What prompted your first use of the World Wide Web?

It was sometime in the early Nineties, I was probably about three years old, I accessed the Sesame Street page. Even then I was looking up shows I liked.

I remember installing Mortal Kombat 2 sometime in 1994 I think. I didn't know much about computers so I installed it directly to C:\ , and when I wanted to remove it I just deleted everything that was in C: (not the folders).

I was very surprised when the PC wouldn't boot anymore, my dad was furious and told me to fix it, so I borrowed a friends computer to search the internet on how to fix it since we didn't have the internet yet.
It was how I started learning about computers really. I did fix it eventually.

My sister worked at Intel in her final year of college when I was about 7-8, we didn't have the internet at home so she took me in one Saturday before her intern ship was up to let me use it. I looked up and printed off pictures from video games and cartoons as well as some cheat codes or game guides.

Shareware versions of most of Apogee and ID's games :)

Prodigy! I can still remember my id: UAMJ75C.

I also remember that it cost 25 cents to send an email. My parents' bill ran high.

Pokemon and GameFAQs Majora's Mask walkthroughs.

The local library got some computers with the internet and you had to check them out in 30 minute blocks. I'd say this was around 1997 or 1998. Actually, probably earlier than that. It was definitely pre google. My dad would go to look at stock market stuff I think, and he'd bring me and my sister along. She got an email address and hung out in chat rooms. I just searched for pictures of hockey cards.

This is the second topic this week that's made me think, if only Tested had gotten a wiki. You probably could have linked it to the Browser platform page though.

Researching homework on the internet around 1995 I think, probably ended up printing out really low qual photos of giraffes for a report on Kenya's safari parks.

Googe image searching dumb shit. This specific example is probably not the first time I used internet, but I do have a distinct memory of sitting huddled with other kids around a 56k and searching for "boobs". Boys gonna be boys ey.

I remember hyping up on promo art and preview music for Final Fantasy X every time I could access the internet. But that must have been a couple of years after first contact with the web.

I'm pretty sure the first time I ever got to use the web was at primary school in 1998/99. They took a bunch of us down to the computer room and explained what to do, and with us being seven year olds in the late nineties we obviously went straight to the official Pokemon website. I think we got dialup at home not long after that.

I remember staring at this a lot while I waited for things to load. Mostly in college I was trying to understand what other people were doing online, because I wasn't that interested

1993.

Mosaic.

I think one of the first things I typed was N64.com, which basically took me to exactly what I was looking for, which is guides on how to get some of the trickier stars in Super Mario 64.

Bolstered by this great success, the next thing I tried was SNES.com. That turned out to be a porn site, and I quickly closed out the window for fear of being caught. I was also too young to have any prurient interest in pornography myself at the time. I was probably 8 or 9.

I guess my first time with the internet was in school, where we had to create an e-mail account on hotmail, which I'm still using almost 20 years later.

After that it could very well also have been Earthworm Jim codes or codes for MDK, because fuck MDK.

Everyone on here is like ten years older than me. I was born in 1994 so I learned how to use it in Elementary School. I believe it was third grade was the first time I ever used the internet. A question for you guys older than me. In the early seasons of Buffy, knowing how to use a computer was considered geeky by most people. Was that actually how computers were viewed in the late 90's?

My very first time on the Internet was searching for images of steam locomotives as a kid in 1994. Surprisingly enough, I found exactly that, and no weird porn.

I didn't start using the Internet actively until 1998 though, and then it was IRC and streaming audio (particularly since the public service Swedish Radio network used to have live IRC chats with the hosts of several of their shows).

EDIT: I just managed to track down that very first image I saw on the Internet (coincidentally, the FTP server I saw it on is due to shut down later this month, having been around since the late 80's):

Chat rooms for sexting. I was 13 when the net really took off.

A/S/L?

@crimsonavenger: Knowing how to use a computer, maybe not, since most kids had to use computers at some point during school, but choosing to spend your free time that way instead of playing outside or something was a pretty geeky thing to do back then.

Or if you're talking about teens in the 90's, I guess most would have social lives rather than screw around with computers.

mortal kombat rumors

The creation of the internet was the first thing that prompted me to try using the internet.

Naked girls?

I remember there being a crowd of us around a computer, dialing into the internet for the first time, waiting 15 minutes for a single picture of some model lifting up her shirt to load.

It's crazy to think that when I was 10 I had never seen anything sexually explicit and had heard only a handful of curse words, yet by the time I was 13 I had basically witnessed everything I have from 13 until now. Thanks Internet.

Definitely in the lab at school in one of the primary grades. At home I first remember using CheatCC for Final Fantasy 7 walkthroughs (the PC version whatup) and before that watching my brother look up help for White Wolf, because goddamnit White Wolf.

Figure out the codec frequency to contact Meryl.

The first thing I did when I used the internet was go to www.videogames.com. Proceeded to go there everyday until about Novemeber 2007... for no particular reason.

No recollection. My parents were early adopters.

If I remember correctly, we loaded up some dialup BBS and downloaded...I wanna say Duke Nukem 3D? I think. Sometime after that my friend got AOL at his house and we definitely looked up porn, which was miles above the copies of Playboy my other friend's dad had hidden in his sock drawer.

