so i was pondering the way we all entered into communicating on the internet. how did you start? i remember a time when i preferred chat rooms, now i strongly prefer forum style. chat rooms move too fast for me now, and they rarely had intelligent conversation when i was a kid. yet the forum style seemed daunting to me at that time. now it lets me get out a complete thought all at once, not once the conversation has moved on. then i got to thinking, some of the younger folks, or those who didnt have a computer (we had a 'prodigy' that had a great 'playroom' interface. i wish i could find that software) when they gained popularity might have been introduced to the internet differently, like myspace. so while its really just to satisfy my selfish curiosity, please tell me how you first came to the internets, and any anecdotes about your time here.
I started online communication before there was a public internet. Using dial up modems (150baud) to call into BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems), that were set up similar to the forum system, minus graphics beyond ASCII. A buddy had set up a BBS that a bunch of local friends all called into to leave messages and play turn based games, specifically Tradewars. About the story I can think of to tell would be related to Tradewars. There were teams that we had grouped into, and we got to know each others schedules pretty well (only one person could call in at a time), and there were a few that played on the other team whose parents insisted that them playing games didnt block the phone. With 'Call Waiting', they had it set so if someone called while the computer was on, it would kick them off and let it ring through. So we would call their house, hang up and dial into the BBS, leaving them stranded in non safe sectors of the game and go blow them up.
When I was a kid, porn was the first thing that drew me to the internet. After a few years of drug use, Erowid brought me back to the intenet.
This game. It's a multiplayer game.... I played that for like 5 years straight... haven't played it in a couple months though. I'm godly at it. I used to just make fun of people constantly because you can chat... I'd always win and the other people would get pissed. I stopped making fun of people though..... I still rarely lose...
I was on the internet before it was the internet. I remember using my dial up modem with the amazing speed of 14kbs and thinking, wow this is the shit. Think Tron the movie way back when and then dial it down because they were not that advanced yet even by then. I remember when you could hook up the phone line to my external modem and it was a box the size of a tissue box. I remember having to put the hand set of my phone on the modem and it would talk to your computer that way. Back then we used Bulletin Boards. A lot like forums. Like forums 1.0. Nuts. So, for me the internet was looking up book titles for a research project and then printing out that list on the Dot Matrix Printer, then going to the stacks in my library to get the books I needed to look up the information that is now posted on the internet. So, like now when you search magazine articles we did the same but had to go read the real copy, not on the screen. Needless to say, I got my first computer when I was like 13 and I am 40 so, 27 years of the internet. I was right there beside Al Gore when he invented it. LOL
I first came to the internet when i would get on my brothers yahoo messenger and pretent to be him.. i was like 7 or 8 then? haha i found out everything. When i was younger i loved disney channel and so i would go on the internet site and play games and stuff then i found social networks like myspace and facebook and stuff like that and now im here. I stil go on my myspace and stuff still though. This is the only site i have actually gone in a chatroom but i go in there because there are poeple im comfortable with in there.
The first time I used the internet was when my parents finally got aol and I thought it was the shit that I could talk to all my friends by typing to them. So instant messenger would be the first form of online communication I used. I think now I also prefer the forum style of communication because it blends a bit of everything to communicate with.
I used to go on chat rooms when I first got a computer and the internet.. But mostly I would juts browse around different sites.
lol i remember having america online back in the day, that original screen they had with all the buttons/channels, having to listen to the modem dial up. Being able to download a 3 minute porno in 20min was amazing. now it's mainly for wikipedia/forums/aim/facebook/porn in that order
I've been on the internet for most of my life. I started off going on neopets and random chatrooms and game websites when I was around 7 or 8. Then when I was like 10 or 11 I would go into the Christian chat rooms on Yahoo and argue with everyone about how false Christianity was. Then when I discovered Cannabis.com and myspace it was all about social networking and forums.
