Taught meself how to type and whatever. It was the late 90s and I was plodding away on my parents' Win95, not doing much on the internet (it was dialup anyway) except for looking at pictures of cute animals.
Then someone at school mentioned Neopets, and I looked it up. I was hooked, as little kids are.
Spent most of the time at gran's place though because her computer was better.

Also while I was too old for newsgroups, I did spend far too much time on IRC and roleplaying forums. Those were the days.
I do wish I'd have been born a few years earlier though so I could have gone on alt.sex.fetish.robots, since I have no idea where to find that stuff now, and believe me I've tried everything.

Sorry for the shit post.
(Avnas dosh!, Tue 27 Mar 2012, 7:37, 6 replies)

My mum did her PhD on
using the Internet as a teaching tool. Or some such.
She completed it 6 mths before she died of lung/brain cancer. She was 64.

She used to tell me about how her first job with computers was with Rolls Royce. In the 50's. Back then computers were the size of buildings with lots of valves and moving parts. I/O (input & output) was cardboard punchcards. I'm guessing it probably had a hand-crank somwhere.

She first got online sometime in the 80's on a "little" unix workstation she brought home (size of a really large fucking suitcase!) - it was probably something like JANET as it was thru her uni that she connected.
I even got to play a network "Kings Quest" game on a dosbox she brought home from work a few times.

Oh how far we've come - nought to pr0n in 3 sec.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Tue 27 Mar 2012, 0:32, Reply)

I am probably
a late starter compared to all you lot. My first experience was reading about this new fangled thing in The Face magazine, probably about 1993/4, and thinking what a great thing that sounds! I didn't get my first computer till 1998 when I moved to uni, and then did the usual ridiculous porn searches while pissed with mates. Spending many an evening pissing ourselves to the worst/best kind of searches.

My mum on the other hand is still new to the internet kind of.
She is gone 70 and is amazingly sweet and soft and lovely, I have mentioned her before. She visits often, and I always take great pleasure in showing her numerous videos, often ones posted here. She usually ends up in uncontrollable tears, before asking me to search for The art of Richard Chamberlain or Dirk Bogarde books.
She loves, of course, cute animals doing stupid things, babies, and surprisingly anything sweary. It seems to tickle her funny bone to the degree that she nearly wets herself.
She finally bought herself a laptop last year in an attempt to get 'online' bought mainly because I showed her how to look at things via google earth, and she likes being nosey.

I have one brother that lives in Chicago. He had moved into a new house and she was desperate to see it.
So after looking at almost everyones house, including her own, accompanied by lot's of 'ooooooo' 'ahhhhhh' 'wows' we went stateside.
She asked me about 3 times how on earth they did it, I explained in great detail, not once but again and again.
We got his house up...
'If we call him, can he come to the window and wave at us? Will he be able to see us?'
I love my mum
( Herb Alpert's Taxi Driver I have very beautiful lips, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 23:39, 1 reply)

Trolling a bunch of perverts on the Daily Sport chat room under the name Dennis
No wait, that's shit. What I really did was hack into the mainframe and 3D print my very own Honda Accord. Except I'd used my 1337 skilz to give it the engine out of the Starship Enterprise. And TSW Venoms.

Then I went and shagged some fifteen-year-olds in the park, but the police couldn't do me for it as I'd used my Second Life avatar and worn my special sexhelmet, which connected by Wifi. Which I invented in 1983 on a Commodore Amiga 1200.
(Eukanuba, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 19:41, 2 replies)

Rathergood.com
was the first ever website I used (well after google anyway) Me and my sister (I was about 13- 14 ) used to watch all those crazy animals singing silly songs. Our absolute favourite was 'SPOOONNNGUUAARRD!!!'- The video took about ten minutes to load each time. To this day I cannot for the life of me hear 'independent woman' with out picturing that northern cat with an accordion. Oh such follies!
(shezam slouching towards nirvana., Mon 26 Mar 2012, 19:38, Reply)

If it wasn't for this QOTW I'd have never known you could get pornography via the internet.

( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 19:10, 7 replies)

Boobies
My school fitted a number of new interwebs connected computers in the computer rooms installed with Netscape. I think it took 3 minutes to get a picture of boobies up. The internet's come really far compared to them old days. Now I can do it in 3 seconds...
( Fadgebadger (1 like), Mon 26 Mar 2012, 18:46, 6 replies)

Grey background, blue text
Was my first impression (much like the QOTW set up). My friend was in college, trying to write a web page for his dad's dental business or something. Although I had heard of the internet, I had never seen it.

He showed me the page he created, then went to an early version of Yahoo! He clicked on the link labeled "Celebrities", then "Pamela Anderson", and a photo popped up with her topless. He went "oops", hit page back and showed me sports stuff for another 15 minutes.

Needless to say, I decided then and there I needed the interwebs.
( BrokenCoccyx doesn't mind if you grope on, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 17:27, Reply)

Anyone else remember a very early DOS-based email system called 'Higgins' (named after the butler in 'Magnum')
Late 80's - it was a slow pile of crap that was massively proprietary, no IP/SMTP, just Higgins-to-Higgins comms, the first version wouldn't allow what we've come to know as attachments, it real was rubbish.
(Chopper3, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 16:48, 8 replies)

Escape from LA official website.
Some of my personal highlights of my first times on the internet include;

1. Using a local college computers to access the official website to John Carpenter's "Escape from L.A."

2. Using an Amiga 1200 to get on the internet at a friends house.

3. Talking to horror fans in other countries.

4. Finding IMDB on Saturday afternoon while the film Le Man was on telly.

5. Finding some porn sites, (amazingly a couple of them are still going)
(Mitchell Gant, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 16:22, 5 replies)

Wake me up when it's Thursday someone
Cheers,
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 16:16, 13 replies)

This is my first experience of the internet.
Until a few minutes ago I didn't even know the internet existed.

Have I missed anything? I doubt it.
(King Nightmare, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 15:23, 2 replies)

AOHELL
As a fresh-faced youngster I remember getting dial-up in the house. After what seemed (looking back now) like a lifetime of listening to a noise akin to R2-D2's orgasm, we were 'connected to the internet' and a rather sultry voice welcomed me to AOL and announced that I had email.

I was of course oblivious to the wealth of problems in billing and connection that my dad suffered. My worst experience at the time was the brief moment when I thought internet bills were like phone bills and listed a history of all the sites that had been visited! They weren't. I was happy.
(satanstolemyteddybear Mu hõljuk on angerjaid täis, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 14:00, Reply)

Paper internet
I can't think when it was, but ages ago when the world wide web was very new indeed I was invited to dinner at someone's house. The host was a complete tosser. Highlight of the evening: he brought out a folder of printed copies of funny pictures he had downloaded off the internet, and passed them round to us. There must have been 300 pages. The evening livened up when his wife started throwing up in the kitchen, but that's another story.
(Smale is stuffed, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 12:52, 1 reply)

Back in 2003 or so
I was working for Onetel. Broadband had just been invented (or so it seemed) and we were selling it a 27.99 a month for 512k. 57.99 would get you 1 meg.

One day we were pulled into a meeting. We were going to host a big promotion on our Broadband in the Sunday Times. A disc was being sent out where Dialup users would put it in their PC and it would take a few details and order Broadband. 1 month free was on offer. no connection fee (usually £60) free Modem (usually £60) with no quible return offer if you werent satisfied. Extra staff were called in. our boss sent out for Pizza for everyone.

Massive Flop.

Instead about 7 people actually rang up - 3 of which took up the offer. We didnt receive any offers other the net, apart from a few bewildered customers who seemed to think the CD would 'switch on' the broadband on their line. (infact it would take about 14 days for it to go live on the customers phone line.

