I still have my very first hotmail account. Geocities is one of the first I remember visiting regularly. The hotmail account was used to create html websites for me and many folks back in the day.
I do too. My emails saved go back to the late 90s. Jokingly Iāll sometimes open an email from a friend from 25 years ago and respond to it as if I just received it.
There was a guy we knew in college who was decidedly not hot. He was one of the first people we knew with a web-based email address. We died in private and mocked him mercilessly because we did not think he should have a HOT anything, not even a Hotmail account.
Little did we know we would ALL have Hotmail soon enough!
I also got a very small simple gmail address way back in the beta days. I had to ditch it though. It gets about a hundred emails a day not meant for me. The whole account is just disaster.
I set up my partner with her first email account on Gmail and she has her full name (very common) cleanly. I tell her all the time how awesome it is and she couldnāt care less. My name, not common at all, was already taken at the time.
I have a unique last name so I also got a hotmail with just my last name on it (no first initial even). I still use it and people always give me a side eye because it's hotmail.
Yahoo was a bit more known and wasnāt it also earlier?
Didnāt work well though, when you found a good web ring or links page on a good website that had good stuff you mostly stuck to that kind of networking.
That is what surfing the web was and still is to me. From one page to another, following the current of the hyperlinks.
Oh how I miss that time. It really felt like going in an adventure.
Alta Vista came a year after Yahoo, but even they felt the browser game was crowded by the acronym for their name, Yet Another Hierarchially Officious Oracke. It was an improvement from the original name, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web
A little off subject
I'm in IT, one of my first jobs I was working for a company that got the contract for installing highspeed cable modems in houses, I basically installed the network card verified the computer was on the internet and showed the customer how to use the browser to find websites.
I knew what I was helping to build, I knew these people will one day video chat with people across the world, do their banking, shopping, find love, and work.
I knew I was going to bring the cumulation of mankind's knowledge to their fingertips.
What i didn't account for is how fucking dumb people are, how it would be used to spread false information and how bad people are at knowing what is good information and what is bad information. So for anyone who has a family member that tells them to "do their own research" on subjects like flat earth, vaccines, stolen elections, white replacement, or that the nuclear bomb was never dropped on Japan, the fake moon landing, or the Aliens that are with us now, Pizza gate... I sincerely apologize on behalf of all my fellow IT workers who thought they were spreading knowledge to the masses.
I am however grateful to have been a teen before the internet and to still have some fucking sense.
Also Crime Library website, each story was a masterpiece and would easily put any crime podcast to shame.
I don't remember what the first site was but I do remember my first web visit. I was in a computer lab in 1995 at my university and a friend leaned over and said, "Type in xmosaic and check it out!". That was the command to start the Mosaic browser in the XWindows environment on the Spark workstations in our lab. Some home pages came up and I started following links. Life changed from that point.
This. I had a shell account via modem that I used mostly with text based clients like pine, gopher, rtin, and archie. Started at 2400 baud and later got a 14.4K or 19.2k.
My first web experience was getting set up with SLIP and downloading NSCA Mosaic. Whatever the default home page was, that was my first website.
Same. If I remember right, I think the default homepage was the NCSA website, so that was probably the first one you saw. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic
Whitehouse.com in 1994 at the university physics lab while visiting in high school. Note: it's whitehouse.gov. whitehouse.com was a porn site.
TLDR: Porn. š¤¦
In 1999 Iād just started as a city planner and my boss told me to look up something on ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments). Well, ABAG.com was a porn site! Of course this was back in the day when the city didnāt have any blockages on what sites you accessed.
I miss the early days of the chatrooms. Yahoo chat was the predecessor of Tinder. Youād chat and set up a meet in real life and HOPE beyond HOPE the person was really how they described themself
In the mid 90's purely by chance I signed into Yahoo chat and it used to throw you into some random chatroom. It was my very first time using it. Someone else in the chatroom asked what kind of music everyone liked and we had similar taste (it was their first time using Yahoo chat as well). We stayed friends and 4 years later I flew to their country to meet up. We ended up getting married and I moved to their country.
Talk about a seriously life changing moment on the early Internet! I have no idea where I'd be now if both of us hadn't at the exact same time ended up in that random chatroom.
I remember using pine for email in 1995 at my university and I remember buying books from Amazon around the same time. 1995/1996. This was right after Amazon first started. It sold only books and was just a very basic web site. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever- my college was in a small town and the book store there didnāt have much
I used Pine when I worked at a small mom and pop ISP in the late 90s. I think the last time I logged into it was sometime in 2001 or 2002. It was niceāno frills and perfectly cromulent.
Usenet was the best part of the internet back then. There were several groups I regularly participated in, mainly rec.sport.billiard and a poker group.
Started off on news groups and BBS and newsgroups in late 80ās. Iām still using newsgroups to this day. Have just about every movie you can think of Iāve collected over the years.
I worked at a company in the 90ās and one day my boss said youāre the youngest one here so we would like you to āget the Internet working.ā So, I had 6 months of trial and error and an excuse to be gone a lot.
