So obvious in current year the Internet is a glorified utility. You need it just as much, if not more than say water and heat. But it wasn't always like that. When did you first discover the internet and are you using the same user name that you started with?

I began with AOL. My Dad made my username and it was cowaRANDOMNUMBERS because I liked TMNT as a kid. I mostly used it just to chat with random people online in those AOL chatrooms. I discovered the term porn in the pic room. I mean obviously I knew what porn was, but didn't know it was called porn. Some guy asked me if porn was okay and I asked what that was... pics and videos of people having sex! (direct quote). The rest is history.

So how about you guys? What year did you first look up goatse?

I'm going to say sometime in 96 or early 97, I spent the weekend at my aunts ghetto apartment and she had a friend come over with one of those old school laptops that was like 3 and a half inches thick when closed, he hooked it up to the phone line and we all gathered around him and took turns talking shit to people in some type of chat room. It was fun.

And then it was sneaking onto ECW website in the computer lab in school and watching those 4 second videos of New Jack dives that you could barely make out because they were so grainy and they took an hour to load. Good times.

Spring of 1997 for me when our high school got internet in the library and computer lab. This was before they got a real good tracking system so I got to surf Bomis.com and Jade's Nude Celebrities after hours lol. I also used it for Rajah.com for my first insight into wrestling dirtsheets, View From The Rising Sun for all the latest AJPW/NJPW articles and purocentral.com for full matches on Quicktime that would take hours to download.

I became an avid user around '99. Beforehand I was aware of it, but only thought of it as an advanced encyclopedia and a way to send emails, I didn't think it had anything of interest to me. Things changed when I got into Pro Wrestling and it became clear that there was some significant gaps in my knowledge. Being a WCW fan, it was almost impossible to keep up with what was going on since we only received Nitro. If I was going to stay on top of things, I'd have to log in, check out WCW.com for the latest reports then cross-reference it with the fan-sites since their reports were usually more enjoyable to read. I can't remember most of their names anymore, but DDT Digest was a favourite.

The other major interest was Pokemon, especially since the next batch of monsters were released in Japan and there was a lot of rumour and innuendo being spread. It was a more innocent time and half the fun was the old 'two truths, one lie' game everyone would play with the series. My major source of news was Pojo, and one of the highlights was their daily coverage of the latest games which at the time blew my mind. Finding out you could return to the previous region, challenge all the old gym leaders and battle the original trainer sounded like horse-shit, but to see the proof right infront of me was astonishing.

I'd say until 2001, the internet was mostly a way to keep up with my hobbies and something I'd spend maybe 30 minutes a day tops on. Then I discovered the message boards on GameFAQs.com and it blew my mind. What appealed to me about the message boards was just the sheer mass of information out there and the fan perspective. I learned quickly that no matter what the WWF did, fans were always going to bitch and moan and I remember how much the fans were sick of Austin & Rock by that point and couldn't wait until HHH returned from his quad tear. It was so bizarre, but it was enjoyable to see things from their perspective and just how much they would rally for guys like Jericho, RVD & Angle.

Otherwise my memories are basically surfing the website and logging into all the various fan-sites which all had awful wallpaper, a guest book and usually the same animations plasted over them. There was something charming about even guys like El Dandy having their own WCW fan-site and his few wins being treated like Superbowl victories.

Christmas Day, 1997, and my first trip to Nintendo.com. Like a kid going to a candy store.

I got really into efedding after getting on the internet at the local library I would walk to the library once a day, cut an efed promo, then go back home. This was when I was in junior high, I’d guess 95 or 96. Then we got the internet as I went into high school and I was hooked.

My big memory of not having internet at home was learning about pw.coms hotline. It was an 800 number some guy named Sushi X updated regularly. PPV nights I’d be calling that thing every fifteen minutes.

Cool topic.