Over the course of the next week our sales guys took full use of the offer in the system to give everyone and sundry free modems and connection.

fast forward 9 months, the department was in the process of relocating, redundancies being made etc. I was cleaning out some cupboards and came across a large metal locker, upon opening it I found 40- maybe 50 Broadband Modems (Speedtouch 330's)all in various stages of worth. Some in boxes, some in plastic bags. All had been sent back by customers. At the time this was Aladins cave. These Modems were worth ALOT. My boss just happened to be standing next to me and gave me a little talk that - he knew how many were in there, and that they would be sent back to the manufacturer...... yeh right.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 12:21, 2 replies)

Tetris was still new and cutting edge
So few in my social circle had email that we all shared each others' latest gems. It would qualify as spam today, but back then, we took what we could get. A friend of a friend of a relative of a proper fundamentalist Christian wife sent round a game file. I blithely downloaded the forwarded file and saved it to my hard drive at work. Forgot about it, as I did have work to do in my 15 minutes of allotted time (we shared one dialup phone line and an aol account amongst a dozen of us).

Came the day I opened the file and it was a Tetris tribute game... Probably an 8-bit graphic game, "Sextris" I think, with various shapes of male and female nude bodies in crude, out-of-focus monochrome. All right, I thought, how hard could this be? I diligently played shape after shape, concentrating whilst endeavoring to not laugh or let anyone in the office know what I was up to. I skillfully manoevered naked men and buxom nude women right and left, spinning them around, dropping them jn place, perfectly matching the shapes to make solid rows. The rows stacked up rather than disappeared, which puzzled me. Undaunted, I pressed on. Tits and asses reached the top of the board, game over, I lost. What a rubbish game!

A few days later, I had a bored few minutes so I opened the file again. I spent less effort stacking the nudie-shapes and more effort appreciatng the artistic genius necessary to create such detail with so few pixels--perky boobs, a hint of a smile, waves of hair cascading down a shapely back.

Then it happened. I lost my focus, and instead of spinning a woman so she nestled neatly, back-to-back on a male shape, I accidentally dropped her directly on a prone male. Instead of sticking up at an odd angle, she dropped down further, straddling his ready crotch and its anatomically-correct male parts! The sounds of satisfied moans erupted, the shapes wiggled a bit, and dissapeared!

I laughed in surprise, delight, and head-smacking chagrin as I realized that I had finally learned how Sex worked. Or how Sextris worked. And I wasted a great many more hours playing that game and trying to stack the players so a match would create a cascading orgy of partners.

I miss that game, and I guess the innocence of those early days of the internet!
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 11:30, Reply)

Forward thinking.
During my time with the DSS, I did a variety of jobs, one of which was a short stint in the stationery store. This was mostly dull and involved monitoring stock levels, dishing out items as required and sending off an order, once a week. This was done using a standalone computer system that was set up for the purpose of keeping a record of what forms were in stock and ordering stuff from HMSO. Nothing else; you couldn't do any normal day to day business stuff on it, it served a solitary function and that was it. This would have been around 1993 / 94.

At this point I got offered a temporary spell of promotion, so I could no longer carry out my duties as stationery Nazi. Instead, the department got a young lad in on a casual basis, and installed him instead. I showed him the ropes, and off he went. He'd done I.T. at college, was in the process of looking for work in this area and this job was a hopefully temporary stopgap for him. Noticing the somewhat rudimentary nature of the computer system he was using, he must have taken it upon himself to have a bit of a tinker with it. Not being an I.T. geek myself, I have no idea what he did, but somehow he managed to reconfigure the system to enable him to send emails to his girlfriend.

Management's reaction when they found out about this little bit of technical wizardry? Not "This kid's good, maybe we can find him a position where his expertise on something we frankly haven't got much of a grasp on ourselves can be fully utilised, perhaps even saving the taxpayer millions on an I.T. project that will ultimately be aborted because no-one has a fucking clue how to make it work". No, instead, they sacked him on the spot and frogmarched him off the premises.

I hope he managed to find something, and that the small matter of being possibly the only person in the civil service to be fired from a job for tampering with official equipment didn't blot his CV too much.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Mon 26 Mar 2012, 10:38, 12 replies)

Quake2 and the 12 port Dlink Hub.
Once upon a time there was an intrepid group of young men who shared a love of playing early fps games & would regularly go round to their mates house (who happened to have a rare case of "broadbanditis") carting all of their beige boxes, metres of (then) expensive cat5 cables and heaps of big ole heavy CRT monitors in order to play said blocky fps's.