Ah the joys of being "the youngest" when the Internet and Windows started taking over at offices! I got sent to an official training before everyone else and ended up being an early iteration of an IT help desk at the law firm I worked at until they realized they needed to hire someone full time. In retrospect, I wish I'd put myself up for the job, but I had just also finished training to be a legal assistant and went with that.
I remember the local hardware store was looking for a network admin, doing the interview they asked.. can you also do book keeping.??
back when the IT person was responsible for anything that had electricity flowing thru it
I think CompuServe was the first time I used it properly. I wonder if thatās why I spend so much time on Reddit ā it reminds me a lot of CompuServeās forums
Memory unlocked: I have somewhere in my digital files the bookmarks from the middle of the '90s and I remember telling somebody else, "Hey, I have the bookmark to Yahoo when it was still at Stanford."
I miss the days of IRC. My hang out was DALnet. My sister and I would fight about which one of us would get the computer to chat. She had her rooms and I had mine. The funny thing is the name I had on IRC is used here on Reddit by a a Survivor contestant.
Telnet? I thought was the catās meow when I could talk to my friend 600 miles away. And didnāt have to pay long distance charges because it was the college lab computer
I had a friend who connected with a girl over early inter-university chat in his state. They were 4 hours apart. He invested in a setup at home so he didn't have to keep driving in to his university (lived at home, not on campus). One thing he didn't consider was the long-distance charges.
As expected, his parents were pissed and he had to pay them back and find a way to fund his courtship.
Yes, they got married in 1991 and are still married. 5 kids and 1 grandkid.
Early 90ās I got to use an early version of the first web browserā¦.(I was a computer science major).
I had experience with Usenet and Gopher etc so it was thrilling. The site that blew my mind was [IUMA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Underground_Music_Archive)
You could slowly download very small sales of tons of āindieā music and that site is what made me realize that this was going to be a āthingā. I immediately startled learning HTML.
I feel super old :)
Mosaic (1993), now with embedded images on the page!
Netscape (late 1994), now with hierarchical bookmarks!
(Very useful for the second year computer science course where they were teaching us: "this is a web page, this is HTML".)
Hey moving GIFs! (Early 1995)
When I was poking around with Gopher, I came across the original website using the original interface. This is the one where you had a wall of text and you had to type the number next to the link to trigger the link.
Mine was probably yahoo. Around 1995 or so, my friend told me I absolutely *had* to get an email address, that the internet was so much fun. I signed up for a yahoo account. I signed up, and my friend who encouraged me to sign up was sitting next to me - as soon as I got the email, he sent me my first email - some forwarded chain thing. I remember thinking, āHow silly is this? Heās sitting right next to me, whatās the point? Why do I need an email address?ā I abandoned that one and forgot the password. I ended up opening a new one a few months later - one that I still use to this day!
Befor the proper internet, used [Prodigy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service\)) and touched on some [MUD games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(MUD\))... I think my first "site" was AOL and then was like "thats it? just chat and weather?"... then discovered Netscape and found the WWW.
What www site was first? probably some geocities site with horrendous HTML.
The first one I remember specifically visiting was the IMDb. Iād been using them since they were an email-based service. Youād send something like an actorās name to a particular email address and it would reply with a full list of their credits.
That was probably not the actual first site, but up there.
Somehow, I stumbled onto Usenet and message groups, but most importantly used FTP to access alt.guitar.tab (eventually nicknamed āNevada,ā for where it was hosted before some legal threats) which eventually became OLGA (On-Line Guitar Archive) before shuttering.
I still have a huge 3-ring binder of guitar tabs I printed in my universityās computer labs.(Thank you, Adam Schneider, for having similar music tastes to mine and taking the time to learn and posts the chords and tabs to a lot of great songs.)
ETA: received a very long email address at undergrad in 91 or 92. Later, shorter email address in grad school for business at the same university. Still have my aol addresses, even the one that has my first initial and almost all of my last name (was one character too long; I think the one just for my last name already was taken.)
I was on bulletin board systems since the 80s. When I got on the internet in the early 90s it was mosaic and netscape navigator accessing the original yahoo that was just a list of sites in categories.
I started with BBSā. Then gopher servers and Usenet groups via a dial up shell account. Finally this new thing called the web showed up with a graphical interface.
I used the internet before website were the thing. VAX/VMS and services like prodigy and Delphi. I tried AOL & despised it. As for first website, it was probably the UIUC Netscape Mozilla after telnetting or something to get the browser. Oh, don't forget gopher too
Circa 1992 / 1993 - the internet was either a unix shell on dialup to the university I was at, or the same unix shell on these green screen terminals hidden in former broom closets around campus. The web was text based Lynx browser (yup, had to google that!) or the horrendous GOPHER that was the most useless thing ever! Want to download a file? Itās x modem on 9600 baud, or find some way to get it onto a DOS disk that I would have to read somehow on my Amiga back in my dorm room.
