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

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1992 I think with the Olivetti PCS 286. Dad got a modem from somewhere, got something going, but didn't really make it a thing until a P75 was got which had a modem integrated. I had read something so wanted to see. When I saw, I mostly left it at that.
 
AOL, back in the days when it was charge by hour, so 95-96. First ISP available where I lived. My dad was pretty psyched, since he'd given up UseNet to move out to the country for a better place to raise a child.

It was pretty amazing being able to look up gaming stuff online instead of calling a 1-800 to find out about the new Commander Keen episode or something. I ended up working out a deal with my dad to take my usage out of my monthly allowance, plus extra chores I could do for credit.

Then a few years later I tried to look up a myth about Pokemon Red and Blue someone was spreading at school. The search engine in question either didn't have safesearch yet or my dad had been looking up porno, and got my first accidental introduction to rule34, saw more Charizard penis than I ever wanted to, and got grounded for it to boot. Magical.
 
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Ye Old Days of talking to random on ICQ, then AIM. A/S/L?

Then took discovered the Usenet Alt. Suicide.Holiday as a youngster, it was first experience of the internet as a place to let the self-absorption freak flag fly. Thankfully I never took the bus.

I don't even recall what busted set up I had.
 
Probably around the time of this.

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Mosaic in a Box grabbed from the local computer store called Egghead (was a back room in some other store that sold Sierra titles and stuff). Think it came with a subscription to Prodigy.
 
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It all started back in school when someone told me about a little gem called unreal tournament. The rest is history.
 
Tookie said:
AOL. Then I got to spend days exorcising it from the family computer a couple years later when we switched to a regular ISP and discovered AOL had wrecked the computer's TCP/IP software and modem drivers.
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Ah, yes. Fun fact: AOL was totally capable of rendering some early MMOs unplayable with that fuckery.

The requisite AOL exorcism was rendered moot for us when we upgraded to a custom-built beauty with Win98 and a brand spanking new Voodoo2 to go with the newly-available satellite internet.

Then my dad boomered it up and got McAffee, and we had to do a PC exorcism anyway. In hindsight, this was the start of him losing his grip on the cutting edge of PC tech.
 
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Oh god. It was on a Kindle Touch, after I figured out how to go other places than the default Wikipedia. I mainly went to FanFiction.net and, ah, went from there. I'm not proud of it, that's how it went.
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On an actual computer, I mainly played Webkinz, played Wizard 101, or watched early YouTube. And watched a lot of shows on WatchCartoonsOnline.com.
 
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I remember going to a friend's house because their parents paid for CompuServe. After that it was the "real" WWW on Netscape Navigator.
 
I think it was the early 2000s, dial up internet and all that. It was pretty expensive, so I barely used it. My first memory of surfing the net was looking at the magaman site. It was pretty cool. When cafe internets became a thing where I live, I was entering puberty, so I remember downloading newgrouds hentai games in like five floppy disc, but also, it really helped shape my current world views as I regularly visited a skeptic site.
 
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While I had access to the occasional Dial-Up connection during the 90s, my proper online journey began in the early-to-mid 00s with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Got some basic broadband connection and my own PC the same time.

All the...
Battlefield 1942 mods I have downloaded. Good times. Desert combat was really nice, while Forgotten Hope was really ambitious. Of course I don't miss the old Download managers and limits one had when using planet.battlefield. (An IGN hub site.)
 
My first experiences online were all done using Internet Explorer on cheapo local dial-up back in the early 2000's, I was ten years old when I first got online, so this was probably 2003 or early 2004.

Some of my earliest experiences were lurking Simpsons Archive, TV Tome, the IMDB forums, GameFAQs, Neoseeker, using Yahoo as my main search engine, random Geocities and Angelfire sites, and reading Wikipedia articles for fun.

My family only had dial-up back then because I grew up in a very poor rural area that didn't get any broadband internet until after we moved shortly after I turned 14.
 
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