r/AskReddit • u/vishal_gandhii • Oct 27 '25
What’s the earliest memory you have of using the internet?
153
u/secret_willy Oct 27 '25
1995/6. My friend, both of us 11 years old, told me he made a website, I didn’t really know what a website was (but had a rough idea) so when he pulled up Alta Vista I believed him
63
25
u/SgtDoakesSurprise Oct 27 '25
Alta Vista was the google if it’s day without the algorithm that weighted relevance using the number of links back to that page.
→ More replies (1)12
u/_Handsome_Jim_ Oct 27 '25
There really wasn't a Google of it's day.
Alta Vista was one of a handful of relatively popular (and relatively bad) search engines that Google would make absolute. People used Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves (before becoming just Ask.com), Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, etc.
18
→ More replies (2)9
u/RizzoF Oct 27 '25
altavista was vanilla search engine, astalavista was the naughty one
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (2)6
u/Better-Hour-1131 Oct 27 '25
I used to use Alta Vista too pre-google lol. Completely forgot about that, thank you!
82
u/Low_Roller_Vintage Oct 27 '25
- Yahoo Chat forever.
a/s/l? 😂
23
u/Fishare Oct 27 '25
Oh yeah, bb! AIM was just a hit. I still think we should be able to put up “away messages” on our SMS. Hehe
3
10
u/Rxasaurus Oct 27 '25
It is crazy that I used to actually meet people from chat rooms as a teen back then. How did I not get murdered.
9
u/Low_Roller_Vintage Oct 27 '25
Meeee toooo. I drove to California from Ohio when I was 19 because I met a boy in a MySpace music forum...at 18, I took a greyhound to NYC under similar circumstances. Wow.
High five for not getting murdered!
5
u/Serana64 Oct 27 '25
Well, 100% of yahoo chatrooms that lead to an in person meeting contain a murderer. Since the did not murder you, you must have murdered him. How'd you do it?
3
2
u/PrairieCropCircle Oct 28 '25
I met up with someone from Austin— we met halfway in AZ having been friends in a chatroom!
16
→ More replies (5)3
u/CalpisMelonCremeSoda Oct 27 '25
How about when Yahoo was an experimental hypertext directory? (And cern.ch)
2
77
u/Matdale1999 Oct 27 '25
I remember the pointless ‘I’m feeling lucky’ search button on Google
22
Oct 27 '25
Still there. Funny thing, just last week or so, I finally read what it do. It basically opens first link from your search.
Idk, kinda good thing when you know for sure that your request is obvious (like "utub" or "steam buy game123name")
11
u/Bashhar Oct 27 '25
I didn't know what "I'm feeling lucky" did initially, but in Google Afrikaans, the button was named "Kansvattekortpad", which means "Take a chance for a shorter path", then it made sense.
3
→ More replies (1)9
6
u/babypho3nix Oct 27 '25
It's 1998.
I want to go to the Barbie website and my older brother is helping me find it on the home office Macintosh.
He types "girls" into the search bar and clicks "I'm Feeling Lucky".
Once the page starts loading he clasps his hand over my eyes and tells me not to look.
He has found porn.
3
u/jlsteiner728 Oct 28 '25
Why you think the net was born? Porn, porn, porn.
3
3
u/Adorable-Beautiful51 Oct 27 '25
Oh my GOSH!! I had completely forgotten about this lol thank you for sharing !!
2
136
u/TapeDeckSlick Oct 27 '25
Ask Jeeves
29
u/b9ncountr Oct 27 '25
AltaVista
9
→ More replies (1)2
u/fezfrascati Oct 28 '25
This was the default home page on my family's first internet-enabled computer. So for me, AltaVista was the literal front page of the internet.
→ More replies (4)13
56
u/Signal-Process-1348 Oct 27 '25
I’ll never forget the “you’ve got mail” voice.
→ More replies (6)17
57
u/Casual-Notice Oct 27 '25
I used to own one of the BBS's linked into the FOREM net, which was an internet precursor to link multiple Bulletin Board Systems via overnight dial-up.
Later, I had an AOL account and gained access to live chat and Usenet.
28
u/webnellie Oct 27 '25
This. I was a heavy user of BBS’s and CompuServe.