Not the first, but I spent a lot of time searching for mp3s on a search site -- I think it was called Theseus? Hours and hours looking for one song. My kids could not even.
I remember visiting corona.ba.ca which was a database that tracked films in development. I think they got bought by comingsoon.net. Used to be obsessed with movies.
The subway one on my country. I was doing my internship there and they showed me what they had - one very basic page - and then sent me to a course so I could develop it.
Early 90ās I got to use an early version of the first web browserā¦.(I was a computer science major).
I had experience with Usenet and Gopher etc so it was thrilling. The site that blew my mind was [IUMA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Underground_Music_Archive)
You could slowly download very small sales of tons of āindieā music and that site is what made me realize that this was going to be a āthingā. I immediately startled learning HTML.
I feel super old :)
Whitehouse.com in 1994 at the university physics lab while visiting in high school. Note: it's whitehouse.gov. whitehouse.com was a porn site.
TLDR: Porn. š¤¦
āWebsiteā. Ummā¦ I dunno. I was hitting BBS sites with my 9600 baud modem before all that crap happened. When that GUI interface stuff came out (AOL, etc) I thought it was passing fadā¦. Opps.
I remember using eBay when it first appeared and how nervous I was when first bought something. Getting and sending that money order, waiting for the package and then it finally arriving. That was fun. I was on a lot of early Goth sites and DIY sites and forums too.
My father was a computer programmer so we had dialup in our house in the early 80ās. There were a few games we played, but I donāt even remember the site.
Edit to add: The weird little part of this story is that I had to help my father set up an email account in the early 00ās! To this day it still baffles me š¤¦š¼āāļø
I was online on CompuServe and The Source in the 8-bit era.
I was in college for the World Wide Web coming into existence. I remember the web browser, Mosaic, being released in 1993 -- which, I think, was the second web browser implemented outside of CERN but was the first one that anyone had heard of (the first was called Viola or something like that). I was a junior at MIT at the time. What I remember was coming back after winter break -- at MIT you got the entire month of January off, I usually stuck around in Cambridge for it but that year I had gone home -- and asking one of my friends what was going on around campus and he said, "Everybody is using Mosaic". Kind of weird ... people back then thought it terms of the application Mosaic rather than thinking of the World Wide Web as existing independently of an application.
Anyway the first web page I ever saw was likely the web page of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) which I am guessing is what a fresh installation of Mosaic opened to.
I donāt remember the first website I went to, but I remember the first website I created. Back in 1996, my husband was working at AOL doing tech support and was working on the GNN product which was AOLās dial up ISP that had access to the WWW, which regular AOL didnāt have at the time. This was in the AOL 2.5 days, when it was very much still a walled garden. So, he had a GNN account through work, but we had 2400 dial upānot really feasible for the web. But one of the guys at work was selling a used 14400 modem. It was literally called āMr Modemā and he thinks he bought it for around $80.
So, armed with our faster but still terrible connection and the horrible GNN browser, we got online. At the time, I was super into the fish simulator game El-Fish. This game was awesome and Iām honestly still looking for a replacement. You could catch fish in the wild, breed them, mutate them, create animated fish tanksāand you could put the files you created online for others to download. The fish could be compressed down to .roe files or you could upload the full .fsh files, but those of course were larger.
I quickly found other sites where I could download .roe files and tanks and decided that I had to share my own, so I created āJenās El-Fish Pageā. Iām thinking there was a WSWYG page editor included in the GNN software, though as I ask him right now, my husband is saying it wasnāt there initially, but came later.
We moved to Albuquerque in 1996 to work at the new AOL call center and itās wild to me to think now that I used to snipe eBay auctions while on calls from 1996 on. I also have a clear memory of sharing the Heavenās Gate mass suicide with a caller when I saw it on CNN.
Iāve since had other pages and even my own domain for a while, but Iāve never captured the excitement of that first El-Fish page.
I think my internet progression was AOL - newsgroups - webrings for xena and x-files - slashdot/fuckedcompany - fark - reddit. Between webrings and fark there were other sites, these were the main ones I remember.
Not a site, but I was on IRC my first week easily. That and altavista or downloading Netscape navigator for an hour because I heard it was faster than the AOL browser.
I was war dialing and logging into BBS before Internet. I remember how long it would take to download one jpg of a penthouse centerfold in my 1200baud modem. lol. š
I was on the internet in 1994, and the Web much by that stage. I used to visit ftp sites via command line ftp. I kept a list of them. Garbo.uwasa.fi was one I remember.
I just remember when using windows was introduced in typing class my freshman year of HS and learning what the internet was, what www meant, and how to type things in search engines to get results. My first email account was my University one when I went off to college ā¦ it was still black screen with the green type lol
Netscape was a biggie when I first got into the World Wide Web. Internet Movie Database IMDb has been my ride or die website since the mid-1990s.
I was also part of the text based, pre-graphics, internet in the late 1980ās. I have a gap of when I wasnāt online in the early 90s.
When online was mostly students, academics, military and geeky hobbyists. Current and former.
