Your History of the Internet

[Pumpkin]

[FONT=Trebuchet MS][SIZE=1]Everyone that's been here's obviously has learned the use of the Internet. The internet is a system in which people around the world are allowed to communicate. The point I'm trying to get at is, how did you discover the Internet? Did a friend tell you, or maybe you introduced it to them? How old were you? and what were some of the first things you did? Or maybe you've just started using it?

I know my first contact with the internet was when I was 6 or 7 and I use to go into Nickalodean chat rooms and talk about things like TV shows or cartoons. And yes I had parental advisory back then. I stopped until I was twelve, when I had an AOL ( AOL was hot back in the 90's! ) account with the screenname "Tinksparkles" ( dumbest name ever ). I was really into anime & manga mailing Lists that people made and sent to you in your inbox. There was some rivalry against zines and mailing lists, and I of course owned a mailing list. That was the coolest thing back in the day. I also did a lot of RPGing in chatrooms. I stopped using the internet when I turned 13 and ended up starting again when I was 16.

My question is what do you remember of your use of the internet? What were your hobbies and what do you mainly use it for now? I know for one I mainly use it for mmorpgs, school, and the forum. Come on share the details ^^; [/SIZE][/FONT]

[Retribution]

[SIZE=1]I started using the internet when I was very little -- maybe 6. My screen name was Binder238. Don't ask me how I remember that. Anyway, I only used it to access the Kids Only sections and play pretty pointless games. Then I didn't use the internet for a very long period, except for school. I started back when I was about 9, and we got CompuServe instead of AOL. Oh joy. The 56k nearly killed me after going to my friend's house who had just got DSL.

So it took about three/four years of bugging before my parents gave into getting Comcast Highspeed Internet. I've never left this seat ever since.

I use the Internet for... everything. Music, IMing friends, looking at art, and browsing cyberspace (forums, etc). I find it facinating that I'll never see all of the Internet. However, it provides so much stimuli that a conversation cannot. That's why I spend alot of time on the computer. *shrug*[/SIZE]

[Stuart]

[FONT=Franklin Gothic Medium]You know, I was acutually thinking about this same topic earlier when I was asking myself "What is it I do on the internet?". Ok, so here we go.

If I am on an internet connection I can guarantee that I'm on OtakuBoards. Even if there's nothing new or anything that strikes my intrest I browse the boards and send out a few PMs from time to time. Being a moderator of The Lounge keeps me pretty busy, reading everyones posts and making sure it's well "moderated" Hehe. Visting the "Art Studio" is one that I enjoy the most.

INSTANT MESSANGER, and the dreaded Myspace.com! I currently have a total of 71 real world friends and 53 friends from OtakuBoards on my AIM buddy list. All of which I talk to regulary, or atleast I try. There's never a dull moment as long as someone is online. Myspace.com is just evil, Keep away! I spend too many hours wasted on there with my profile.

Shopping. Though I've never actuallly bought something offline I still enjoy my online window shopping, lol. Checking out the latest in games is an all timer. I guess I like to tease myself with the games I know I'll never be able to aford, without having a job. Also, browseing around Hottopic.com is something I do when I'm bored. Also gives me an idea of what I'd like to buy when I visit the mall.

DevaintArt.com, can keep me occupied hours on end. There's ALWAYS something new and appealing to view. Perhaps one of the greatest sites I visit. Aside from those I can't currently think of anything else I use the internet for... *ponders*[/FONT]

[SIZE=1]Pfft... Downloading music ^_~[/SIZE]

[Sage Kaley]

I didn't start as early...let's see, 7th grade sounds about right. I used to go into video game and RP forums as bluemoondestiny or BMD and just rp and chat and my parents honestly didn't care because they had already scared the crap out of me about crazies on the net. I used to look up FF7 fanfiction and spent a lot of my time on Oh No Not Another Final Fantasy 7 Webpage's forum, run by Frank. Man I loved him, he's the one who got me to write again. Even if it was only fanfiction, he encouraged me. I had a lot of friends there and it was nice but it sorta fell apart due to internal struggles between the mods and a group who wanted to be mods.

Now Frank's page is gone too, though you can still find the internet series he wrote. So I left the net for a bit and when I came back, it was mostly for fanfiction and music. I still use it for fanfiction, most of my net friends I met through fanfics. I also use livejournal a lot and I suppose this is my new forum heh. I like it here anyway. I also now use the net for webcomics and anime news. Go me. I just sit here all day writing and scanning the net heh.