The first time I remember going online was in August 1997 at the local library with my brother and cousin. I remembered the callers to this wrestling radio show I listened to every Saturday night saying WWF.com and WCW.com were crap, and ProWrestling.com was the place to be online if you were a REAL wrestling fan. So the very first site I ever went to was naturally ProWrestling.com. Only thing I remember is an article about the Ric Flair vs. Syxx feud. The writer was pro-Flair/anti-Syxx, and kept referring to Syxx as "Sean," which I thought was really weird.

My 2nd online experience came a month or two later. I was with my friend Brandon in our other friend Eric's basement. Eric showed us how to get into the AOL wrestling chat room. I thought it was amazing. Look at all these wrestling fans! The only real detail I recall was speculation as to the identity of Kane, with Isaac Yankem & Dan Spivey being the main two names thrown around. This was only confirming what I already "knew." 

My family finally got online via AOL in early 1998 when the Winter Olympics were taking place. For about a year I only knew how to access stuff through the AOL homepage. I initially spent the bulk of my online time in the AOL wrestling chat rooms. They were dominated by WWF vs. WCW mark wars. I jumped right in on the side of WWF. Before long I had made my first internet friends- the WKO, or Wrestling Knowledge Organization. We were basically trolls with a newzletter and eventually a geocites page. Here are the members....

Ed- Our elder statesman. An old school fan from Texas who idolized the Von Erichs and thought wrestling's best days were already behind us.
Showstoppa- A Michaels, Benoit, Masa Chono fan. Also a dick. Insisted everybody refer to Benoit as "Pegasus." We frequently quarreled. Sometimes it was brought about by my (counter)trollish insistence on shortening Pegasus to "Peg." Show hated that.
Nate- A level headed fan of ECW & SMW. Eventually got into the business doing stuff for an indie promotion in Ohio.
Brent- A fan of hardcore wrestling, IWA Mid South in particular. Became an IWA Mid South referee.
Kevin- The most level headed member of our clique. He was either married or engaged and found the good in all promotions/wrestlers. Occasionally wrote articles for some of the big name sites in the years to follow.

I remember getting temporarily suspended by AOL for calling Shawn Michaels a pussy   It was my 3rd strike. Nothing major happened the first two times (also likely brought about by calling Shawn Michaels unflattering names) so I continued with the occasional potty mouth comments until Strike Three. I could no longer log on. My parents were not happy when they found out. I played dumb. They called the AOL hotline. This is when they found out why we had been suspended. More unhappiness ensued. I became a model online citizen after that. Also bought a bunch of tapes from highly reputable sources.....like Phil's Wrestling Tape Page.

After a few months I finally moved on from the AOL wrestling chat rooms to the AOL wrestling message boards. Bill Simmons of ESPN fame was a frequent contributor. What I remember most about the boards was ECW fans going crazy for Tatanka, who was rumored to be coming in for a run. This was weird to me. I didn't understand why ECW fans were going crazy for Tatanka. He just didn't seem like the ECW fans type of wrestler. Eventually I realized I was illiterate and Tatanka=Tanaka, as in Masato   I was also AOL buddies with Mikey Whipwreck (ECWWHIPPER) and once bought a tape from a young, mostly unknown Necro Butcher.

My family was without internet for most of 1999. So I'd run to the computer room at school whenever I had a free minute to get the latest wrestling newz. If the computer lab was closed, or occupied, I would race off to the local public library in between classes. I was obsessed with muh wrestling. By this point I spent most of my internet time at 1wrestling.com, with APW.com being another regular destination. 

By 2000 we had internet service again and it would remain that way forevermore. StrictlyECW.com was my go to site. I also spent time on all the other big wrestling sites of the day....

-PWTorch.com, and Meltzer's site to a lesser degree, for news and current reviews.
-Scott Keith's reviews were more-or-less gospel so long as you remembered to deduct 1/2* off of practically every Benoit & Jericho match and add it to nearly every ECW match. I also jacked a bunch of Keith's lesser known catchphrases that I still use here to this day. 
-Kayfabe Memories and John McAdam's tape page to learn about "old school" 80s territorial wrestling and SMW/USWA.
-I'd also hit up WWF.com and ECW.com at least once a day, though I didn't spend much time there.
-Then there was DeathValleyDriver.com, which was a weird cross between Bizarro World and UberSmarkLand. For a long time I thought the whole site had to be one big, elaborate troll, and I avoided it like the plague. Why it was like a whole world of Stuart's! But I eventually started going there more frequently when it became the only place to find fellow WOW enthusiasts and decent indie wrestling news/reviews. Before long, I became a big fan of Dean's writing (he was one of their big contributors) and stuck around, though I never did adopt many of their more "out there" opinions.
-OVW.com and UPW.com to follow the future of wrestling.

