I looked up old archived newspaper and magazine articles about Charlie’s Angels for a midterm essay in a college class about television programming over the decades. I was a Radio/Television/Film major at UNT in Denton, Texas but that campus didn’t have internet connectivity, so I had to go to the library at another state college in town, TWU. It would have been between 1992 and 1993, I think. I remember it was text-only. There were no graphics.

Well, the my earliest memory of the internet was yt basically at its very inception. I was a little kid, so I didn’t have the freedom to traverse far and wide on the net on my own yet. That’s why it was a cheesy video, most likely, being shown to me.

Mid 80’s. FTP data/programs from sites on ARPANET.

Got the first screenshots of Daytona USA for the Sega Saturn. So probably about 1994.

My first access was AOL. So, I did AOL things, I guess. Been a minute.

It was early enough I don’t remember. I started out on disk computer games, like as soon as I could use a mouse, but there was always an internet connection. It would have had to be after I could read.

I’d love to know what my first search was. I’m also curious if I ever used Netscape; it could have happened, although I’m young enough it seems like an old-timey thing.

1997 Sierra Vista Arizona, two friends took me to a coffeeshop that had complementary internet access & they helped me set up my first Hotmail account.

But actually even before that, in our daily 9-5 job we were using the internet at work that year. It was all mid-1997.

Lots of IRC then hunting for images. I was so fascinated with computerized pictures.

CBBC kids website

I bought a yoyo and paid for it by mailing a cheque to the vendor.

When my uncle first got the internet I went and filled a few floppies with midi files. Nirvana, metallica, a bunch of other bands I’d never heard of. Although they were just midi files, it really felt like I was cheating something. Plus I could plop them in guitar pro and get approximate tabs to learn the songs.

Then when we got it at home I mostly used AOL chat rooms. I also found out I had a fax software with the modem so for a while my friend and I used to send faxes to each other. Just one Word page with silly bitmaps and word art, it was really cool.

flash games as a kid. I also remember my dad looking up some science stuff for me because I was curious.

Mainly email, research, eventually Napster, irc chatting, and entertainment. Things were not fast on 14.4 or 28.8kbps dial up. When I got 56k,it took about an hour to download a 5MB mp3. Those were tough times. File downloaders were necessary apps, which would recover and continue your download after your modem connection quit halfway. It was also unheard of to have to log into a website. HTTP wasn’t the only show in town, some other older nerds may remember Gopher (you can still browse it, too).

I remember my father showing me early Yahoo!, my family was into roller skating, and he looked up some stuff about roller skating. Grey backgrounds, Times New Roman and some slowly loading pictures.

The very first thing I ever independently used the internet to do was look up cheat codes for Mechwarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, using Ask Jeeves. At the time, they had this campaign that you could just…type a natural sentence and it would answer. We were a quarter century from that actually happening, but my tweenage ass typed “Where are the cheat codes kept?” and I did manage to bumble my way to a Web 1.0 cheat code site, this was before GameFAQs and those hugely long ASCII documents.

BRB, I’m just gonna die of old age real quick.

Mostly talking to weirdos on Usenet and ftp’ing warez from various public FTP sites that had “hidden” directories.