well, back in my day we used to…

When we first got on the internet, we went through Prodigy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_%28online_service%29) which was like AOL. I also connected to some telnets to play MUDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD) super geeky.

Later on I remember going to rsub.com (still live) which linked to disinformation, the blue dot and other neat creative sites.

Okay, I got my first computer back in ‘99 (oh blueberry iMac how I miss thee) so I’m a little behind with the computer/internet stuff compared to most people I know. From what I can remember, I was on AIM a lot in the chat rooms. The Korn discussion board was my favorite place, though – I mostly visited the off topic forum! I loved all the religious and political debate that went on! Then, I found out about Geocities…the rest is history.

First website I remember frequenting was Freelancers Online. Back in 1998 on a text-only Internet entrance via the local library system and my POTS connection. FOL had a jobs board, natch, and one time a Florida publisher of science journals posted for a layout artist. I responded and heard back, even tho’ my home studio’s on Long Island in New York.

Interesting thing was that the person who answered my query was an old friend who’d moved from Long Island to Florida some years before and with whom I’d lost contact. What was lost was found AND I got a gig that listed a few years.

I can proudly say that my life was a lot more clutter free back in the days. The internet era has drastically elevated the standard of browsing we have today. It has completely revolutionized the power of social media as well.

I remember, a few years back, when the social networking sites were non existent and had lot less impact on people compared to today, and I was simply browsing sites like wiki, google and a few others and playing AOE and Quake… not to mention with a 56K modem which got interrupted twice every minute :)

If i remember clearly, i did stumble upon a few articles from the Smashing Mag quite often although it wasn’t as tremendously popular as what it is today, it surely helped me a lot. Its really hard to imagine how the internet has grown and evolved through the years, both technically and socially. I cannot wait but envision what it might become in the next decade or so.

Man the memories, now you compel me to tell the full story :p

I think it was 1995, 11 years old then, when I signed up for a computer’s class in a local off school tutor. Of course computers were scarce back then and I didn’t have a PC yet but I spent lots of time playing Lemmings, Xenon, Tetris 3D and MSPaint on my uncle’s PC every week.

After a couple of lessons seeing I could use a mouse my tutor decided it was time to learn “the Internet”. He opened IE and typed yahoo.com on the address bar. I still can remember that awe I felt when doing search queries and finding all sorts of websites.

About a month and lots of begging later I convinced my father to get me a PC and a 28.8 modem (which were really expensive back then!) and I setup a dial up Internet connection, stolen from the university my aunt worked.

Two months into the classes and my teacher says “next month we’ll learn how to build a basic website”. I cannot describe the feeling when I found out you could actually build a website on “The Internet”. Being unable to wait a whole 2 weeks I immediately searched on yahoo how to build a website and I found geocities site builder. Back then it was a very simple site maker.

Through it, I learned the basics of HTML, frames, tables etc and having obtained copy of Photoshop (version 4 was it I think?) I was able to make my first website ever, at age 12 (wish it was still online) about my guild in Diablo (also first game I ever played online).

Had someone told me that this would be what I’d be still doing 15 years from then and earning some money from it I’d probably laugh :)

Sorry for the long comment :)

hampster dance, anyone??

haha. i was also really into newsgroups (i used deja news or deja reader, can’t remember the name) to check up on my favorites ::cough:: alt.fan.hanson ::cough::

i had about six fansites back in the day, first on angelfire, then i moved them to geocities. (and now they’re all gone :( ). webmonkey.com was a huge help in learning HTML, and later CSS.

also spent a lot of time on AIM, livejournal, diaryland, ask jeeves, shockwave games…

I got my first real computer in the spring of 1995…one of the first flight Pentium 100s. I mainly used it for school, playing Privateer and AOL. My friend and I figured out how to exploit the free Terms of Service area to talk without being charged (this was when an hour of AOL cost as much as a gallon of gas does today), so AOL smartly redesigned the page with a ton of graphics instead of quickly downloadable text. Our plans foiled, we both moved to Netcom and discovered the real Internet. The rest is history =)

My first contact with the net was before the internet , i already use little TELNET and BBS … and also used the gopher !! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol))

But for start I used internet to serach forum to get cheats to play games like Doom or Day of Tentacle … lol

Good topic for a post. It does sometimes feel like the web has been around forever, though thinking back I remember the days of dial-up and waiting for hours to download a file, only for the connection to drop and have to start from scratch again. Oh, the good old days!

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