Most of my real life friends were online by this time so I spent a lot of time chatting with my real life buddies on AOL messenger, or whatever they called it.

I spent the vast majority of those early internet years in the wrestling bubble. The first non-wrestling stuff I got into online were a Doctor Who site (Outpost Gallifrey, I think it was called) and writing book/movie reviews on Amazon.com. I also spent a decent amount of time on a cult tv site which I'm pretty sure was called CultTV.com. 

My Mom had a guy friend since childhood that was an engineer and stereotypical first generation nerd, so he was on the Internet since roughly the beginning, and he showed me some CompuServe version of the internet in the early 90's. It was all text based role playing and I thought it was the lamest, dorkiest shit I had ever seen. I was picturing the internet to be some virtual reality Max Headroom type thing, you know? That's my earliest, but that barely counts.

I don't remember visiting the internet as we know it now until 1996. My Mom and Dad pinched in together (they were divorced, so this was probably a fucking ordeal) for a Windows 95 equipped Packard Bell with a 64MB hard drive and CD Rom drive (and Encarta Encyclopedia) for Christmas of 1995. My Mom's nerd buddy helped hook it up and show me how to properly shut it down. This was very important to him. "You can't just turn it off. You must shut it down properly." Holy shit. Calm down, dude. Sometime in 1996 we got an AOL 5¼-inch floppy disk preview in the mail (Pre-CD Rom previews!). My Dad came to my Mom's house, and we were going to go on the computer and sign up for AOL for the first time that night. It was a fucking event. 

We went online, and we were like, "Now what?" I remember we didn't know that AOL was internet. There was a Internet Explorer Browser that said "Internet" and our thought process was that we have to sign on AOL, which has chatrooms with weirdos in it, but then Internet Browser will work and we can go to the internet too! I believe I went to ESPN's website, which had some ridiculously long name. They had been promoting their website on Sportscenter, so I knew it existed, and had to remember the website address. If there were search engines, I didn't know they existed. I also went to MTV's website because they too promoted it on their shows and I knew it existed.  I remember on my second trip to the internet trying to download a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert live from MSG. I can't imagine it was a file, it was probably a Real Player stream, but it took an hour to even pretend to start, and when the status bar was complete nothing happened. I tried again my third trip to the internet. I did nothing different. Same results, obviously. I remember voting for the 1996 MTV Movie Awards. You used to have to call a 900 number to vote, so I never did. Who would pay to vote for an MTV award? Having the internet access, I was able to do it for free! I voted multiple times. I'm pretty sure you can thank me for Adam Sandler vs. Bob Barker winning best fight scene. You're welcome. 

Websites mostly sucked in those days, as you might imagine. I mostly spent my AOL time in AOL chatrooms. I was 12 during this period, but I'd tell people I was 15 because that seemed more sophisticated and less vulnerable in my mind. AOL chatrooms were strictly moderated, which annoyed me at the time (I liked to curse then too), but it was probably for the better because I never had some creepy dude hitting on the "15-year-old" me who was really 12. I didn't like the chatrooms. I didn't have much to say. I was 12. I didn't care what other people had to say. I do remember my only instruction for going into chatrooms was, "Never give real information about anything." No names, no address, no phone numbers. I mention this because I never really outgrew this mentality. I've never joined a social network site where the idea is put yourself out there. I cringe when I see an article and they'll be real names with real photos commenting, saying what is quite frankly, insane shit. Never give real information about anything.

