How did you start browsing the web? - Reveal just how old you are. Also nostalgia.

[ToroidalBoat]

I think I first started with using Internet Explorer. Around that time, internet advertising was so out of control that I switched over to Netscape 6 or 7 (where JavaScript can be turned off with one easy-to-find option instead of 2 options buried in the IE preferences). Then I started using Mozilla, then Firefox, which I've been using as my default since (never really liked Chrome).

I think the very first thing I ever looked up online was info on the Galileo probe that visited Jupiter, from a school library.

 

[soft kitty]

Netscape Navigator, during the aol dial-up days. Nowadays I use the latest dev build of Brave.

 

[That Ho Over Here]

At the library as a wee munchkin, when I worked out how to circumvent the 'educational sites only' thingy so I could play games on neopets and shit like insaniquarium.

 

[Fascist Frederick]

It was so long ago I don't remember the browser, but I remember my first unsupervised usage of the internet was to type "boobs" into a search engine. I unfortunately didn't know about browser histories so shortly thereafter I received "The Talk".

 

[Twitter Hate Mob]

Probably crap to do with schoolwork that Encarta didn't cover - would have been with one of the versions of Netscape Navigator. Also used Firefox, back when it was Firebird and actually good.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Netscape. Until about 2005 or 2006, I used Wal-Mart's dial-up service. That's right, there was a time when you could get internet from Wal-Mart. Mostly used it to find cheat codes.

 

[Dom Cruise]

My history with the net is kinda complicated.

My first experience with it would have been in my Elementary school's computer lab on an imac circa 98 or 99 on Netscape Navigator, but I can't remember what we looked up.

The first internet experience I can remember would have been on my grandma's computer circa 1999 where I visited the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network websites which had all sorts of fun games and stuff.

Then in 2000 and 2001 my family briefly had a Gateway computer with dial up, I continued to visit the Nick and CN websites because I was too young to really understand the idea of "surfing" the web, but dial up and the computer itself both sucked and eventually we stopped using it.

The sheer vastness of the web didn't really become clear to me until using an uncle's computer in fall of 2004 when I browsed sites like imdb, Gamefaqs, Anime Nation, IGN and Japander, that was the first real "wow" moment when I realized just how huge the net was, which continued when I used an aunt's computer in the summer of 2005.

So finally, in Feb 2006 I convinced my parents to buy me a laptop and get broadband internet, I was 16 and it just totally, utterly blew my mind.

And the rest is history.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Then in 2000 and 2001 my family briefly had a Gateway computer with dial up, I continued to visit the Nick and CN websites because I was too young to really understand the idea of "surfing" the web, but dial up and the computer itself both sucked and eventually we stopped using it.

The sheer vastness of the web didn't really become clear to me until using an uncle's computer in fall of 2004 when I browsed sites like imdb, Gamefaqs, Anime Nation, IGN and Japander, that was the first real "wow" moment when I realized just how huge the net was, which continued when I used an aunt's computer in the summer of 2005.

So finally, in Feb 2006 I convinced my parents to buy me a laptop and get broadband internet, I was 16 and it just totally, utterly blew my mind.

And the rest is history.

Lucky. I had to use a Wii if I wanted a reliable computer until about 2009. The Pentium 3 HP was becoming too slow to use around 2007. A Wii was the main way I browsed the internet from 2007 to 2009.

It was actually really good for internet browsing until around 2009 when Youtube stopped working on the browser.

 

[BrunoMattei]

IE back in 96. We were lucky to have cable internet. Used a lot of Yahoo and Ask Jeeves to find shit. Back then, boomer talk incoming, porn was hard to find. You could find images of porn but not video, at least for free, and if you did find a video it was only like 30 seconds long and was 140p quality if you were lucky.

 

[Vic Viper T301]

First experience was through America Online. I remember the first website I visited was IGN64, having seen an advertisement for them in a video game magazine. This was before they merged all their system specific websites into one IGN.com.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

Using Prodigy for DOS in 1993, then I switched to AOL for Windows 3.1 around 1995, then Internet America in 1996 when they offered the first contract that charged a flat fee by the month instead of billing you by the minute.

The first email address I remember making was bungholio@aol.com. I was a big Beavis and Butthead fan.

 

[Spooky Bones]

I'm going to out myself as old but I first encountered the wide world of Internets using lynx and gopher (remember gopher?) at a library on an old style terminal with amber text. Like several other users I bypassed some security measures to give myself more access. Soon I got expensive dialup after that. 9600 baud IIRC and faster modems soon thereafter. Then, Netscape like most people was my first (graphical) browser. I accessed all sorts of deviant shit I shouldn't, and was really into crazy USENET stuff for a while too (remember 'alt' stands for "anarchists, lunatics and terrorists!") maybe even more than the early web. I learned a lot of interesting shit and a lot of deranged shit too from reading Usenet FAQs which were probably the first thing of substance I accessed on the web proper. Tech stuff mostly but of course I checked out alt.sex and alt.drugs and such. I even paid the ISP extra for a static IP and ran a server out of my house. Wrote a shell script to reconnect it via dialup (this is early Linux and it was based, now it is gay and overcomplicated.) Somehow fucked it up and got a lot of surprise charges which I was able to haggle down. Sometime in there I briefly checked out the AOL demo too on another computer and wound up chatting with a lot of spergs but overall didn't want to pay for that shit and be corralled in a walled garden.

 

[Ronnie McNutt]

When i was younger, i used to use Internet Explorer and play flash games there. Also sometimes watched some YouTube videos. Such great times.

 

[uncleShitHeel]

Dial-up on a less than 56K modem circa 2000. Machine was running 98, and was second hand. I learned so much using that slow piece of shit. Mostly around hiding my tracks and how use command lines to get old dos games running.

Streaming was in its infancy, piracy was widespread and tumblr didn't exist. It was a magical time.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Visiting a family in a far away city that my parents were friends and their son, who I grew up with but hadn't met in 6-7 years, asked if I wanted to see Pamela Anderson nude. Not just straight up like that but it popped up in conversation about what the internet provides, because they had internet access. We were the same age and had entered puberty, it was pre-internet porn times and Pam Anderson was really big at the time, don't judge. He used Webcrawler, that might have been it's own program, to search the web for a picture and then there it was, a picture from her Playboy spread that took forever to load because they had a 14.4k modem I think.

Because they had a PC, unlike me, I asked him if he ever heard of this upcoming game called Duke Nukem 3D. He didn't recognize the name, so I described it as a first person shooter that took place in a city or something - I had only seen screenshots and read about it in a magazine - and he perked up, 'oh I have the demo for that'. Fantastic!

Then he launched William Shatner's TekWar.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Then he launched William Shatner's TekWar.

At least he launched a Build Engine game.

 

[Recoil]

Telnet portals, usenet stuff.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

With a computer, silly.

Nah, but in all seriousness, it was Internet Explorer during those halcyon days of my youth. I pretty much used it until the 2010s when I switched over to Firefox.

 

[Spooky Bones]

With a computer, silly.

Not that silly. Some zoomer will come and tell us his phone.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

That's right, there was a time when you could get internet from Wal-Mart.

Costco had "free" dialup internet around 2000. The catch was constant annoyingly prominent ads in the browser itself.