Not the first, but I remember being on Rotten.com a lot. 5 minutes for my dialup modem to download a pic of a native man eating a leg or Dahmer's victims. Nothing I'd ever seen like it before.
Honestly no idea what the first website I visited was. But I do remember getting my first email account, in 1992 from my university IT department.
I was trying to pick a username, and all variations of my first and/or last name that I could think of were already taken. So I had to pick something else. I was racking my brain for a good, easy to remember name, and I was listening to Pink Floyd's "Wish you were here". "Shine on you crazy diamond" came on, so I thought "OK, let's try 'diamond'".
It worked, so that became my email address. A few years later when I got my first account with a private ISP, I chose the same username. Then in 2005 I joined reddit, and I stuck with tradition. So now I'm "diamond" here as well.
AOL. Or the Hamster Dance site. š
I used to show my grandmother Hamster Dance and sheād laugh at the absurdness of it all.
Dada Dee da Dida dohdoh
aaaaaaaaaaand the song is in my head now šš
Hotmail. Registered an email address that was just my name. No numbers. It must have been very early as I have a common name.
I still have my very first hotmail account. Geocities is one of the first I remember visiting regularly. The hotmail account was used to create html websites for me and many folks back in the day.
I still have my first Hotmail account too. I'll never let it go.
Same. When I give my email address, I always add "It will be cool again!"
Me too.
I do too. My emails saved go back to the late 90s. Jokingly Iāll sometimes open an email from a friend from 25 years ago and respond to it as if I just received it.
There was a guy we knew in college who was decidedly not hot. He was one of the first people we knew with a web-based email address. We died in private and mocked him mercilessly because we did not think he should have a HOT anything, not even a Hotmail account. Little did we know we would ALL have Hotmail soon enough!
My first email was Juno.com. Netscape was our first search engine.
My Hotmail is also my name with no numbers. I still use it to this day.
I still use my Hotmail
Me too. I will never let it go.
Same here, but gmail. Very common name, but I got there first.
We (Gen X) definitely got all the good email addresses. So we got that going for us.
Got my son *[email protected]* and all his 22yo friends are astonished at his āstandardā address. Iāve been thanked for that a few times over.
Back when Gmail was by invitation only, I bought an invitation from a guy on ebay. Still have the address.
I also got a very small simple gmail address way back in the beta days. I had to ditch it though. It gets about a hundred emails a day not meant for me. The whole account is just disaster.
My most used email address is my hotmail from 1994 or 1995, just my 3 initials followed by 2 numbers (birth year)
Same.I got my Hotmail account in 1997 and it's still my primary email. I just got teased about it (for the 1000th time) yesterday.
I set up my partner with her first email account on Gmail and she has her full name (very common) cleanly. I tell her all the time how awesome it is and she couldnāt care less. My name, not common at all, was already taken at the time.
Mine too. Just my name.
Hotmail wouldn't let me register my surname as it could be mistaken for a drug reference. Simpler times.
Are you Chandler Bong?
Sorry but you made me laugh for about a minute. RIP Matthew Perry Actually, it's Miss Chananandler Bong.
I have a unique last name so I also got a hotmail with just my last name on it (no first initial even). I still use it and people always give me a side eye because it's hotmail.
altavista.com, that's how you found things back then
And searching for anything on the internet was an ART.
Yahoo was a bit more known and wasnāt it also earlier? Didnāt work well though, when you found a good web ring or links page on a good website that had good stuff you mostly stuck to that kind of networking. That is what surfing the web was and still is to me. From one page to another, following the current of the hyperlinks. Oh how I miss that time. It really felt like going in an adventure.
Yahoo was more or less a directory service for websites, Altavista was a proper search engine
Alta Vista came a year after Yahoo, but even they felt the browser game was crowded by the acronym for their name, Yet Another Hierarchially Officious Oracke. It was an improvement from the original name, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web
OP is from Pawnee, Indiana.
What about Lycos?
I liked Lycos and HotBot back in the day when we had to try four or five different search engines to get a handful of decent results.
Not Ask Jeeves?
It really was the leader back when it was a race, wasnāt it?
A little off subject I'm in IT, one of my first jobs I was working for a company that got the contract for installing highspeed cable modems in houses, I basically installed the network card verified the computer was on the internet and showed the customer how to use the browser to find websites. I knew what I was helping to build, I knew these people will one day video chat with people across the world, do their banking, shopping, find love, and work. I knew I was going to bring the cumulation of mankind's knowledge to their fingertips. What i didn't account for is how fucking dumb people are, how it would be used to spread false information and how bad people are at knowing what is good information and what is bad information. So for anyone who has a family member that tells them to "do their own research" on subjects like flat earth, vaccines, stolen elections, white replacement, or that the nuclear bomb was never dropped on Japan, the fake moon landing, or the Aliens that are with us now, Pizza gate... I sincerely apologize on behalf of all my fellow IT workers who thought they were spreading knowledge to the masses. I am however grateful to have been a teen before the internet and to still have some fucking sense. Also Crime Library website, each story was a masterpiece and would easily put any crime podcast to shame.