I remember talking to my friend Ian at lunch one day. He was one of two kids I knew that ever been on the internet. Ian asked, "You ever been on Playboy.com?" No. Holy shit, why didn't I think of that? Of course Playboy has a website, I thought. I went to Playboy.com, it had maybe three pictures of topless women, I printed it out and sold it to some kid at recess the next day. I did that one other time. Miraculously, I never got in trouble for doing it either time.

Maybe the reason I find myself on a wrestling message board today is because I don't really remember enjoying the internet until 1997 because wrestling. I am bias, but the Monday Night Wars was the peak era to be a wrestling fan on the internet because it was a thing, but not yet an everybody in the world thing. I actually found Prowrestling.com in 1997/1998 simply because I typed "prowrestling.com" into the browser. Surely that's a thing? Pre-understanding search engines most websites I found were on guesses? "There's a 1wrestling.com, is there a 2wrestling.com?" There was. There was a zwrestling.com, a twrestling.com. There were so many websites, rumors were so irresponsibly sourced, and the Monday Night Wars were so insane in reality, going on the internet after school and checking out the wrestling website rags was a hoot. Baker and I actually posted at StrictlyECW at the same time, but we don't really remember each other. Neither of us were Stuart, fortunately. 

I remember attempting to buy tapes from some shady angelfire website. The tapes never came, my Dad did a reverse lookup, got the dude's number, found out he was a kid and than verbally scared the shit out of him until he agreed to send the money back. It was a great moment. I joined Ebay in 1999 (it's a Member Since that I still have that I'm oddly proud of) and that never happened again. I'd send money orders since I didn't have a checking account, and obviously not a credit card.

Me and a friend started a wrestling email newsletter in 1997/1998. AOL accounts all had profiles. They also had a search function, so you could find people of similar interests. I would search WWF, WCW, ECW, Wrestling, Stone Cold, Austin, Rock, nWo, Hogan, Hall, Nash, every wrestling search term I could think of, and I created a spreadsheet of confirmed AOL wrestling fans. There were thousands. Then I wrote some (mildly at best) amusing pitch about a wrestling newsletter that didn't yet exist, and CC'd it to every member in my database. Most ignored it, but hundreds, hundreds(!) were like, "Yeah, I'll read your newsletter," and we had a pretty good subscription base from day one. I'd mine the rags for the best rumours, email it to my buddy who would curate this madness into some sort of coherent thing to read, and we'd take turns writing a feature about whatever needed to be talked about. I remember putting a lot of time into a Rick Rude tribute after his death. The rest is a blur. After close to three years we were done by 2000. I spent the majority of my internet time 1997-2000 reading about wrestling. I can't separate the Monday Night Wars and that Newsletter. It's all part of the same thing for me. 

By Napster in 1999, everything changed. My time on the internet would then be spent searching for files, no longer information, and the internet as a whole would change as it was already pretty monetized, and post-Napster, almost entirely monetized. I could go for days about other late 90's internet stuff, but I'll stop there as this is already super long.

I first got access to internet in 2000 or 2001. You know the deal. Awful dialup modem that made the strangest noises when connecting. Back then internet was a rare and expensive commodity. We had some kind of cap, probably montly, so we had to ration out internet usage. Every member of our family had to write down the start and stop time of our internet usage. Being the nerdy kid I was (and still am), I quickly got addicted to the internet, so being restricted was a burden I struggled to overcome and often got caught overstepping my boundaries.

At the time my primary interests were video games and chess, so it didn't take me long to find this website/forum called Kung Fu Chess (later renamed Shizmoo). The game is just like chess except you can move as many pieces as you like at a time. Once you move a piece there's a timer that goes down. This timer could be changed. 1 second timer - a crazy fast game dictated more by reflex than strategy. 10 seconds - a very strategical game, but in a much different way to regular chess. The two dudes that made the game were mini-internet pioneers. They created a few other unique spins on regular games, and they were a big hit among their small community of 100-200 internetters. I spent a lot of time playing those games, but I also spent a fair bit of time basically being a troll on the message boards. My highly original gimmick was spamming memes like the irritating little internet shitkid I was. Yes, there were memes back then. My favourite was the O Rly owl. I also played Runescape for many years but quit when, after hundreds of hours of building my character, I take my first step into the dangerous wilderness, where players can kill other players, die instantly, lose all my gear. That wasn't a good day.

