Your History of the Internet

[Pumpkin]

I know I've done this thread before, but I decided to bring it back since it's been quite a while since it was posted and I see a lot of new members on OB now. If not, feel free to close it for me.

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? What do you remember about how computers use to be or better yet how the internet was like? Any sites that you remember going too?

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 cartoons. I had parental advisory so no I didn't get into anything bad. I didn't use the internet again until I reached around 12 or 13 in which I got hooked on creating my sailor moon mailing list which I sent through AOL (that was the best in the 90's) and I remember being in mailing list rings. There was some kind of war between zines and mailing lists that now I find funny, especially since zines ended up taking over most of the mailing lists from what I remember.

Everyone had a diary mailing list, not a blog as you see nowadays. (livejournal, myspace, blogspot, xanga, etc.) I also read fanfiction on fanfiction.net. I use to RPG in AOL chatrooms which were pretty lame to be honest. I didn't come back to the internet until I was 16 in which I started joining forums instead since I had DSL and mainly used it for that and email. And now here I am on OB, which happened by accident actually since I wasn't expecting to find a forum that I liked.

Anyways....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, email and OB. Feel free to share the details.

[Panda]

This is going to be funny to many of you "youngins'" but I didn't start really using the internet until January of 2001. I wasn't a computer person so I never really got into being online. It seemed really weird to me how some people would spend hours online. Looking back at it now it really does seem funny to me seeing how now I live online.

I started out eBaying. I have a natural love of shopping and this was my husband's nightmare. I could shop 24/7. It was my drug. I was hooked on eBay. I would constantly be checking in for what treasures had been posted in the time I was away from the computer. Watching my bids like a hawk waiting for that annoying sniper trying to outbid me in the last 30 seconds. It truly felt like a little victory when I would win the listing. LOL Oh I should mention I was on DIAL UP at the time. Yeah, try eBaying on dial up, it really is a victory when you win a popular listing!

I then moved on to an anime based message board. It was the beginning of the end. You know how that is. You find people who share the same interests as you and all of a sudden you have a new group of friends. I made many really great friends, whom I have traveled around the country, to meet. I have gone to Ohio, Florida, Texas, Oregon, California and of course around my home state to meet people I first met online.

I can't imagine my life now without the internet. Since my health is so meh I do all my work online. It gives me a professional and social outlet that I would be lost and isolated without. Now the majority of my time is spent on theOtaku network and emails. I hardly ever go into my messenger programs since I have to take frequent breaks to rest my hands...darn arthritis! Besides that I still check in on eBay but I don't nearly spend the time I use to on that site. I'm sure my hubby is happy about that!

[Retribution]

[quote name='Pumpkin']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 cartoons. I had parental advisory so no I didn't get into anything bad.[/quote]
[size=1]Whoa! Same here!

Anyway, my first contact with computers was watching my mother work on MSDOS to do the taxes ... fun. Once we got a Windows 98, I got into the whole internet scene -- not alot of real involvement, just going into the "Kid's Only" section of AOL (4.0, I believe. Yeah, I'm totally old school). My first screen name was Binder238 -- don't ask me why, but I'm pretty sure because when my mother asked me for a name, I looked around the room, and a binder, and tossed on some number.

I stopped using the computer for the internet for quite a while in about fourth grade, but I got back into it in about seventh grade when talking to friends became super-important to me. By this time, my family had switched over to CompuServe (more 56k sufferage) and stayed this way until I finally nagged them for Comcast High Speed Internet in 2003.

After I got High Speed Internet, I spent alot more time online, and eventually found OB in 2004. Since then, I've been a complete addict, and I don't intend on stopping. But really, I can stop whenever I want to. I swear. ;_;[/size]

[sakurasuka]

[SIZE=1]My first contact was through Neopets. I wasted so many hours of my days, and days of my life fixing up my [anime] guild, building userlookup-layouts for me [and other people], and just playing with the cute little pets!

By having a Neopets account, I was forced into learning to do graphics in MS Paint [This was before I got a competent program], and building layouts. Neopets layouts were also the introduction to HTML for me. Fun times.

I think I was eight. I didn't get PaintShopPro until I made my OtakuBoards account, I think it was about a year and a half/two years ago.

My current obsession is the dreaded MySpace.
[[URL=http://myspace.com/itsyourpunishment]Click.[/URL]][/SIZE]

[Lindus]

My first contact with the internet was when I was 11 for a math project, but other than that, I had absolutely no interest in what the internet had to offer. I kept that mentality until 8th grade, when an internet-savvy friend of mine not only introduced me to anime, but taught me that the internet was more than just an information database.