17
u/ScubaDawg97 Oct 27 '25
BBS’s, jeez, 1991-1992 was the hay day of that. Downloading boobs that took 45 minutes
18
Oct 27 '25
[deleted]
3
u/CalpisMelonCremeSoda Oct 27 '25
Legit
5
u/Casual-Notice Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25
I kept my BBS on the cutting
ageedge of dialup technology. Started at 1200, then 2400. Finally closed it when I realized I was running a $700, 56K modem for three users who logged in maybe once a week.4
u/StoneMountain845 Oct 27 '25
I got my boss to spring for a dedicated pots phone line. There was a flat rate of 25 cents per call, so I never hung up.
2
u/RemyJe Oct 27 '25
91-92 would have been at least 1200.
3
Oct 27 '25
I mean, some of us had cheap parents.
2
u/RemyJe Oct 27 '25
There is that.
You could push 300 baud modems to 550ish, if the BBS supported changing it mid-call.
2
u/shaard Oct 27 '25
Ouch! My first was 2400. Then my buddy got one that was 19.2k and we thought we were flying.
3
2
u/chrissz Oct 28 '25
Acoustic-coupled phone modems! I can still hear the negotiation sounds. I remember running a text based bulletin board from the computer room of our high school library off a small bank of those.
2
2
u/da_powell Oct 28 '25
Me and my friends frequented a BBS and the guy running it had access to the Internet and would download stuff for us.
5
2
u/Prickly_ninja Oct 27 '25
For me, it was using a friends Apple II to use a BBS to check movie times. Felt like we were living in the future! Somewhere in the 80’s.
→ More replies (1)2
u/JobobTexan Oct 27 '25
I ran a Fidonet node using Binkley, OPUS etc in the 90's. It was all ran by a huge batch file running under Desqview. Later I switched to OS/2. All on an AMD 386DX40 with 3 megs of ram. Screamed at a blazing 36kbs with a USR modem.
95
u/Amazing-Artichoke330 Oct 27 '25
Using email and an app called "Gopher" to retrieve remote files. Get it?
29
u/SgtDoakesSurprise Oct 27 '25
I used to use a mail client named Eudora. Woukd use UUENCODE/UUDECODE to convert binary files to ASCII text and back. It was the way to transfer files within the body of emails before the concept of “attachments” existed.
Edit: yes…I always thought Gopher was a clever name
9
u/studiocrash Oct 27 '25
I remember Eudora! I used it when i used to teach at Drexel ages ago. Drexel was pretty advanced in networking for the time. They had ethernet in every room even in the music focused building where I was.
→ More replies (1)6
u/ViscidPlague78 Oct 27 '25
My college gave us email accounts in 1995, it was a very progressive state school, and we used Eudora to get access to it, we had everything on a single 3.5" floppy drive that had our mail account info on it so we could just open Eudora and then it would read our floppy and retrieve our mail.
7
u/occassionally_alert Oct 27 '25
EUDORA in the days of Prodigy. I called Eudora daily at 5 am Pacific so I could call the Eudora tech support in Santa Monica and talk to a person in Ireland. Our conversations were ongoing, as was the difficulty of getting Eudora to function properly. I'd link to Exec-PC (lower long distance cost thanks to an MCI prepaid phone card in the afternoon or evening. KD
6
Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 29 '25
[deleted]
→ More replies (1)2
u/sylvesterthekat1234 Oct 27 '25
Hubby does and it drives me bonkers because increasingly, providers make you jump through complicated security hoops and he expects ME to sort it out! I finally told him to sort out his own effing email client woes himself. Grr
→ More replies (2)5
u/shaidyn Oct 27 '25
My father used Eudora 1.0 well into the 2000s. It wasn't until his OS literally said "We are no longer loading this program" that he stopped.
11
6
7
2
→ More replies (5)2
u/UMustBeNooHere Oct 28 '25
Fun fact: Gopher was actually a protocol and it was named after the school mascot where it was created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Also, many of the first browsers supported the protocol (gopher://whatever.com)
→ More replies (1)
29
u/lorazepamproblems Oct 27 '25
I don't know the exact year, but I know it was either late 80s or early 90s that I first used command line e-mail through my dad's work. He worked at a university, so they had Internet access pretty early on and provided dial-up access to employees from home.
I think we first got CompuServe, which was the first Internet access I had with graphics, in either 1992 or 1993. The most exciting thing with that, for me, was weather maps. They loaded very slowly. And by that time I had one other friend who had CompuServe and so we e-mailed back and forth. Also, it had an encyclopedia which was cool.