Heading into my teenage years it didn't take me long to discover peer-to-peer sharing. I used Limewire a lot and infected the family laptop with viruses, but it was cool because I got good music for free. At some point I found this website called Stickam where people can host small chatrooms where anyone can go on cam and/or mic. Sounds like it would be a pornfest and sure, there were some slutty people, but for the first few years of its existence the community was generally pretty chill. Most of the room were just teenagers/young adults chatting about shit. A lot of the rooms were pretty cliquey, but I still made a bunch of internet friends on there, some of which I've met and are among my closest friends. No regrets.

I remember typing in the DBZ website, going outside on the trampoline..then coming back after it loaded. Also looking up cheats for the SNES MK games.

Also playing a few flash games, and being happy you can load it up then disconnect from the internet so my parents could use the phone.

I also My remember my friend playing a lot of Stick Death and some Frog in a blender game as well 😂.

My earliest memories don't have a distinct time-stamp. I recall being solidly in the Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves camps though when it came time for my first online porn search adventures. The Jade call-out has me on a nostalgia trip right now.

The biggest draws to me in my early internet days were AIM, Napster/Winamp, porn, and then eventually playing Starcraft on BattleNet... In that approximate order of priority.

My earliest time-stamp is remembering being online on AIM on New Year's Eve 1999, the clock nearing midnight, not knowing how Y2K just might fuck up the world after all, chatting with my junior high crush, and abruptly declaring my feelings for her via IM before logging off in anticipation of the end of the world.

Would've made for an even more awkward return to school after winter break had it not been the social norm for no one to acknowledge anything that was said on AIM in person at school. It was like we were all living these double lives in a way.

I remember pretending to be a member of Hanson and talking to some girl. She sent me pics (like IRL with a letter). I wonder if she figured out that Ness' address was in fact not a pop star's house...

Aug 3, 2018 19:32:30 GMT 🤯 said:

My earliest time-stamp is remembering being online on AIM on New Year's Eve 1999, the clock nearing midnight, not knowing how Y2K just might fuck up the world after all, chatting with my junior high crush, and abruptly declaring my feelings for her via IM before logging off in anticipation of the end of the world..

We spent NYE 1999 at my Uncle’s house, which was pretty secluded so no other houses around, and as a prank someone went and turned the power off as soon as it hit Midnight. 8 year old me was very concerned for a minute or so 😂.

Posting on the DC Comics message board, AOL Chat Roons, AIM, and the WWF.com chat room during Raw.

We didn’t get internet until I was 16 (call it 2001), so I was a bit behind.

Ah, early Internet memories!




I first really got online around my junior year of high school, so that would have been 1998. One of those households with only one phone line, and Netzero was free and good enough for casual short-term browsing. (I knew AOL was a walled garden even though I didn't know the term, and the price for Netzero made it an easy sell for the parents.) Didn't do much beyond email and it was a family computer in a common room so porn was VERY much not an option.

When I graduated in 2000, some product called FreeDSL came out and it was the same sort of deal; they give you free service in exchange for banner ads. All you have to pay for is the modem. Seemed a fair tradeoff and now we could use the Internet AND the landline at the same time! Got AIM, started downloading and watching fansubbed anime -- hey, we have the bandwidth, why not do something with it -- which led to fansub and anime forums, which led to PW.com boards as another interest. (Also Comic Book Resources)

Napster was almost done by the time I got on board, but who remembers KaZaA?

Mostly got off of AIM by 2002 when I realized I was chatting with my friends but we weren't actually DOING anything; we were sitting in our own homes writing at each other when we could be anywhere else hanging out in meatspace.

Aug 12, 2018 6:06:14 GMT Michinokudriver said:

Napster was almost done by the time I got on board, but who remembers KaZaA?

