One of my earliest memories of using the internet was back in 2005 where I discovered the celeb dress-up game, Stardoll. Of course, the internet has grown massively since then...
So, when u/NewGuyHelloThere asked people to share their earliest memory of the internet, I decided to round up some of the best answers:
1. "The internet came to the masses when I was a teenager and one of my friends got a modem. We would get some alcohol and sit up all night talking taking to people... in AMERICA!!"
2. "You couldn't actually call someone while they were using the internet."
3. "That maze game jump scare."
4. "1994. Accessing my very first email account at college via Pine on a terminal emulator. It felt wildly futuristic."
5. "When I was in elementary school we had to do a paper about our favourite band/musician. The point of the assignment was to learn how to use the internet to search for information. We had just recently got the internet at home, so my mum thought this would be a great opportunity for us all to learn."
6. "I put a virus on the family computer because I Googled 'boobs'."
7. "MSN messenger."
8. "My family got a WebTV box in the '90s. We were all sitting in the living room, figuring it out. We found a site that said it would take our photo, so we gathered on the couch in front of the TV and smiled while a countdown ticked away. When it hit zero, the screen flashed and then said to wait a moment for our photo to be processed."
9. "2004. Playing games on Nickelodeon.com at my mum's office."
10. "In 7th or 8th grade ('93/'94), we took a field trip to the library and the librarian showed us the computer with this brand new thing called the internet, which allowed you to look at information from all over the world."
11. "Late 90's, trying to download a song and after eight hours it would kick me off and I'd have to start over."
12. "I searched for song lyrics and printed them so I could learn them."
13. "I was a kid in 1992 when my dad bought a computer and hooked it up to the internet. He was immediately pirating games onto floppy disks. Almost every day I would go to the Sesame Street website, let it load for like half an hour, then watch a two or three-frame animation of some of the characters."
14. "Playing on Neopets. Then getting several boyfriends on Neopets, proposing marriage to one of them with rings we sent each other, and being neomarried and letting everyone know on the neoboards."
15. "Emailing my cousin and asking my mum when it would get to her and she said, 'well, I think it’s probably already there.' We just looked at each other like it was the most bizarre thing."
16. "Showing my age here, but at work we had to take turns dialling in to get online. If we needed to send an email or look something up, we had to arrange with the head of IT to do it. If someone was online too long, they were called and told to get off."
H/T to u/NewGuyHelloThere and Ask Reddit for having this discussion!
Note: All submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Do you have anything else to add? Let us know in the comments below.
Additional thumbnail credits: Nickelodeon