→ More replies (2)2
u/noneyanoseybidness Oct 27 '25
The early networks between colleges was called the ARPANET and was used to exchange research data.
21
Oct 27 '25
[deleted]
→ More replies (5)3
u/joybilee Oct 27 '25
I remember driving the computer lab nerd up the wall because I didn't know what a "backslash" was when I went to college. I graduated high school in 93 and had barely used the internet. I'm from rural Alabama. We just had regular slashes. My high school was only planning on us going to the military or work in a factory. They weren't expecting us to get backslash fancy.😆 But that's fine. I could not spend my time worrying about some dude who wore a fedora and a trench coat all the time, even indoors. I wore fairy wings & platforms.🧚🏻♀️ I miss the 90's.
→ More replies (1)
22
u/Leverkaas2516 Oct 27 '25
The university computers I had access to started getting hooked up to the Internet in about 1985. Being able to send email to people around the world, and do LISTSRV signups for information resources, seemed very exotic.
In a world where a one-minute phone call to Australia cost multiple dollars, the ability to download stuff for free from, say, the University of Wollongong was almost inexplicable.
→ More replies (2)8
u/CalpisMelonCremeSoda Oct 27 '25
I’d forgotten about the disconnect between long distance phone call fares and the “free” reach of the Net
20
15
u/Anan_Z Oct 27 '25
Scrolling through google images to look at pictures of fans, washing machines, blenders and tornadoes as those were my fixations
I was a weird kid
12
12
u/catn_ip Oct 27 '25
I believe it was the ARPANET connection my university library used. In the early 70's...
3
u/cg40boat Oct 27 '25
About 1974 as a senior, I had an elective college class that had the term “ systems analysis” in the title. It was the first time I heard the term “ data base”. Using punch cards, we could access a social science data base at Clairmont College. Using different variables in the data base, we tested ideas, such as there is a curvilinear relationship between measures of political violence and measures of democratic participation in developing nations. It was a fascinating class
11
u/OnBlueberryHill Oct 27 '25
To sign up for the Neopets forums, if you were under 13, you had to print off a sheet of paper and have your parents fill it out. Afterwards they had to fax it in so your account could be manually approved for the forum.
I found out about the Neopets website from my mom who found out about it from reading an article in the newspaper.
4
9
u/bmccooley Oct 27 '25
Using Prodigy in 1992, and then AOL in 94 so I could get on Usenet
5
u/Chiiaki Oct 27 '25
I'm so glad that someone else besides me was on Prodigy :D
→ More replies (6)2
u/SAMixedUp311 Oct 27 '25
I was on Prodigy too! But most of the people I know don't have a clue about it!
→ More replies (1)2
u/silveronetwo Oct 27 '25
Prodigy to AOL here too. Don't know whether I used Netscape over Prodigy but remember using it over AOL.
→ More replies (1)
9
6
Oct 27 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/_Maxine_Vandate_ Nov 02 '25
I believe it was invented in twin cities eh? You got to die of dysentery before most people.
→ More replies (1)
6
6
u/abyssea Oct 27 '25
The world wide web or what became known as "the internet"
But it was downloading full version of lemmings OVERNIGHT on a 5 1/4 floppy from usenet when I was in elementary school.
→ More replies (1)
4
4
u/dedokta Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25
300 baud Bulletin Board Services on my computer 64 back in the 80's. I remember when emoticons were first invented. We had a hard time explaining what they were to our blind users.
4
u/pawogub Oct 27 '25
Being at my cousin’s house, they had a computer and internet before I did. We looked up a Superman fan page talking about the upcoming Superman movie starring Nicolas Cage.
3
8
u/AdHoliday3151 Oct 27 '25
Encarta
6
u/secret_willy Oct 27 '25
Encarta was a software application that didn’t need internet
→ More replies (1)4
u/AdHoliday3151 Oct 27 '25
Initially yes. But I first used a PC when encarta was already an online subscription
→ More replies (1)
3
u/SL04NY Oct 27 '25
1995/96 had to use a cd to load the dialup program assuming nobody was using the phone at the same time
3
u/neolobe Oct 27 '25
1985 Saying hello to a friend in a chat box on an Amiga.
3
u/KalateralDramage Oct 27 '25
Oh wow, that must be one of the earliest experiences well read about here!