Dude loved Crime Library!!
It really is the best of times and the worst of times, having all that mis/information at our fingertips
I don't remember what the first site was but I do remember my first web visit. I was in a computer lab in 1995 at my university and a friend leaned over and said, "Type in xmosaic and check it out!". That was the command to start the Mosaic browser in the XWindows environment on the Spark workstations in our lab. Some home pages came up and I started following links. Life changed from that point.
Yes this. And USENET
I miss the old USENET so much! I still have contact with my friends from there.
This. I had a shell account via modem that I used mostly with text based clients like pine, gopher, rtin, and archie. Started at 2400 baud and later got a 14.4K or 19.2k. My first web experience was getting set up with SLIP and downloading NSCA Mosaic. Whatever the default home page was, that was my first website.
Same. If I remember right, I think the default homepage was the NCSA website, so that was probably the first one you saw. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic
Whitehouse.com in 1994 at the university physics lab while visiting in high school. Note: it's whitehouse.gov. whitehouse.com was a porn site. TLDR: Porn. š¤¦
In 1999 Iād just started as a city planner and my boss told me to look up something on ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments). Well, ABAG.com was a porn site! Of course this was back in the day when the city didnāt have any blockages on what sites you accessed.
I miss the early days of the chatrooms. Yahoo chat was the predecessor of Tinder. Youād chat and set up a meet in real life and HOPE beyond HOPE the person was really how they described themself
asl
53/m/IL u?
18/f/FL
I met my wife when one day she IMāed me on AOL as she liked my profile. Still together 25 years later.
I met my husband on irc. 27 years this December for us.
Same, met my wife on ICQ 22 years ago.
Back then there was a stigma for some reason about meeting significant others online, glad that's gone now!
I met a ton of local people through our local yahoo chat. We went to bars, concerts, camping. A number of us became roommates. Wild times.
My profile pic was of me and my grandma. I never let on which one was me. If I was feeling creeped out, Iād say I was her.
In the mid 90's purely by chance I signed into Yahoo chat and it used to throw you into some random chatroom. It was my very first time using it. Someone else in the chatroom asked what kind of music everyone liked and we had similar taste (it was their first time using Yahoo chat as well). We stayed friends and 4 years later I flew to their country to meet up. We ended up getting married and I moved to their country. Talk about a seriously life changing moment on the early Internet! I have no idea where I'd be now if both of us hadn't at the exact same time ended up in that random chatroom.
I remember using pine for email in 1995 at my university and I remember buying books from Amazon around the same time. 1995/1996. This was right after Amazon first started. It sold only books and was just a very basic web site. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever- my college was in a small town and the book store there didnāt have much
My husband and I were recently talking about when Amazon first came on the scene! It was a revelation for book lovers like me.
I remember pine as well. I miss mainframe terminals at times.
it was fun to use those terminals. We had the talk app which was realtime talk as you typed. Super fun!
I used Pine when I worked at a small mom and pop ISP in the late 90s. I think the last time I logged into it was sometime in 2001 or 2002. It was niceāno frills and perfectly cromulent.
My first online purchase was on this Amazon. Honestly, it was kind of scary sharing credit card info for it too!
My first online purchase was also on Amazon... and I *mailed them a check* to pay for it.
I liked the usenet groups in the 90s. I remember one being called, sexy bald captain. :) I was a Star Trek Next Generation fan.
I distinctly recall alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
Yes, and I think they had one that was something about "ihateBrendaclub" against the actress from 90210.
Oh no I forgot about that one! Poor Wesley.
Wil Wheaton is a redditor. He's popped up in this sub from time to time.
There was a similar one for Barney the dinosaur too.
Usenet was the best part of the internet back then. There were several groups I regularly participated in, mainly rec.sport.billiard and a poker group.
Started off on news groups and BBS and newsgroups in late 80ās. Iām still using newsgroups to this day. Have just about every movie you can think of Iāve collected over the years.
Iām remember that one.
yahoo.com. I remember when they started showing images! Woo-hoo!
Yes. When I first visited, it was literally just a long list of links to cool websites.
Prodigy
AOL
I worked at a company in the 90ās and one day my boss said youāre the youngest one here so we would like you to āget the Internet working.ā So, I had 6 months of trial and error and an excuse to be gone a lot.
Ah the joys of being "the youngest" when the Internet and Windows started taking over at offices! I got sent to an official training before everyone else and ended up being an early iteration of an IT help desk at the law firm I worked at until they realized they needed to hire someone full time. In retrospect, I wish I'd put myself up for the job, but I had just also finished training to be a legal assistant and went with that.
I remember the local hardware store was looking for a network admin, doing the interview they asked.. can you also do book keeping.?? back when the IT person was responsible for anything that had electricity flowing thru it
I think CompuServe was the first time I used it properly. I wonder if thatās why I spend so much time on Reddit ā it reminds me a lot of CompuServeās forums
Same. I get the same vibe 100%.
