How did you get on the internet?

Lumeinshin · 2023-08-10T12:15:07+00:00

Somewhat in contrast to @Theory_of_Everything 's thread. What was your earlier memories of using the web like? What did you use it for primarily? Did it co...

Phantasia

I've been on the internet from a very young age. The first time I remember being on the internet was 4 years old and I have been fascinated by it since. When I was 7, my mom moved our family computer into my sisters room and since she was never home basically, that lead me to have a ton of unmoderated computer time, and I found things like newgrounds, youtube, torrenting, and forums. I think the earliest forum I remember being on was the Sega forums.

My first PC was some Dell Dimensions
Crazy how long it's been..

Ross_R

My father took me with him to his work place in the late 90's. Back then internet was far from common in this country, so I was one of the lucky teenage fuckers who was in a rather specific space, that was mostly populated by tech-nerds, students and working men.
I visited some english sites in 2000's, but it was mostly various video-game-cheating related sites, like Action Replay's site, which I visited to, obviously, download codes to punch in into my copy Action Replay for PS2. Ocassionally YouTube, I guess, but not too often.
Then in 2010's or a bit earlier the whole cultural thing started to shift, I learned english - and I moved to english webs. Tried Facebook and Twitter very briefly - my whole Facebook experience was pretty much playing some browser game and talking with some dude who wrote some cool fanfic on fanfiction.net, and then in Twitter I didn't even make a single post before I abandoned that account completely. Encountered some man-made horrors beyond my understanding - mostly via DeviantArt, surprisingly or not. And via those three sites I learned rather quickly that mainstream totally sucks, and I gotta stay in obscure places, like this one.
So, aside from 4chan, starting from 2012 - give or take a year - I pretty much drift from one small forum to another. The only big place where you can find traces of my digital shadow is my YouTube channel, of course. Other than that - I'm a leaf in the wind, and that pretty much sums up my whole online way so far.

sanner

how did i get on the internet? with my computer ha

Toobie

I got on the internet with a pretty good computer at the time, my dad liked having good electronics. Don’t know how early that was anymore. I miss the old internet quite a bit. At least flash. Google and adobe are evil to get rid of such a long lasting program from browsers. I played a lot of flash games around 2005 when I was a kid. And then I started watching YouTube videos of random stuff and LOTS of Lego videos. One that I repeatedly watched was the Lego numa numa video which is probably close to 20 years old now.

Bricky

My dad got a Pentium II system running Windows Me way back when 48kbps dial-up was the best we could do. I was very good at breaking computers due to my curiosity getting the better of me, but I'm able to break them because I'm genuinely retarded. 😛

I did at least get my start in Age of Empires II from it, and I got to see the golden era of Flash/Shockwave games and animations before they were whisked away from me. Simpler times.

Radiant

I started using the internet frequently in middle school, so like 06-08, probably closer to 08. My parents content restricted me to just a couple sites so I mostly used a forum they let me on because it seemed vaguely educational probably (there were a lot of politics nerds on there). I would try to get around the blocker all the time and used a couple other forums and social media sites sometimes as well.

Once the blocker finally got removed in high school, I mostly used IRC and other forum stuff relating to my interests--TTRPGs, Order of the Stick, etc. I got into MBTI for a bit in college and joined forums relating to that, and eventually I joined Tumblr for a bit. In college I started using Facebook frequently also, which I sorta regret. But I'm mostly on discord now.

music liker

When I was small, I would go on the PBS kids website and watch episodes of Dinosaur Train and Wild Kratts. Our family didn't own any headphones, so I would just try to guess what they were saying from context. Around third grade, I discovered YouTube, and in 7th grade, Tumblr and image boards.

friffri

music liker
Your post reminded me that one of my earliest internet memories was also visiting a TV channel's website: Cartoon Network.
I had 2 school friends, they are twins, their uncle repaired computers and he lived on the other side of my road. He had many computers and unlimited broadband internet so, whenever they came to visit him, I would get called and join them to play cartoon network flash games online on their 2(!) computers.

After an hour or so, their aunt would force us to get away from the computers and go outside. Good call from her.

music liker

friffri
yeah, that was a good move on the aunt's part.
your childhood sounds a lot more idyllic than mine was...

Colgatto

My earliest memories of using the internet is to play flash games and watch funny flash animations. I remember being annoyed that most of the good stuff was in english (ESL), and so I learned English on my own in the early 00s.
Around that time, being a huge Kirby fan since I received a Game Boy, I joined the Kirby community forums of my country. At the same time I was getting exposed to the "greatness" of memes from 4chan, which at the time I found both immensely funny and edgy, and made me kind of an insufferable meme-spouter.
One of the biggest happenings I remember was Japan Time, and one motivated member of the Kirby forums took it upon himself to collect all knowledge and spoilers from the early release of Brawl in Japan. This created a huge afflux of new members in the Kirby forums (there was no proper smash community in my country's internet at the time), which over the course of the following months warped the forums in an unliveable mess. It's also around that time a poster In respected stepped out and told me plainly how an unfunny memelord I was, which I cannot thank him enough for.
Quickly after, the community lost all coherence and fractured in pieces, but in the mean time I had made some friends that I still talk to regularly and visit to this day.