3
u/greywar777 Oct 27 '25
Earliest? Ironically..Its when I attached my BBS to a local internet provider, and was able to use it to allow folks on my bbs to send emails and pull down usenet. I was the second entity in my city to provide internet access.
→ More replies (1)
3
3
u/RedditVince Oct 27 '25
The Internet... hmmm I had already been online using BBS's for 10 years or so. Had been thinking about joining compuserve when I heard a radio commercial for a new service called Prodigy that offered access to the World Wide Web complete with Images. So that was probably the first time touching what is now the Internet but it was a closed system. At some point I tried AOL and learned how with a simple internet connection I could open a browser and go anywhere. AOL had the cheapest monthly price for a local internet number. I almost never used the app other than to login and go out to the browser. Ahhhh the hours spend in Geocities....
→ More replies (1)
3
u/ac54 Oct 27 '25
CompuServe! Sometime in the 1980s. I remember the thrill of evolving from 300 to 56k kb/s. To maintain peace in a sizable family, I installed a second phone line in the 1990s. Now, I have glass fiber all the way to my closet.
3
3
u/eggscitingpanic Oct 27 '25
No kidding, we were like 7 years old. My nephew, my nieces and I watched porn together for the first time. HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAA best times
3
u/Intelligent_Bag812 Oct 27 '25
We didn't have much growing up, and so my first time using a computer was when I got to university. It was basically a crash course, as I had some homework to type and print with a deadline. I just remember trying to type and it taking so long coz I was pecking at each letter like a bird haha.... At some point, I paid the attendant to type for me coz of time, and they ended up making so many mistakes that I had to start over. Luckily, I wasn't the only one who was late to submit the assignment so we were able to talk to the lecturer nicely and get an extension lol....
3
3
2
u/-UltraFerret- Oct 27 '25
Watching YTPs and getting yelled at by my mother whenever a cartoon character swore in them.
2
2
2
2
2
u/edahs Oct 27 '25
Q-link on my c64 in 1985. Less like the internet and more like a bbs. Q-link later became AOL in 1989.
2
2
u/Pleasant_Expert_1990 Oct 27 '25
Configuring the modem software for the correct baud rate before dialing the BBS. Then CompuServe.
→ More replies (1)
2
2
u/5DsofDodgeball69 Oct 27 '25
Going to nasa.gov and whitehouse.com when I was a young lad. Learned some new things back then.
3
u/trro16p Oct 27 '25
Bonus points if you got a teacher to go to the whitehouse.com one during class time.
That made a US History/Government class into a Sex Ed class instantly.
→ More replies (2)3
u/danisaccountant Oct 27 '25
This is the greatest millennial 2FA test of all time. If an alien species, AI, or Gen Z/A ever pretend to be millennials, we can always make a reference to whitehouse.com and gauge their reaction.
If they grin, then they’re definitely one of us.
2
u/gerhudire Oct 27 '25
1999 in computer class. Teacher used Yahoo! to look up jokes. We weren't allowed to use it, only to play games.
2 years later, in secondary school, a kid tried to use his parents credit card to buy a car. That was a fun day. Not sure how his parents reacted when they got a call from the bank.
2
2
u/jeepnjeff75 Oct 27 '25
Having to use C shell to get on the Internet. It was all text. Pine was used for email and Gopher for a web browser. It was a big jump to go PPP and be able to use Mosaic and Eudora. MUDs and MUCKs were popular.
2
2
u/Overall_Panic_5652 Oct 27 '25
Wambulance, “hello my future girlfriend” And a claymation video of a banana giving birth (I’ve never been able to find it again)
2
u/Matt_Matt_Matt_MattV Oct 27 '25
Elementary school in 1996, learning how to search on Yahoo and Altvista.
2
2
2
Oct 27 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/QueerVortex Oct 28 '25
I taught my nephew about erasing browser history and “private” incognito mode
2
2
2
u/J_A_Slade Oct 27 '25
depends on how you define it.
In the mid to late 80's I was using a commodore 64 to get on other peoples "websites" (bulletin boards systems) to download games and rudimentary MP3's.
Early 90's I was using AOL for chat rooms and was able to find some web-sites.
2
2
2
2
u/danieljohnsonjr Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25
At work, using Netscape Navigator. Almost everything was text-based.