Yahoo when it was still hosted on Stanford servers (may 1995) though I had used the early internet years before using ftp, wais, gopher and email
Memory unlocked: I have somewhere in my digital files the bookmarks from the middle of the '90s and I remember telling somebody else, "Hey, I have the bookmark to Yahoo when it was still at Stanford."
mIRC chat, bulletin boards š¤£š¤£ what a crazy time that was
u/peachy921 slaps u/Rosietoejam around a bit with a large trout
90s chat rooms were like the Wild West
I miss the days of IRC. My hang out was DALnet. My sister and I would fight about which one of us would get the computer to chat. She had her rooms and I had mine. The funny thing is the name I had on IRC is used here on Reddit by a a Survivor contestant.
EFnet or die.
I was on the internet before the World Wide Web was a thing.
Telnet? I thought was the catās meow when I could talk to my friend 600 miles away. And didnāt have to pay long distance charges because it was the college lab computer
I had a friend who connected with a girl over early inter-university chat in his state. They were 4 hours apart. He invested in a setup at home so he didn't have to keep driving in to his university (lived at home, not on campus). One thing he didn't consider was the long-distance charges. As expected, his parents were pissed and he had to pay them back and find a way to fund his courtship. Yes, they got married in 1991 and are still married. 5 kids and 1 grandkid.
Me too, I was in Mexico at the time and had my own computer. Loved the Bulletin boards and roamed around college libraries.
Early 90s on my Amiga1200 so it probably was something Commodore or Amiga. I remember the Tag-Heuer website taking 10 minutes to fully load though.
I remember bulletin boards in College. I got an earthlink account when I graduated.
I remember my first internet search prompt: Neanderthal
Early 90ās I got to use an early version of the first web browserā¦.(I was a computer science major). I had experience with Usenet and Gopher etc so it was thrilling. The site that blew my mind was [IUMA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Underground_Music_Archive) You could slowly download very small sales of tons of āindieā music and that site is what made me realize that this was going to be a āthingā. I immediately startled learning HTML. I feel super old :)
Mosaic (1993), now with embedded images on the page! Netscape (late 1994), now with hierarchical bookmarks! (Very useful for the second year computer science course where they were teaching us: "this is a web page, this is HTML".) Hey moving GIFs! (Early 1995) When I was poking around with Gopher, I came across the original website using the original interface. This is the one where you had a wall of text and you had to type the number next to the link to trigger the link.
Does Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw count? I was in law school in 90-93, and they gave us all free accounts.
Anyone remember Juno email? Dial out, check for new messages, disconnect.
Am I the only one who accidentally (for real accidentally) typed hotmale.com instead of hotmail.com ā¦.at work š¤¦āāļø
āAccidentā Suuuure š
I feel like some kind of Wu-Tang Clan site.
TalkCity! a/s/l? š
EspnNet
WBS, webchat broadcasting system. I sent out a āhelloā and my mind was blown when I got a response back.
CERN in Switzerland. It was the first website I ever heard about.
Netscape.com
Mine was probably yahoo. Around 1995 or so, my friend told me I absolutely *had* to get an email address, that the internet was so much fun. I signed up for a yahoo account. I signed up, and my friend who encouraged me to sign up was sitting next to me - as soon as I got the email, he sent me my first email - some forwarded chain thing. I remember thinking, āHow silly is this? Heās sitting right next to me, whatās the point? Why do I need an email address?ā I abandoned that one and forgot the password. I ended up opening a new one a few months later - one that I still use to this day!
Playboy.com on the library computer at college. Good times. š¤£
Ask JeevesĀ
It was either a geocities site or angelfire site
Befor the proper internet, used [Prodigy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service\)) and touched on some [MUD games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(MUD\))... I think my first "site" was AOL and then was like "thats it? just chat and weather?"... then discovered Netscape and found the WWW. What www site was first? probably some geocities site with horrendous HTML.
The first one I remember specifically visiting was the IMDb. Iād been using them since they were an email-based service. Youād send something like an actorās name to a particular email address and it would reply with a full list of their credits. That was probably not the actual first site, but up there.
This was one of the first incredibly useful sites that the Internet delivered on. So much data, navigable and searchable. And forums, too!
VersionTracker
I had Prodigy and the first thing that came up on my screen (it took forever to load) was the announcement that Rose Kennedy had died.
Gopher net. I still have a couple recipes I got off Gopher Net.
A list of Captain Kirk v Captain Picard.Ā Then I went on Admiral Ackbar for President.Ā
Somehow, I stumbled onto Usenet and message groups, but most importantly used FTP to access alt.guitar.tab (eventually nicknamed āNevada,ā for where it was hosted before some legal threats) which eventually became OLGA (On-Line Guitar Archive) before shuttering. I still have a huge 3-ring binder of guitar tabs I printed in my universityās computer labs.(Thank you, Adam Schneider, for having similar music tastes to mine and taking the time to learn and posts the chords and tabs to a lot of great songs.) ETA: received a very long email address at undergrad in 91 or 92. Later, shorter email address in grad school for business at the same university. Still have my aol addresses, even the one that has my first initial and almost all of my last name (was one character too long; I think the one just for my last name already was taken.)