Since then I don't think I became really part of an internet community, nowadays I have a hard time connecting to people I can't meet IRL. I use a few interest discord server, but it ain't the same.

Yui

Very, very earliest, probably sometime around 2008 or 2009, when my parents bought our first laptop. I used to play purble place, Solitare, a shoot-the-chicken type of game, and Minesweeper all the time because our internet was very moody, if not working at all, lol. I'm not sure when exactly, but at some point, my cousin, whom I was very close with at the time, found a very fun site for girls to play on and create/dress up their own character. She was hooked on it and got me hooked too. Because I was younger than her, despite liking it a lot, I was way too young to understand or even coherently read most of it, so I usually just ended up watching her play or only using the dress-up part. By the time I got to fully enjoy it, she had already abandoned the game, leaving me on my own to discover and learn everything, and I eventually got pretty active in it's chatroom/chatting culture. While it wasn't particularly enlightening, it was a very fun and memorable time for me, and eventually after the site started dying out and everyone stopped coming online, I felt ready enough to branch out and try other sites, eventually leading me to discover better games and making me interested in PCs and tech in general. This was all between 2011 and 2015.

Reveriemoe

I don't know the exactitude of how, but my first time was on my parents' computer, a Windows XP machine with those classic white speakers, aged 4, which would have been around 2004-2005, hooked up to Madasafish internet. And from then on, I spent time playing a lot of flash games mostly via Andkon Arcade, the first of which was Super Mario 63. As for internet communities specifically, the first interaction I recall took place in the YouTube comments section of I Can't Defeat Airman.

Nuda

Lumeinshin
My dad set me up with Speed Racer's The Great Plan on shockwave.com. that game was the shit, and so was that game engine.
I saw there were more games in the sidebar, and went off to town, then very soon after discovered Roblox and YouTube and Minecraft, and all the bullshit that came with them. Probably ruined my life, ngl. Worse than 4chan did, later.

Nuda

Nuda I was maybe 6, in 2008, at the earliest.

Nah

My sister's friend's older brothers got me started by showing me some websites and funny videos.

YouTube did not exist so instead I got my fix from Macromedia Flash. The main websites that I browsed included well-known ones like Newgrounds (still kicking btw) or AlbinoBlackSheep to trashier places like Ebaumsworld and FunnyJunk. I remember videos like "Ze End of Ze World" or "The Ultimate Showdown".

These weren't the only websites available; the internet was less centralized so there were sites aplenty to watch flash videos with some having me question how the hell my elementary-school self discovered them in the first place. For example, the early 2000s were not a good age to be a stick figure. I remember places like sticksuicide.com or something where you can do a vast array of terrible things to the poor stick people ranging from accidents to executions. There were of course flash videos of these stick figures which could better be described as snuff films. I remember a series that can be seen on YouTube called "Joe Zombie". Try to see how many episodes you can endure before the Shadow-the-Hedgehog edge cuts you too deep.

Just like today, there was nostalgia for the good-ole days even in 2004. A common flash video theme was 16-bit or 8-bit graphics. Instead of psychopathic violence directed at stick figures, you could go berserk on Nintendo characters. There was a game called "Super Mario Rampage" where you're just Mario with a double-barrel mulching the inhabitants of mushroom kingdom in world 1-1. There was also this video themed around The Legend of Zelda 2 where Link goes into all these village houses to bang the women and the video ending in an argument about child support or something.

Other twisted flash games included "Kitten Cannon"....Actually, I'm not sure if I'd call these games. They were more like some macabre curios in the digital space.

I want to emphasize that these flash sites weren't all just childish shock material. Content was never monopolized on a single website and instead was scattered across the web in these small platforms - some more darker than others. There were some genuinely cool but innocent places to discover with people sharing their creations and their feelings of nostalgia for the 8-bit/16-bit eras. I was too young to feel nostalgia at that time. I wonder if the creators of these flash videos would ever think that people would have nostalgia for their works?

Unlike some people on this board, I did get in trouble with my parents. My father found my browsing history and to be honest, I'm not sure if I'd rather find my 8-year old watching porn or find him enacting atrocities in a stick figure execution chamber.

Edgy Gen-X themes were on a different world compared to what we have today. The internet back then was cool.

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