Now you're talking my language. I do.

My early mp3 memories went like this:

Somebody showing me how to download music on Usenet and me being unable to remember it.

Napster: The game changer of all game changers. 

Scour: Was a website, not an app, happening in parallel with Napster. I remember downloading the first A Perfect Circle album on Scour in the summer of 2000. They were shut down soon after because they didn't have the clever loophole Napster had with not actually distributing mp3s, just setting up an environment for people to share. The music was actually on Scour servers, so they were toast.

Post-Napster was the wild wild west. Justin Frankel, the genius behind Winamp, and a first generation internet dude who cared about money second (unlike the next wave who sold every bit of user information they could en route to becoming billionaires) created the Gnutella Network when Napster first started getting in trouble almost as utility to fill the Napster void, which was the same kind of peer-to-peer network Napster was (although slightly different in a way I don't understand because I've never coded before in my life). Unlike Napster, Frankel open sourced the code and from there came a bevy of Napster clones. This is where Bearshare, Morpheus and Limewire (among others) came from, and they soon filled the void Napster left, Limewire taking the early lead as the next Napster.

I didn't like Limewire. I found a place called Audiogalaxy, which I think was the coolest of the free mp3 era. It worked a bit like a primitive version of bittorrent. You had to download a thing called The Audiogalaxy Satellite, and their server sent a proprietary file to you satellite that was not a mp3, so they skirted the law. However, that file would become a mp3 once the satellite finished downloading it. It really was like when you download a .torrent, and it turns into an mp4, or something. Audiogalaxy also had forums that worked as a sort of primitive version of Reddit. Every band on their servers had their own page, their own forum, like a subreddit, and it was a really booming community in 2001/2002. When the feds finally shut Audiogalaxy down in 2002, the forums stayed open for another decade.

After Audiogalaxy, I found KaZaA. KaZaA was like Limewire-like Napster clones (Morpheus especially), but had its own server non-dependent on Frankel's Gnutella created one. After Limewire became hot, and then RIAA started cracking down on them, KaZaA, which I think actually predated them in being created got its turn as the P2P app. I hated it at first. It was bloated and slow. Then I found KaZaA Lite, which was an unauthorized modification on KaZaA, looking and operating the same, even using the same server, only they eliminated all spyware and adware, and wouldn't you know it, it was no longer slow and bloated. I will always remember KaZaA Lite for being a game changer with porn. Unlike early Napster, Limewire had video downloading capabilities, but KaZaA just did it better, and as a result nearly all porn I downloaded 18-20 years old was off KaZaA.

Around 2003 was when I had friends that were downloading music the right way, paying for it and shit. While I respected their ethics, I also found this completely insane and I still have yet to have ever paid for a mp3. With streaming service, I don't think anybody does anymore, but I knew dudes in the mid-aughts spending like thousands of dollars on mp3s per year. The way I looked at it, mp3s were meant to be free. If you liked the music enough, you'd eventually buy a physical copy. I believe this is how the whole vinyl revitalization came to be. The Napster Generation, kids who heard more music in a few years than previous heard in their entire adolescence thanks to the technological advances of P2P networks giving us access to everything for free knew what we liked, knew what was worth having to us, and by the time we were in our 20's and 30's started buying physical copies of the best of our old mp3 libraries. 

Don't think I ever used Napster for my music fix. I remember things like Kazaa, Winmx, Limewire and all the spyware that came along with them. Because of them I was convinced Radiohead did Video Killed the Radio Star since the file I downloaded was labeled as such. Not saying they may not have done a cover, but that clearly wasn't them looking back...

Speaking of Radiohead I think one of my earliest and longest AIM screen names was KnivesInside based on one of 3 Radiohead songs I liked (Knives Out). I think after that I went with radishman on every account that wasn't PW. Imagine if I stayed gone after that early banning. How would we live without my postings?