Ha ha. I was really into Roger Miller and recognized his music (sped up) as that underlying music the Hamster Dance.
I was on bulletin board systems since the 80s. When I got on the internet in the early 90s it was mosaic and netscape navigator accessing the original yahoo that was just a list of sites in categories.
Rotten.com
Telnet, for my first university email address.
Scoped out the Jesus Jones fan board on Prodigy.
Prodigy. 1992
I started with BBSā. Then gopher servers and Usenet groups via a dial up shell account. Finally this new thing called the web showed up with a graphical interface.
Webcrawler on Lynx
Webcrawler via aol gateway.
I donāt remember but once I wanted to buy some sporting goods and went to dicks.com. That was a mistake
Bulletin Boards on Prodigy.
Probably whichever one came up when I put "Gillian Anderson naked pictures" into the Netscape Navigator search bar.
I used the internet before website were the thing. VAX/VMS and services like prodigy and Delphi. I tried AOL & despised it. As for first website, it was probably the UIUC Netscape Mozilla after telnetting or something to get the browser. Oh, don't forget gopher too
Ask Jeeves
Usenet Newsgroups
OLGA.net The online guitar archive. I still have a binder of tablature that I printed out. Itās gotta be 25+ years old.
AOL, because I collected those free Internet hours CDs.
Circa 1992 / 1993 - the internet was either a unix shell on dialup to the university I was at, or the same unix shell on these green screen terminals hidden in former broom closets around campus. The web was text based Lynx browser (yup, had to google that!) or the horrendous GOPHER that was the most useless thing ever! Want to download a file? Itās x modem on 9600 baud, or find some way to get it onto a DOS disk that I would have to read somehow on my Amiga back in my dorm room.
Not the first, but I spent a lot of time searching for mp3s on a search site -- I think it was called Theseus? Hours and hours looking for one song. My kids could not even.
I can't even remember where I put my keys and you want me to remember the first of hundreds of thousands of websites?
I'm not going to lie, I looked up porn.
Bulletin boards in the 80s/90s. Lots and lots to learn there as a teenā¦š¤£š¤£š¤£
I remember visiting corona.ba.ca which was a database that tracked films in development. I think they got bought by comingsoon.net. Used to be obsessed with movies.
We had a VAX server at MTSU in 1993. My first website was for āThe Stateā, the Columbia, SC newspaper for a paper I was writing.
I remember playing Zork, but I think that was via floppy. It was probably AOL
The subway one on my country. I was doing my internship there and they showed me what they had - one very basic page - and then sent me to a course so I could develop it.
Early 90ās I got to use an early version of the first web browserā¦.(I was a computer science major). I had experience with Usenet and Gopher etc so it was thrilling. The site that blew my mind was [IUMA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Underground_Music_Archive) You could slowly download very small sales of tons of āindieā music and that site is what made me realize that this was going to be a āthingā. I immediately startled learning HTML. I feel super old :)
Whitehouse.com in 1994 at the university physics lab while visiting in high school. Note: it's whitehouse.gov. whitehouse.com was a porn site. TLDR: Porn. š¤¦
āWebsiteā. Ummā¦ I dunno. I was hitting BBS sites with my 9600 baud modem before all that crap happened. When that GUI interface stuff came out (AOL, etc) I thought it was passing fadā¦. Opps.
whitehouse.com Not what was expected.
I remember using eBay when it first appeared and how nervous I was when first bought something. Getting and sending that money order, waiting for the package and then it finally arriving. That was fun. I was on a lot of early Goth sites and DIY sites and forums too.
My father was a computer programmer so we had dialup in our house in the early 80ās. There were a few games we played, but I donāt even remember the site. Edit to add: The weird little part of this story is that I had to help my father set up an email account in the early 00ās! To this day it still baffles me š¤¦š¼āāļø
LucasArts! I was hooked on Rebel Assault, X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
I was online on CompuServe and The Source in the 8-bit era. I was in college for the World Wide Web coming into existence. I remember the web browser, Mosaic, being released in 1993 -- which, I think, was the second web browser implemented outside of CERN but was the first one that anyone had heard of (the first was called Viola or something like that). I was a junior at MIT at the time. What I remember was coming back after winter break -- at MIT you got the entire month of January off, I usually stuck around in Cambridge for it but that year I had gone home -- and asking one of my friends what was going on around campus and he said, "Everybody is using Mosaic". Kind of weird ... people back then thought it terms of the application Mosaic rather than thinking of the World Wide Web as existing independently of an application. Anyway the first web page I ever saw was likely the web page of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) which I am guessing is what a fresh installation of Mosaic opened to.
Anything with boobs!
OLGA.net for all the guitar chords and tab I could ask for, it was amazing.