The hero of our story came across a dlink hub @ a car-park market for a couple of bucks.
Oh. Happy days.
Many gamers all playing off the same (dos-box) server playing both inter and intra net games. With a broadcast rather than local IP. Wheeeee!

It was good. Copious amounts of alcohol and "victuals" were consumed. Much chuff was puffed.
We were happy.

& then some of us who had girlfriends got married and those who stayed single got into pr0n. (I guess).

We occasionally played BF2 (& later on 2142) on the net as a squad all playing in the same room just for a laff many years later but it just didn't have the same kind of magic.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Mon 26 Mar 2012, 10:30, 2 replies)

Internet? Pfft. If you want to be cool then do the book thing:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkBxl8Cq-fI
7 different shades of awesome, but its 1991.
So: www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-little-of-our-culture-dies-with-the-printed-britannica-20120322-1vlp6.html
( enoughblueskyforsailorstrousers, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 9:36, Reply)

1982 ARPANet
The Marines found out that I had hands on experience with computers.

So then I had three jobs, but at least the office work was in an AC'd room.
(Slam63 I wasn't really peeking. Nice panties., Mon 26 Mar 2012, 6:51, Reply)

My dad had one of them new fangled modem things fucking yonks ago.
Something to do with a degree he was doing and back then it was all just uni's sharing files.

But that's not important right now. I remember our first ISP was virgin net and I used to download hiliarious desktop themes, blend a frog at joecartoon, wonder what the fuck was so great about rathergood and laugh at the funny stuff on the tvgohome website.

Charlie Brooker is fucking Konnie Huq and also being on TV now while the height of Joel's week is appearing in the b3ta newsletter. LOL.

Oh yeah, 90's internet, go shove a hamster up your cockend and shit out a dance.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Mon 26 Mar 2012, 3:10, 4 replies)

Filthy porn early 90's style.
Way back in 1990, I was a first year Computer Science student. Some friendly second years showed me and a few of my friends how to download files from some FTP site in the US via a JANET gateway. Some of those were .GL files (sort of like a very very basic Flash video file). We thought it a jolly wheeze to leave such a file, depicting a young wench riding a St George on some well endowed fellow, running on all the 286 mono-VGA machines in one of the labs. After that came newsgroups, and gopher, and downloading UUEencoded Usenet archives from gopher, stitching them together by hand in a text editor, before decoding them and turning into jpegs so I could get more grot on a 720k floppy. I think that's where my degree went.

A couple of years after I graduated, when I was still working at McDonalds, ESCOM had a fantastic deal on 14.4k modems (£50!). I only has a Switch card then, and one of the few ISPs that accepted Switch cards had a chat function. The first evening online, a woman came through. We spoke on the phone once, and online a few times, but she wouldn't send me a picture, claiming that I'd not want to speak to her again if she did. I went through all the (for want of a better word) defects I could think of (really a man, disabled, fat, ugly, etc.) but it was none of those. I often wonder what was wrong with her...
(marknotgeorge is not worried. It's my natural expression., Mon 26 Mar 2012, 0:02, 2 replies)

Getting caught wanking in the dot.com generation
I was 17 and went to visit my older brother at University in Scotland, it was 1998.

My brother owned a PC and was also online, not having one at home and barely understanding how they worked, my brother showed me the basics of the Internet, left me to it and went to his lecture. People had told me about the wealth of smut online and I proceeded to check it out. Remebering one site my mate had told me about (The Hun's Yellow Pages) I managed to navigate there and was utterly overwhelmed by not only the amount of grot there but it's depraved variety, needless to say, I spent the next 3 hours wanking myself stupid.

With a right arm like Popeye's forearm and a deep feeling of stress release, I changed the website and logged off before my brother came back.