Man, the Winamp days were so epic. Before the advent of Shazaam, you were so fucking hosed for trying to guess what songs from the radio were called when trying to find them to download. I had the hardest time trying to find Violent Femmes' Big Hands/Blister in the Sun because all I knew or could remember was just that guitar riff. Try searching that in Napster... Fuck you, good luck. This also reminds me of how many mislabeled and misattributed songs I hand back in the day.

Speaking of actual connections... We were a single phone line household growing up, and were a dial-up internet family until like maybe 2000 when a miracle happened and my dad finally caved and got us cable. Those old dial-up noises are still a nostalgia trip for me, but not entirely happy... As they come with the anxiety of praying that my dad wouldn't pick up the phone somewhere else in the house and break the internet connection in the midst of a Starcraft session or worse yet, in the midst of professing my middle school love to my latest crush and then not getting her response before losing my connection.

Oh the good ol' days...

Spending hours downloading the Royal Rumble or something off Limewire only to play it and it be the Chyna sextape. Devastating.

My two stupid internet obsessions in my teens. I’d get hammered and play these in my dorm room and just infuriate my roommate (good friend to this day) to fuck with him.

Badger Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom:


End of Ze World:

My earliest forum into the Internet was in high school. We had Windows 95 computers. The teachers had Windows 98 and I remember at the time thinking that it was grossly unfair that we had less technology than they did. Generally speaking the only site I knew at the time was MSN. But I loved it. I knew jack all about other websites. But it was my first taste of the web and like a hooker to crack I was addicted. My first home computer had a modem that had dialup. The local cable company had a username and password of test test. I leached off that son of a bitch until they upgraded their systems and kicked everyone the hell off. 🤬

So then I went to the library quite often and school of course. Finally after school I got a job, subscribed to the Internet, first through the local cable company (horrible times, if it went lower than 32 degrees you had no Internet access period), periodically checking to see if our phone company was advancing closer to our neighborhood with their Internet service. 2 years later, they did advance, I told the cable company to suck one, and after years of snowy tv reception, finally told them to fuck off for good about 6 years ago. I should reiterate that the rich kids had Internet access from the get go with their $5,000+ laptops that they couldn't get $5 for today. But eventually I got there.

Since I used AOL I wasn't aware of other websites. I thought all I could do was chat, IM and use keywords. Then I was at my neighbors house who was looking up move lists for Mortal Kombat. Of course he wouldn't share how they got his information because "only I can do this" - which basically told me that he was a cunt. That did change things once you find out there's a vast fountain of information. Before it was strategy guides, Nintendo Power and "ask a friend'. Now there's FAQs, Youtube walkthroughs and all sorts of garbage to help a struggling gamer. So lucky.

Also fuck you Chris.

I remember using Netscape Navigator at a friend’s house but couldn’t tell you what we looked up. Probably porn.

When we got our own computer at home I didn’t browse the Internet much, but I used dial-up to play GTA online with a few friends.

I didn’t really discover the internet until high school when someone showed me Homestarrunner.com. Then it was all downhill from there.

Aug 12, 2018 15:30:48 GMT 🤯 said:

Man, the Winamp days were so epic. Before the advent of Shazaam, you were so fucking hosed for trying to guess what songs from the radio were called when trying to find them to download. I had the hardest time trying to find Violent Femmes' Big Hands/Blister in the Sun because all I knew or could remember was just that guitar riff. Try searching that in Napster... Fuck you, good luck. This also reminds me of how many mislabeled and misattributed songs I hand back in the day.

Speaking of actual connections... We were a single phone line household growing up, and were a dial-up internet family until like maybe 2000 when a miracle happened and my dad finally caved and got us cable. Those old dial-up noises are still a nostalgia trip for me, but not entirely happy... As they come with the anxiety of praying that my dad wouldn't pick up the phone somewhere else in the house and break the internet connection in the midst of a Starcraft session or worse yet, in the midst of professing my middle school love to my latest crush and then not getting her response before losing my connection.

Oh the good ol' days...

Shows how far behind I was in Australia, was very happy to have dial up in 2001 😂. I don’t think we got Broadband until 2014.

Have NBN now which is great, horrible roll out time aside.