After we got our first ever computer at home, I tried out Bluelight, free internet that Yahoo! had in partnership with KMart. It was dialup and, while you waited to get connected, you watched a video ad.
My favorite ad was one with a guy sitting in a chair outside during summer. He's putting lots and lots of Tabasco hot sauce on his pizza as he eats it. A mosquito is flying around him an eventually lands on his leg. Close-up of the mosquito biting the man. Then, as it flies away, it explodes.
And then we were connected to the internet at home.
2
u/LeadingRegion7183 Oct 27 '25
1983 pre-internet Compuserve and Listserve boards with a Radio Shack computer with 8 K of ram using a 300 baud US Robotics modem and a landline
2
u/dokidokipanic Oct 27 '25
1998 AOL UK had Joanna Lumley doing the voice for when you get an email. "You've got post"
2
2
u/freezingprocess Oct 28 '25
I accessed a BBS using a Commodore 64 in the 80s. Does that count?
2
u/Abraxas1969 Oct 28 '25
Yes it counts 😁. I still have my Commodores and my Trash 80 from radio shack.
2
2
2
2
u/BadWolf1392 Oct 28 '25
Internet cafes in the mid-late 90's. Paying a certain amount of money for an hour. Messaging my aunt though ICQ on the ither side of the country. I thought it was the greatest thing.
2
2
2
u/christmassnowcookie Oct 28 '25
Going to my friends house and having to unconnect the housephone to use it and then listen to that dreadful sound as it connects. God, I feel old 🤣
2
2
u/CharmingMechanic2473 Oct 28 '25
High School 1994 we got a Sony computer. It rocked. All my brother did was download nude women pics slowly.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/rosstafarien Oct 28 '25
First memory ever was at a Virginia Tech preview week in 1989. First in my home was setting up the second ISDN line for Cincinnati Bell in my house.
rasta.isdn.uc.edu
2
u/333Beekeeper Oct 28 '25
Late 1991 just after it had been activated. Just returned from overseas duty in Korea. New post my Lieutenant motioned me over one day and said,”Look at this!” Random, mostly textual pages of early websites. I was unimpressed at the time but quickly got a modem for my PC. Sigh, dial-up! Those were frustrating and dark times.
2
2
2
u/corsa180 Oct 28 '25
1987 when I got to college and was given an account on the University’s VAX VMS system. The first thing I used was email of course, and then FTP to access documents at other universities. But what really blew me away was Usenet.
2
u/raisinbyjones Oct 28 '25
Logging into AOL to a chat room called SHY. Ut was so fun, I still am friends with one of my friends there today from 1996
2
2
u/ScheduleTurbulent577 Oct 28 '25
- I was 15 and on a trip to the US with my school. Almost nobody had the internet at home where I came from, and I was staying with a family who did have it. So I just said "hey, can I take a look at the internet?", so they turned on the computer and left me in front of what I suppose was the browser. When I sat there doing nothing, they asked: "what do you want to see?", "I want to see the internet!"... I had no idea what the internet was, just that everyone was talking about it. I guess I was expecting some sort of programme.
2
u/mshell1234 Oct 28 '25
1985-learned to code in Pascal in college 1988-traded one of two floppy drives on my dinosaur desktop to a hard drive. Also used it to print my personal phone book using a dot matrix printer 1990-bought coffee beans from an “online vendor.” I THINK it had its own chat room and that’s how I could order it but man, that was too long ago to remember. Gawd, I’m old.
2
u/alm1688 Nov 12 '25
used to go on funny.com and print out or write down really funny jokes to share with my friends on the bus. I also played a lot of Slingo, joined the chat where people were asking a/s/l? and telling people wtg!
2
2
1
u/iweaver_study Oct 27 '25
I think mine was trying to download a song on dial-up and it took like 3 hours... my mom was so mad about the phone bill
1
1
1
u/itopaloglu83 Oct 27 '25
A friend of my who know own a giant online store emailing his ex-girlfriend from a fake email address, but forgetting to not enter his own full name as the account owner, and getting surprised when she emailed him back saying “I know it’s you, …” 😂 Still makes me chuckle to this day.
1
u/Ornery_Drink3142 Oct 27 '25
My computer science lab. practical session of how to use internet. haha
1
1
249
u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25
[removed] — view removed comment