The next day I was eating lunch with brother and nonchalantly he says "the next time you go online, make sure you check your history." "what's that?" I asked innocently "it just shows what sites you've been on..." he smirked as he chewed a mouthful of pasta. The colour crimson crept up my neck and flushed my face.
( Hardfarter Following through since 1978, Sun 25 Mar 2012, 22:55, 2 replies)

This is embarrassing..
Bought my first pc 5 years ago and took it home but there were some problems with it. I rang up the guy I bought it from and , fair play, he came round to have a look.
He booted it up and checked the connections and replaced the dvd player (which I now know to be a "disc drive"). He asked was there any other problems. "Yeah" I said "the internet doesn't work!". It wasn't even connected. I still cringe
(Omar Goyyid hat drei ecken, Sun 25 Mar 2012, 22:12, Reply)

Gozilla
When I first had the internet, one of the problems with using a 56k modem was that of mum picking up the phone, which cut the internet off and corrupted any file I was currently downloading at the time.

I finally found a solution using the download manager Gozilla, which enabled me to restart downloads from where I left off, queue multiple downloads etc etc. Perfect. The coolest function was the WAV file that played on download completion, which was the T-Rex scream sound from Jurassic Park - but as my PC was running through my rather beefy stereo at the time, I had to be very careful to lower the volume. I only made that mistake once!

One day I had a couple of files queued in Gozilla that I had started the night before, which would complete when I logged on again that evening after college. However my Mum had popped onto the internet during the day to look at the weather forecast or something, and had spent just long enough online for one of my files to finish downloading. The T-Rex scream sound played as normal - however I had been listening to Underworld at cheek-riviting volumes while getting ready for college and forgot to turn the stereo off.

The T-Rex scream was matched by that of my poor mother who had the shock of her life and, in her own words, "been blasted across the room".

eep!
( h3donist tryin' to play me out as if my name is Sega.., Sun 25 Mar 2012, 18:25, Reply)

Blind faith
Many many moons ago I worked for a company supplying computer equipment to the blind and visually impaired.... screen readers, braille printers and the like......one of our clients was the RNIB technology centre in Peterborough....

We provided a screen reader to one of their clients, blind since birth, and connected him to the internet. After demonstrating the software we connected him to the internet and asked him if there was anything he wanted to find out, given the vast swathes of information out there.... his reply...

"Dudley... I have always been interested in Dudley.... the place"

Sorry for such a dull post, but it just shows that we take the web for granted...

These days I would probably have given him an audio running (pun intended) commentary of 2 girls 1 cup and run out of the room.
(the_icks has the sweet essence of giraffe, Sun 25 Mar 2012, 12:07, 5 replies)

‘Monetizing the sexual experience’
I’ve mentioned before b3ta.com/questions/books2012/post1489177 that I used to work for Amazon, starting when it was just a books business.

After the .com bubble burst I had to make my team redundant and took redundancy myself. Unsure of what to do next I started to do some consultancy work whilst I looked for a permanent position, so uploaded my CV online.

I received a call from someone who said he worked for an online publishing business and wanted to talk to me about a marketing role for a job based in Barcelona. The company was Private.com (NSFW) – the legal “hardcore version of Playboy”. He asked me if that was a problem for me and if not he’d like to bring me out to Barcelona to spend a day with them to understand more about the business and to be interviewed by their European MD.

Knowing that there was no way I would work for them (it would have had a substantial long term impact on my career) I agreed to go out to meet them purely to have a free trip to one of my favourite cities.

In the meantime he sent me passwords for all of their sites so I could “familiarise myself with the content”. Circulating these to my friends got me several free pints.

On arrival at the offices they gave me a tour. I saw a gang bang being filmed in a studio and various different videos covering genres being edited. Every part of the offices contained serious grot. None of the commercial or technical staff batted an eyelid when talking about content.

I felt a bit sorry for them. I guess if you work in McDonalds the last thing you want to do is to eat a burger and the same principle applied to these people.

My interview with the MD took place in a meeting room with a massive glass cabinet down one wall containing their full range of vibrators, cock rings, symbian machines, anal beads, fisting mittens, butt plugs and kegal balls. An experience I don’t expect to repeat in the rest of my career.

After all that they didn’t offer me the job anyway, but I got a free trip to Barcelona and an extended tour around a porn set in action. Only the internet could have created this opportunity. Thank you Tim Berners Lee.
( Fucking hell Jeff I am not a robot, Sun 25 Mar 2012, 9:29, Reply)