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1]Alright. Year 6 or 7, I'm not sure. Back in 2001, I think. School computers in my class were always a fight to get onto. I think there were four computers, and there were often 10 or more kids wanting to get on them. It started off with Neopets and Cartoon Network games. It then became that I was looking for Pokemon information. I discovered OB and made a few posts.

Because I had no internet at home, I drifted away over school holidays. And then... March of 2003, I remembered OB. I came back, and got myself a new name. And started posting. And here I am ~_^

I use the internet for a lot of things. I obviously post here, I blog, I chat, I surf and I download. The internet is a vital part of who I am as a person - over the last few years it has most definitely helped to shape me.[/size]

[Delta]

[COLOR=Firebrick][SIZE=1]I started way back in '95. I was 9 years old then and had no idea on where to get material for a group project on barbiturates and hypnotics. Yep, illegal drugs. The library's pretty scarce on that subject so a friend suggested we look for it on the Internet.

Me and the web, we've been going on and off for ten years now. Our PC's had its share of virus attacks ("Gotta turn my curiosity down a notch," a family friend would say), after which I would usually take some months off because of paranoia. The library became once again the research destination of choice.

Now that I'm in college, I've reunited with the Internet, mostly out of need and convenience. Clicking buttons to look for stuff about, say, faults is much easier (not to mention [i]waay[/i] more sinus-friendly) than browsing through ancient texts. Good ol' library now serves as a last resort that (thankfully) I have yet to turn to this semester.

So there you go. My Internet history revolves around research. Boring, yes, but that's why I have OB and artsy sites in my Bookmarks. After all, ARPANET is soooo 60's.[/SIZE][/COLOR]

[Kazuma alter]

[COLOR=DarkOrange]i actully started using it early because my dad let me for some reason.....like when i waz about 5....and all i went to really is nickolodian.com and disneychannel...but i wanted to know more and eventully i knew how to use the internet by myself and when i read my first manga i wanted to know more and thats when i used alot...and i got into anime and all....i used to go to neopets....but the only reason i did is because i wanted to talk anime and manga to someone....i don't have any friends to talk to about that kinda stuff so ya.....thats my story[/COLOR] :catgirl:

[SilentSecurity]

It really started with me just surfing the web. OB was the first forum I participated with (under a different name, a few years back). I totally forgot a bout OB for awhile until just recently I came back, I couldn't remember my old name so I made a new one. I'd been participating in the forums on gamespot and a few others around the net. Group Sounds is one of my favorites (besides OB of course). Runescape is something I spend a little of my time on, but most of the time I stick with here and .hack//Integral (another cool site, the links on my MyO site). Thanks to the internet I can talk to friends and family with AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. I don't know what I'd do without the internet.

[Kamuro]

[SIZE=1]When I first got a computer I was enthralled and amazed with everything, not simply the internet. When I first started using it, the basis was for video games. I was really into a lot of games, but I later realized that's not all the internet was good for. I used it to talk to my friends, send e-mail, look up information, anything. It's a lot easier to find things on the internet then at the library *sigh*.

At this point I really enjoy forums, such as this one. I like meeting new people and expanding my mind. I'm far from perfect, and there's so many things I know nothing about, the internet helps a lot. I meet people from all walks of life, and although I don't have the money to travel anywhere I'd like, when I finally do there'll be plenty of people to visit lol.[/SIZE]

[sakurasuka]

[CENTER][SIZE=1]I started getting on the internet when I was 7. About a year after I moved to GA and realized that all my friends didn't like me =/

I loved Neopets.com. I had an anime guild. I loved that guild more that anything, and being the leader of it forced me to make graphics (In MSPaint) and layouts for it. By the age of nine, I was an HTML whiz and was posting threads on Neopets like 'I make FREE websites and layouts!!! Just neomail me!!!' and the like.

I never really had a website of my own, merely because I couldn't figure out if I wanted it to be forums-related, graphics related, video game related, etc. I didn't want more that one site, because I wouldn't be able to keep up with that. (I had a VERY limited time on the internet...)

Soooo... Yeah. After about 6 months of my inbox being full of requests (Which I LOVED, but it was time consuming) I had to resign, as it was taking up most of my free time better spent studying. Now I've just become lazy, and I don't remember half of the stuff I'd learned back then... *sigh*[/SIZE][/CENTER]

[DBZgirl88]

[COLOR=#004a6f]I first got introduced to the internet in elementary school. I was about 10 I think. All elementary school children had an email address with the board of education's web address. We simply used those emails for educational puropses.

