with some little Digimon flash game thing for part of a summer when I got to use the internet every morning. I also used the AOL chatrooms and message boards a lot to talk about Digimon. Yeah, Adventure old guard over here. People still cared about shipping back then, let me tell you. :V

But I went digging for old sites/accounts and the oldest one that remained preserved was my fanfiction account which I made in 2003. Everything else I registered for either got deactivated or the site went under, but I did use a lot of forums, the most memorable of which were the old Chao Island forums and some Inuyasha forum full of elitist assholes.

I remember the few kids I knew that had internet access back then were obsessed with Neopets. I tried it, but never understood the appeal. I still don't. I've tried making a new account there six or seven times, and only once did I see any appeal in it [the Habitarium] but they ****ing shut it down. Only thing I liked on that stupid site, way to go. I preferred using the internet for fanfiction. Kinda feeling nostalgic for a few old Sonic and DBZ fics, I might have to go dig up my printed copies of them!

I'm going to say my family probably got the internet around 1995. With my being in high school a bit of an encouragement to get it.

Neopets never die. They are still there, alive, starving, waiting for you to log back in and feed them.

I didn't know Neopets even existed until they were mentioned in this thread. I remember the tamagotchi fad in the late 90s, though. I think they were similar except that they were physical devices. I was never interested in getting one, but I did get the GameBoy game.

Tamagotchi... I remember those were big for a time with my sister's bunch. My mom sent me into Toys R Us with my sister to get one, she figured why don't I get one too if I want. Heck, why not.

Darn little non-color screen digital thing that tries to make you feel bad. lol Never messed with it for all that long, but it's still around someplace stored in it's packaging, maybe it'll be worth something someday. :trazz:

The 90s weren't the early days of the internet.

I think in this instance, "internet" = WWW, and seeing as the first proper websites didn't emerge until 1991, that probably counts.

I was one of "those kids" that had like six or seven of the little things. I only have one now, but my Digimon replaced them. [The original Digimon are basically Tamagotchi that fight.]
http://36.media.tumblr.com/a2b1c491d...6d4zo1_500.jpg

The internet didn't become mainstream till like 1995/1996. Even later than that for many people.

Yeah - we had that on Acorn Atom computers at school. I think the language is called Logo.

That still happens to me! I hat it random people are always calling our house... :roll: Every 10 minutes feels like! We also had a white desktop (the really old kind!) computer when I was a kid. We still have it I think but I miss it! I don't think internet was wireless then either!

Wait.

What.

I must not have detected your sarcasm, yeah?

About what the phone? Oh yea i was exaggerating a little but it does feel like someone is always calling us!

I feel your pain.

The kitchen phone with the answering machine is just outside the door of this room, and pretty much at least once or twice a day (in addition to other annoying 'junk' calls) we get some robo call that likes to hang up at a certain moment so that there is a loud dial tone heard over the answering machine for way too long until it cuts it off. Fun when I'm working on the computer and trying to concentrate on something. Heaven forbid I leave both doors open of this room (former den, door on either side) to get some air flow; it will surely call then.

There really is no real point in the (U.S.) "do not call list," is there.

I didn't get the Internet until 2006 (I was 26) so that was the earliest for me. I remember hearing the TV commercials for it in 1995-1996 before it really came online in a major way, but I didn't really give it much thought beyond that.

...

The part about having DIAL-UP.