Growing up before the internet

[Themius]

Lol early internet. I first used the internet in 1999. I was 9 years before then idk I sent letters to my friends in other states that I met, and we sent letters a lot, even when internet came to our household, because a lot of people didn't really have email lol.

Old internet, AOL, where you could be banned from AOL for saying mean things.

[Deleted]

I didn't really get into the Internetz thingy until 1999 (just every now and then before).

But I remember a couple of years later (not that many)... maybe 2001:

We had an Internet flatrate where you'd pay a fixed amount no matter how much traffic you produced.
Then my Dad decided that we (or I guess he thought HE) wasn't using it that much and could save money by switching to a pay-per-use plan without telling me (I guess he figured I didn't matter)...

Next month we got a $400 bill (courtesy of me...). Boy, was he pissed. He made me pay half of it. My first real Inet-love was named Audiogalaxy.

[veenusa]

Growing up before the internet = real childhood

[KayossZero]

I didn't get high speed internet until mid 2003 when I went to live with my father in Bensalem, PA. Prior to that I had 56k. (@ a cool 52000 BPS connect, which was quite good for a rural maine town with shitty phone lines)

http://www.aporcupine.com/dialup.swf always makes me laugh my ass off, it's like Onyxia wipe animation for us modem users!

[Asphyxiate9]

Ahahahaha I remember waking up really early to go on the internet as a child and having the dial up waking up my family, i'd try to find ways to minimize the sound output by covering it lol

[deftones]

Back in my internet days (~1994), you were only alotted a certain number of minutes on your CompuServe account, and then they'd start charging you by the hour or whatever, and it would go on your phone bill. My phone bills were regularly over $300 a month... fucking chat addiction.

So someone got the bright idea of using a credit card generator, and we would all make fake accounts so we could chat for free.
This was very illegal, but the interwebs was so young, I don't even know if there was a way to catch us.
I was a moderator at the time, and one of the extremely higher-ups sent me a message once, that I of course screen-capped:
(I was shitting bricks after reading that first paragraph)



I'm pretty sure she was blowing smoke up my ass, and just wanted me to snitch on my friends. I just told her people liked to brag about doing illegal things, but 99% of them lying to be cool.

Still though, we literally used tens of thousands of fake credit card #'s, as the accounts would expire within a day or two, after they would try and charge the cc# and it wouldn't go through.


I miss chat rooms so much

[Rooflesstoofless]

I was over 21 before I used the internet for the first time....yikes....but then again it took a long time before the internet had evolved into something I enjoyed.

[Al Gorefiend]

Takes me back to the days of Sim Safari and Sim Copter. My first computer was a Windows '98, complete with Juno Internet service (Are they even still around?). Every morning before school I'd fire that thing up to play Sim Safari. Twas my favorite game growing up, wish I had a copy..

[Grummgug]

I'm a firm believer that people learn best by example.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, I had a commodore Vic-20. It didn't have a hard drive. If I wanted to play a game, I literally had to enter the code first. Back then, you had to actually go to a bookstore and buy books filled with code. I had one book called "Zap! Bow! Boom!" that was filled with programming code for about 30-50 games or so.

And THAT is how I learned to program. I didn't learn theory. I just had to enter the code into the computer. Every. Single. Day. And the only error you would get is "Syntax error?" and then you'd have to go in and figure out what went wrong.

To me, that's how people should learn to code. They should have 50 examples and have to keep typing it in. Its exactly like math when you use flashcards to learn your times tables, or having to do 25 long division problems every day in 4th grade.

It must be so much harder to learn to program today, as books filled with examples no longer exist, replaced by things like "Idiot's guides" to textbooks that front you with theory and code snippets. I'd be LOST trying to learn that way.

---------- Post added 2013-05-23 at 10:45 PM ----------

I'm old enough to realize the screeching sound you kids associate with a dialup modem in the 90s is actually the screeching sound made on a datasette to record data in the 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette

[ebah]

I didn't really get the net till 1999.

I remember only using the computer to play those magazine discs with like 20 demos on them. And games like midtown madness. I even did my homework by hand! Crazy!

:D Midtown madness was epic!!

I remember playing d2,runescape and habbo hotel with dial up connection.

[Deleted]

That's the sound of nostalgia.

God, the memories.

[Sierra85]

kids today will ahve no idea of what it was like. it's kind of scary.

[BHD]

Growing up before the internet = real childhood

I was born around the same time most posters here got their first access to the internet D: (I'm 20) I still played way more outside though, I didn't even get into Age of Empires until the early 2000s!

[Zeozordon]

First time I ever used the internet was in 1996, and mostly because in South Africa it took longer for us to have it than the rest of the world even now we strugle to get fast true broadband. But yes had the 56k model making its noise and then getting online so we could play the first Comand and Conquer against each other over the net and if I remember we also did Warcraft 2 and some Dune 1 or 2 cant remeber witch one later on.

[TheSerialSniper]

I first got access to internet in 1997 and remember playing Age of Empires competitively online and making scenario maps, so much fun. Started playing eq 1 in 1998. I remember it taking 1 day to update the game.

[Deleted]

I think the first time I used the internet was in school, in a special lesson set aside for it. I also remember when computers started to become the "thing" everyone had, back with windows 1995 I guess.