What is the earliest memory you have of using the internet? Mine was using Netscape with a dial-up connection to try and look at the newest Nike shoes before I started 8th grade. Took 5 minutes to load half the page. Just curious...
Met a really nice person in a CompuServe chatroom. It was the first person I had ever spoken to on the Internet. I kept asking him if he was real. I was like 11 or 12 years old, but didn't believe that he was a real person. We talked about his job, what I was learning in school, video games, etc. Nothing crazy. Nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, in this day and age, a man talking to a 12 year old boy is insane and chances are that 12 year old boy would be a cop or something, but back in the day of A/S/L and being 12 years old, I was chatting with real live 12 and 13 year old girls! It was awesome! Even called them up on the phone, though my mom was pissed off when she got the phone bill. Definitely had no other way of calling California from New Jersey except to call the number and get those long distance charges.<p>My first computer video games were Putt Putt and Doom. I eventually wanted to make video games and thought that learning Visual Basic 3.0 would lead the way, and although I never did create actual video games, this would definitely be the pivotal moment that would help me 15+ years later in my life and career.
1994. Introduction session to the internet, at Edinburgh University. Being told to swap email-addresses with the person sat on your left, and send them an email.<p>Later I had a machine running Netscape Communicator, with 8Mb of RAM, and lauching was so much faster if you started up with "-no-java" that I remember it even now. Would have been RedHat 3.9/4.0, or so? Just after I tried out Slakware, and just before I moved to Debian.<p>(Of course all the home usage would have been on dialup, in the UK. I still remember the different noises of the modem negotiation. You could tell if it was going to be super-fast 28k, or 14k just from listening to the negotiation-noises. Almost as memorable and distinctive sounds as those from the ZX Spectrum tape-loader, if you're the same age as me!)
My first experience with the "web" was a friend showing me this "browser" thing a friend was working on at another college. It was like the text link thing (gopher?) that let you read man pages on other college networks with inline images. It was so slow and boring. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. I went outside to mountain bike in the nice summer weather afterwards.<p>I didn't imagine it would have much use and was already annoyed by the guys that used FTP to download porn images. They would use terminals in the computer labs to amas collections that you could look at one by one with xv. The browser seemed to speed up the effort of downloading index files, manually typing in filenames, switching to binary mode, then back, etc.
Dialing up and hacking into a poorly protected university computer mid eighties and getting access to universities and libraries around the world..<p>In fact you could randomly dial the 'telephone number range' of "large institutions" to find their modems then from there it was relatively easy to work out how to log in, and get access to other externally connected "institutions".
Mine was learning that we could exchange email beyond the corporate network and becoming the first in my company to have my (pre-domain-addressing) email address added to my business cards.