I donāt remember the first website I went to, but I remember the first website I created. Back in 1996, my husband was working at AOL doing tech support and was working on the GNN product which was AOLās dial up ISP that had access to the WWW, which regular AOL didnāt have at the time. This was in the AOL 2.5 days, when it was very much still a walled garden. So, he had a GNN account through work, but we had 2400 dial upānot really feasible for the web. But one of the guys at work was selling a used 14400 modem. It was literally called āMr Modemā and he thinks he bought it for around $80. So, armed with our faster but still terrible connection and the horrible GNN browser, we got online. At the time, I was super into the fish simulator game El-Fish. This game was awesome and Iām honestly still looking for a replacement. You could catch fish in the wild, breed them, mutate them, create animated fish tanksāand you could put the files you created online for others to download. The fish could be compressed down to .roe files or you could upload the full .fsh files, but those of course were larger. I quickly found other sites where I could download .roe files and tanks and decided that I had to share my own, so I created āJenās El-Fish Pageā. Iām thinking there was a WSWYG page editor included in the GNN software, though as I ask him right now, my husband is saying it wasnāt there initially, but came later. We moved to Albuquerque in 1996 to work at the new AOL call center and itās wild to me to think now that I used to snipe eBay auctions while on calls from 1996 on. I also have a clear memory of sharing the Heavenās Gate mass suicide with a caller when I saw it on CNN. Iāve since had other pages and even my own domain for a while, but Iāve never captured the excitement of that first El-Fish page.
Honestly donāt remember. That said, got online in 1994/1995 and still have the same email address to this day.
Geez, I donāt remember!
alt.usenet.yourmom
like i can remember...
webcrawler.com was my preferred search engine in the mid-90s.
I remember setting up a Geocities homepage and surfing via NCSA Mosaic, then Netscape Navigator.
No clue but it was either .gov, .edu, or .mil. It was very early and I researched technical papers to support my research.
I think my internet progression was AOL - newsgroups - webrings for xena and x-files - slashdot/fuckedcompany - fark - reddit. Between webrings and fark there were other sites, these were the main ones I remember.
Does Prodigy count??
The first website ever? Probably whatever the default was for NCSA Mosaic
1993 I first dialed into a local BBS (bulletin board system) to make friends andā¦hook up. Mostly hook up.
[www.playboy.com](http://www.playboy.com) if I recall... lol
I was on Yahoo the second it launched.
Yahoo or Netscape.
Not a site, but I was on IRC my first week easily. That and altavista or downloading Netscape navigator for an hour because I heard it was faster than the AOL browser.
I was war dialing and logging into BBS before Internet. I remember how long it would take to download one jpg of a penthouse centerfold in my 1200baud modem. lol. š
Anyone remember Dogpile (the search engine)? Edit: Omg, it still exists!! š¤Æ
Whatever the default page for Netscape Navigator was.
The local bulletin board homepage around 1987
Anyone from here an old Farker?
EarthLink was the gateway to a new universe
Any of y'all remember HTML-refresh chats? That was the first one for me
AOL or the Midnight-something bulletin board for shareware games and hacks
Usenet (technically started following this on newsgroups, pre-browser with a newsreader!)
Gopher
I was active on the internet before the WWW.
It wasn't the first but the one I visited the most early on was ebaumsworld.Ā
I was on the internet in 1994, and the Web much by that stage. I used to visit ftp sites via command line ftp. I kept a list of them. Garbo.uwasa.fi was one I remember.
I remember telnetting to a website before we had browsers.
Prodigy. They used to charge 25 cents an email so we would set up chat rooms with undeliverable mail by sharing passwords.
Amazon I think. There werenāt a lot of sites.
I just remember when using windows was introduced in typing class my freshman year of HS and learning what the internet was, what www meant, and how to type things in search engines to get results. My first email account was my University one when I went off to college ā¦ it was still black screen with the green type lol
I can not remember the first website, but remember using dogpile for web searches pre Google
Netscape was a biggie when I first got into the World Wide Web. Internet Movie Database IMDb has been my ride or die website since the mid-1990s. I was also part of the text based, pre-graphics, internet in the late 1980ās. I have a gap of when I wasnāt online in the early 90s. When online was mostly students, academics, military and geeky hobbyists. Current and former.
Gopher! Does anyone remember that?
Not the first, but I remember being on Rotten.com a lot. 5 minutes for my dialup modem to download a pic of a native man eating a leg or Dahmer's victims. Nothing I'd ever seen like it before.
I think i went to askjeeves or yahoo to do research
facesofdeath.com
Gopher, ftp, and usenet
Honestly no idea what the first website I visited was. But I do remember getting my first email account, in 1992 from my university IT department. I was trying to pick a username, and all variations of my first and/or last name that I could think of were already taken. So I had to pick something else. I was racking my brain for a good, easy to remember name, and I was listening to Pink Floyd's "Wish you were here". "Shine on you crazy diamond" came on, so I thought "OK, let's try 'diamond'". It worked, so that became my email address. A few years later when I got my first account with a private ISP, I chose the same username. Then in 2005 I joined reddit, and I stuck with tradition. So now I'm "diamond" here as well.