For me, my Dad brought home a laptop from work and we looked up pictures of pokemon and went to the Simpsons website, circa around 1999. How about you?
irc chatting ~1988, lynx via a BBS was my first browsing
very academic. it was largely only nerds/computer geeks that could cobble the hardware together to get online, or were maybe interfacing with the local college. i used kermit to upload my homework.
that said, first porn downloads were from these BBSs which were like little mini local AOLs… provided ‘email’, chat and some gaming
When we got our first IBM compatible PC (a 486) my father wanted to have a modem in it. His friend who sold it to him couldn’t fathom why he would want a modem. But of course he got it anyways.
In the beginning my father used it for online banking over BTX. And when my brother got his own PC a few years later we played Doom with the modems over our house’s internal telephone lines.
My actual first internet experience was reading and writing to newsgroups on Usenet. (that worked more or less the same as Lemmy) My posts can probably still be found in archives. I mostly hung out in de.rec.sf.starwars. That’s actually how I found my first girlfriend.
Besides that I also surfed the web for different stuff. I still remember how Google became popular because it wasn’t so weighed down by ads and clutter and it actually gave you much better results than Alta Vista or Yahoo.
It was around the mid/late 90s. Maybe around 96 or 97, so I would’ve been 9 or 10. We had a computer at home, and my brother and I played games on it, but we didn’t have Internet. One day, my dad who works in IT, installed AOL and on our computer and paid for it. And he set up an account for me and showed me how to use it. And I was blown away. Eventually. even though I was a kid, I’d hang out in Star Trek chatrooms, created mailing lists for like a kids writers club, and ofc started playing online games. Eventually even had my own website on like GeoCities, handcrafted in HTML.
My parents bought a Tandy hooked it up real early, without understanding what the internet was. I was given access to it at maybe age 9 and I got my first dick pic sent to me VIA SCANNER. Pre-digital camera era. Someone literally put their hardon in a scanner, closed the lid, and sat there while it scanned. Just to send it to 16, f, California.
My friend’s dad had a computer with the internet and we used it to look at pictures of girls tits when he went out. Didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time.
Later on, downloading Beavis and Butthead audio clips on Napster or something: “Time for a little probation”