I only really started using the internet for fun when I was 13. I had just gotten into anime then, and I liked using search engines (my first search engine was mamma.com) to find dragonball z websites. I tried to make my own site at geocities.com, but I didn't even know what html was back then. A friend helped me sign up for a hotmail account, but I didn't have a computer at home then, so I didn't know what msn really was. I've never really used chat rooms before either.

A year later we got a computer, and I finally got introduced to the lovely msn messenger client.[/COLOR]

[Sara]

[color=#6699cc]I began using the internet in earnest my freshman year of high school. (Late start, eh?) Before that I had hung out in Excite VP chatrooms, and most of my non-chat adventures were looking around for avatars to use, or searching for information when [i]The Amber Spyglass[/i] was going to come out. I'd looked for information for school projects in grades 7&8, but never found anything very useful. I had [i]far[/i] better things to do than wait for things to load on our connection (we're talking at several minutes per page, and the better part of an hour on the image-heavy avatar sites I was browsing), so other than chat, or a required "internet source" for school reports, not much happened.

Somewhere along the line we got a moderately [i]faster[/i] dial-up connection. I was [i]amazed[/i] at the speed, and suddenly (finally) understood why anyone would bother "browsing the web" as a hobby.[/color]

[Goodbye, Face]

[font=trebuchet MS][size=1]My first internet experience was when I was in 4th grade, about seven years ago. We had a class project about Native Americans, and we were building a website about it. I ended up doing most of it, and I learned a lot of HTML before I learned home row.

I eventually got a computer beyond my Windows 3.2 (correct? I don't remember what it was actually called other than Windows) in seventh grade. It was $75 and had Windows 95 on it and was internet-capable. The latest thing that my friends were doing was Cartoon Orbit. I, of course, joined in. Then I remembered this place, which my friend Joel (Zidane11) showed me about two years before. I signed up as Cloud Strife00.

I once again decided to delve into HTML, I got my friend Will (gouf) and we made our first website on Tripod. [url=http://cloudstrife9999.tripod.com]Here's the link[/url].

We eventually got bored of being the only ones to look at our site, so we stopped updating it, I don't think any of the links work on the home page.

After that, I started paying more attention to this place, I invited more friends and changed my user name to Axel--Ignition. I basically stayed in the RPG forum. I believe I was most notorious for making a Zoids Tournament RPG, which got spammy beyond my control. I personally got bashed several times in a sticky, so I left almost immediately.

After that, I basically took a one-year hiatus from the internet. I got back into skateboarding, fencing, and karate. I also got into hardcore/metal music, which changed me and my choice of friends quite a bit. All of my friends had LiveJournals, so I joined the bandwagon a year and a half ago.

I pulled Erin (Nataniamon) out of OB and worked on yet another site called The Circle of Dragons, which no longer exists, except as a redirect page to my new site, more on that later.

I went back and forth between my own message board and a "friend"'s. I didn't know he was a hacker, we merged our forums, since they had the same members. I told him that I didn't trust him enough to make him an admin, so he hacked into my account, deleted the boards and then sent a virus to my computer that basically destroyed it.

Then I got this computer after I dropped contact with him and he moved out of state. Quite a beauty. I got pulled back into OB by Dragon Warrior and Kiara Starr (who is now known as Revelation, I haven't talked to her since this). I signed up a new account as Kill All Trends, I wanted to be a New Member over again, I didn't want to be remembered as my old name. I learned that wouldn't be the case, all of the people who would've known me have left or forgotten about me, haha.

I only posted a few times and still decided it wasn't for me. I adopted a mySpace and continued Circle of Dragons with Erin. The links are in my signature. A little bit of time went by and...

I signed up yet again as RiflesAtRecess. Hello![/size][/font]

[Lindus]

I started out about three years ago, so about 8th grade. Not nearly as early as most of you :animeswea

I had been using the internet for small things like school work and such since I was 11, but it wasn't really until I was in 8th grade that I started using it for entertainment and socializing. I started out with a 56k speed then went down to 28/16k when I got my laptop. Comcast was like a miracle after suffering through that *_*

I'm still not internet savvy or anything. I still have a looong way to go XD

[Japan]

[COLOR=Navy]Hmm, if I can remember right, I started using the internet way back in the fifth grade.

I mostly played arcade games on Cartoon Network and Nick sites.

Then went to research, email, message boards, role playing games and instant messaging.

So, that about sums it up for my internet history.[/COLOR]

[Gavin]

[SIZE=1]Interesting, most interesting.