The first time I used an actual browser in my own home, I'm pretty sure I just looked up a bunch of Star Wars midi files and some pictures from the movie.

Gamespot, believe it or not.

A young and horny teenage mind? Well I was on earlier than puberty, so lets see now... this will be around mid 90's so maybe some information on a game, silly pictures or something similarly stupid. I honestly can't remember.

1st time I used it was mid 90s, a friend had these 'chat-rooms' on a computer, I didnt really know what it was but we used to think it was funny to spam Jurrassic park at people, fuck knows, kids eh? :/

The thing that got me to actually get internet myself and set up being online was to play WoW, sad but true.

@mosespippy: I actually ended up doing that (linking to "Browser"), but MB explained that Wiki linking is reserved for linking games to Wiki entries. Anything non-gaming related stays unlinked and in "Off-Topic."

Took THAT long to finally see someone say boobs.

I remember using the internet being this huge event for me back in the day, my house didn't have it until 97 or 98 but whenever we'd visit my grandparents or I'd go to a 'bring your kids to work day' at my Dads it was mindblowing. First thing I ever remember doing was playing some Rock, Paper, Scissors game on Nintendo's website then getting convinced that Mario Kart rumors were true.

Weird thing though, despite my family being kind of late adopters to getting it at the house, we started off with Broadband and had wireless LAN (using some crappy little PCMIA cards) around '99

Early 90s, probably games. Don't remember. But two major internet memories I have: Trying and failing to get Duke 3D multiplayer going with other kids in my neighborhood in '96, and spending hours downloading the 17MB House of the Dead demo in '98.

I played the everloving fuck out of that five minute demo, trying to get as far as I possibly could before the timer ran out. I miss milking every ounce of content fifty times over from each game, good or bad, back then. These days, the mix of online sales, being a grown-ass man, and spending my own money makes the games I buy a lot more expendable and less memorable. I couldn't tell you shit about half of the games I played this year, but hand me a random shareware game and I could probably run through it on muscle memory alone.

Err... anyway... the internet, man. "Under construction" gifs, MIDI music, and poorly chosen garish backgrounds that made you highlight the text just so you could read it. Sites that required Netscape Navigator to be viewed properly. Web portals. Ow, my nostalgia.

Maybe my assignment back when I was an elementary student.

Neopets or Runescape probably.

I think I used the net before then, but as a kid I think those things were what made me excited about the internet.

I wanted to learn how to make a lightsaber. A real one, of course, because I was maybe 8 years old.

Nuke.com, I saw an ad for it on the back of an EGM. Even today they still re-direct that address to gamespot. Great now I'm dowloading old EGMs to find the ad.

Fall of 1992, I was working in a University Pathobiology laboratory, and one of the crazy women in the building told me I had to download WinSock and something called Mosaic onto my desktop PC. She was a techie and she knew I liked computers and hung out at teh computer labs.

I had done some pre-web network goofing around in 1990-91, and had even gone to the trouble of getting a network account at my university at a time when only engineering students and computer science students had them. I enjoyed going into IRC channels after leaving the bars some nights - I was typically bombed off may ass. (The computer lab was open until 2AM and the lab monitors didn't care because they were all doing their homework.) If I said, Veronica Gopher client and you know what I'm talking about then you know the stuff I was into.

The first webpages I went to were probably some at Ohio State University and I think some of hypertext links inbedded in Mosaic was still CERN. Probably I went to some science websites. However, the first gaming 'website' I ever was either:

PlayStation Galleria (http://web.archive.org/web/19961128101747/http://www.vidgames.com/)

Next Generation (http://web.archive.org/web/19961223061717/http://www.next-generation.com/)

Those are the two I remember, but it could have been Gamespot! I was not into console games until the mid-90s so I never really got into searching for that info online. I was getting PC Gamer magazine in 1994, so maybe I saw a gaming website listed in there...but I doubt it.

I really don't know what my very first usage of the Internet was. Kinda crazy to think about, actually. It very well could've been video game-related, though. I used to spend a ton of time on Cheat Code Central looking up PS1 game cheats. But I wanna say we had the Internet before I got my PS1, so I don't know for sure.

Good question, looking up solutions for that fancy new game that used CD-ROM(!), Myst, probably.

AOL chats. I remember being amazed that people from all over the world could get together to talk about the dorkiest of topics and a great length.

I really don't remember. Probably first used it for getting guitar tabs. It was a different beast in the mid 90's to what it is today. Search engines back then weren't that good at all.

AOL prompted it. We had so many free trials. Back in those days you were charged by the minute and the internet came down your phone line. I mainly dived into Cheat Code Central.

porn

MSN Messenger (also known as Windows Live Messenger from 2005).

It was all the rage for UK high school students such as myself around 2001. I gave it a salute when Microsoft shut it down in favour of their newly acquired Skype.

I was at a friends house, and we telnetted into a pirate BBS and downloaded Duke Nukem 3D. Over the course of a couple of days.

I needed to look up a walkthrough for Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle

Copious amounts of free pr0n.

Save our Sailors; I signed an online petition to get Sailor Moon put back on TV; to my dismay it was the first thing that popped up when you search for my name for a very long time.

music was the very first thing i did on the interwebs