What was your first impression of the Internet?

I'm 36, just old enough to remember not having Internet access at home; also just old enough to remember hearing the term "information superhighway" and failing to imagine what that meant.

My first glimpse of it was through AOL, and it seemed like a not-so-useful novelty. An advertisement on the television would say "find us online with AOL keyword ____" and you could read a page with more information about their products, or maybe play a silly game related to their products.

I do clearly remember being blown away when I realized that, after establishing the dial-up connection, I could click on the "Internet Explorer" icon and use Yahoo or Lycos instead of going through AOL, and find seemingly anything in the wild west of the Internet outside of AOL's walled garden. That's when I became fascinated with it as a portal to another world. Like many others on HN have said before, it's sad to me that newcomers (kids or old folks) today seem to be increasingly getting only the walled garden experience again.

I'm 59, I got my own computer just after high school. I had a modem and was on CBBS and Chinet back in the day. I signed up for InterAccess, which was a long distance toll call, (They were up by Ohare, 30+ miles away!) so I got a cell phone, which had free call forwarding, and used that to get toll-free internet time.

It was pretty cool to be able to connect to systems all over the world. I remember PowWow, one of the early chat systems, and I chatted with a guy in Novosibirsk and was just amazed!

I showed it to a friend of mine, and he was underwhelmed to say the least. This was before the rules were changed, and commercial content was allowed.

A few years later, I was the sysadmin of our local dialup internet provider, with about 200 users. That was fun. I wrote the Windows 3.1 installer disks, which installed Trumpet Winsock and Mosaic if I recall correctly. We had about 50 modems hooked to 16 port serial boards. The new owner who bought it upgraded it to a US Robotics digital connection and supported 53k downloads.

A few years after that, cable internet became available, and I haven't looked back.

My friend who was "meh" about the internet now as $40/month gigabit fiber. I'm stuck with $100/month 100 Mbps cable.

Before the web, we connected through our modem to the university a parent worked for and accessed a FTP server with the Fetch client. University affiliated people had put all kinds of little random things on the server, including some mod makers for Sim City 2000. I must have downloaded a half dozen little mod programs and absolutely went to town editing scenario files for the game. I was about 7 years old and playing with basically a glorified hex editor.

Netscape navigator was pretty soon after that and I downloaded a lot of freeware chess and checkers programs. I would also look up game faqs and reviews.

It was basically a magic portal to new software and information, mostly so I could game more.

Naked pictures of Stephanie Seymour answers both your questions.

I felt blissful. It was magical. I had access to all this information - thru GeoCities - and I distinctly remember browsing a bunch of my ‘internet-advancced’ friends before putting my own up. It was truly magicc.:-) When they introduced dsl, it was faster and I remember expanding my repertoire a bit and moving to programming the javascriptt.:):)).. smileys were all the rage. So was ASCII-art!;-)

Oh I miss. THOSE days..:D.

My first contact (1995) with the internet was through a BBS gateway and the experience was underwhelming. Later direct contact (1997) made all up but only after ADSL connect (2000) it became permanent for me as from early on I was interested in serving my own stuff.

Going from local BBS content to global content seemed a bit magical I guess. It was really slow over my 2kbps dialup modem.

Seemed like an infinite amount of exploring could be done even back then so I guess that was the drive to continue using it.

"I wish I could play my games console in my house against my friends playing on their game console in their house"

The internet just made sense to me.