I first started using the Internet back in last 1999, just after my family bought our first Internet-capable computer to replace one my uncle had sent us a few years previously to allow my father do typing and the like. My core interest on the Internet was one subject, Dragonball Z, which I'd become intrigued by from watching Cartoon Network and the pursuit of knowledge relating to that subject and though my time wasn't limited to DBZ sites, it was where I'd predominantly surf.

I'd spend three of four hours a week surfing the net visiting sites to try and increase my knowledge of the show so that when I say an episode and a new character was introduced, or at least a character I'd never seen before I'd know who he was and what his story was. After a bit of time, a year approximately I came across a little website called TheOtaku with a fairly decent DBZ section and stayed around, and
eventually I signed up to it's message board Otakuboards when TheOtaku went down for revamping and really the rest from there is history.

Apart from OB I actually don't visit a great deal of other sites, and 90% of those are linked to stuff I'm doing on OB, so it this place were to shut down I wouldn't really have any reason to keep surfing, though with a connection speed of 28.8 kbps there?s not much else on the Internet to do.[/SIZE]

[Corey]

[size=1]I first started surfing when I was probabaly nine or ten years old. We had an old Macintosh Performa 475 (I actually still have it and boot it up every once in a while to expand a few stories I keep on it) with a 4-8k dial-up modem. It was terrible. We went through AOL, and every single page took a minimum of ten minutes to fully load. Seeing as I was young and impatient, I stopped trying to go on the internet, and stuck to RPing in the chatrooms of AOL.
My username was warlord9, and I remember frequenting the Red Dragon Inn. That's where my love of RPing started. That was all I did while we had that computer.

A bit later we bought an iMac (accursed machine) and the 56k connection, not mention Earthlink, felt like Mach 3. I didn't do much but check my e-mail and IM a few friends until a friend I had made in highschool introduced me to OB. I signed up as DarkOrderKnight, and am still here three years later.

The only thing I usually use the net for is gaming. fAnd even that is just about strictly done on OB. If I had a faster connection, I'd be more open to the prospect of mmorpgs and the like.[/size]

[SaiyanPrincessX]

[SIZE=1]I used computers when I was younger in school, first gradeish. You know, those really old Apple's. ^_^;

My family didn't end up getting a computer untill I was twelve. Compaq Presario. I think we started out with AOL, but after my dad had long arguments with the company we dropped them. I'm not sure what we ended up with then.

I loved searching for DragonBall Z websites, then I learned of chatrooms..The chatroom on the DBZ site was where I loved to go.

Then I learned of Forums/Boards. Went to many, most of which are closed now, like Planet Nameke Forums. I came across Otaku.com on accident in Dec. 2000, joined in January '01. I went to the Otaku chatroom alot back then, which is no longer available.

I got into graphics and art at about fourteen, but used paint. I got Paintshop Pro when I was about fifteen, then Photoshop at seventeen. We got DSL in 2002.

That about sums it up.[/SIZE]

[Darker Alucard]

I started when i was 9. I was a DBZ cartoons etc addict like everybody on that age. so my uncle introduced me on how to work on google. and i've self learned ever since. Search DBZ, Cartoons information on alot of stuff. then learned what was a chatroom messenger and stuff and i sttarted to become a pc freaak. i simply love PC's!!!

[Killer7]

I really started going on the internet about 6 years ago when I was 8. I used it mostly for looking up stuff on video games and anime, and of course Ebay. Then I started going on alot playing free games like Runescape and Alien Adoption Agency. For most of that time I had 56k MSN. 2 years ago I got Comcast, and I have been going on alot ever since. Most of my time nowadays is spent on forums, Runescape, or Ebay.

[MommySkullFish]

I started using the internet in 1997 when I was entering college (age 17). It was required that we have a PC, and the first one we got was a 133mhz system with dialup. (that's not including the DOS PC we had when I was 8 or 9)

I used it for school research, newsgroups, and playing MUDs (does anyone remember MUDs? Text based RPGs online...). I also used email and IM a lot. I met my former fiancee online, met my husband online, and also my current boyfriend... online.

Now I use it for everything. Participate in forums (a lot of them on various subjects), saving money (online coupons, and things you can get cheaper that way), ebay, craigslist (to sell things locally for free), freecycle, many other email lists, email in general, IMs, research, anything and everything! It's where I make main contact with people. I don't like to use the phone, I prefer email. I also use the internet for work, where some exhibitor show kits are only accessible, and I use work email as well.