Not too long afterwards, our first computer ( a 98' Compaq god help me XD) died a terrible death, and I was internet-less for part of my freshman year which was really inconvinient. My dad lent us his computer and around October, I discovered Gaia Online. That was fun for three months or so, but I soon moved on. In January, I got my own personal laptop which was very nice, but we still had to use dial-up. Our connection speed was often lower than 56k so cruising the net became more of a chore.

About a year later, we finally started using wireless internet and I became much more familiar with computers over the next 12 months. And now I type here before you. ^^

[Desbreko]

[color=#4B0082]My first use for the internet was looking up screen shots of the yet-to-be-released N64 game Zelda: Ocarina of Time back in 1998. Yes, even before OoT was released, I was rabidly obsessed with it. What I saw in Nintendo Power and other magazine previews wasn't enough, so any time I was at the local library I'd try to secure one of their net connected PCs and pop over to Nintendo.com to see if there was any new info.

A couple years later in 2000 I got a PC with a modem in my room, so I could get online in the evenings provided one of my brothers wasn't already connected. This was back when we had a dial-up connection. Again, I mainly used it to visit gaming sites; I remember watching trailers and gameplay clips from Zelda: Majora's Mask on GameSpot before the game was released. It seemed like it took forever to download the video files on my 56k connection, but I was a lot more patient with my connection speed then than I am now. Broadband really spoils you.

Then I found the video game message board on Amazon.com. I forget why Amazon, but that's where I ended up, and I made some friends and had fun there. Though I think more was posted in the off topic thread in there than in all the others combined. I got bored of that eventually, and began hunting for a new forum to lurk about.

After looking around various places, I remembered a site I had turned up during some Google search and actually bothered to bookmark. theOtaku.com . . . maybe they had a decent forum. Sure enough, down towards the bottom of the navigation column, there was a "Forums" link. I entered, and OtakuBoards greeted me for the very first time. Version 3 had only started about a month earlier, so the shiny new Virtual Bulletin forum impressed me; all I'd seen before that was the Amazon forums and some crappy proboard forums and the like.

So I joined a couple days later, after looking around a bit. And here I am. :)[/color]

[OMNOMNOMALY]

[COLOR=Indigo][FONT=Trebuchet MS]
I've been a big fan of the internet since I was about 11, I think. So only about 4 years ago. My friend introduced it to me, first by showing me ICQ and then MSN. I loved the idea of MSN so I signed up when I got home and started on just chatting then. Following MSN, around the same time, the same friend got me hooked on neopets. I went into some MSN chats, and I played an internet game shown to me by another friend called Wormhole. That's about all I used it for at the time.

As I got older, I tried RPing in MSN chats for about a year when I was 13-14. They closed the free ones though, so I basically stopped. I've been using MSN ever since I signed up, and as I got out of rping, I got into the idea of communities. I joined myO, and OB, though I only used the myO account until recently. The idea of forums sort of intimidated me, but I finally checked out the OB and y'know.. I really love it here ^__^

Now I mostly use it for 2 communities I'm a member of, my email, MSN, and school.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[TheShinje]

[color=crimson] It was 1995 I believe, when I first began to use the web, I didn't like it one bit because I couldn't use the thing, I foudn the comedians who would joke about it being an information super-culdesac quite amusing. Then one day I found a word which saved my achin thumbs, the simplest word you'd ever typed and this is what it was: Yahoo!

Yahoo opened up the net for me, because before I found out about search engines and stuff, I thought you had to be a lucky guesser and type in web adresses to see if you got anything good out of them, and I didn't even know to put www's and .com's in that adress, so before Yahoo, the only thing I had got to come up was a Springsteen page for my aunty.

I still remember my first significant download, seems so insignificant now, but i waited nearly 5 minutes for it back then, a picture of the new 1996 Holden Commodore (a car for the uninitiated, poor things you are.) I didn't know how to save the pic back then either, so I just looked at it for a while, then sadly closed the window with that little x, fearing I would never see it again..

Quite a while after that, I got into newgrounds.com and the funny flash games and cartoons, I still frequent there under my old 1998-envisioned name (see below.)

After getting a new computer that could handle Java, I started visiting chatrooms, under the name [b]seyingohan98[/b],I changed this to [b]saiyangohan2002[/b] when I first joined OtakuBoards and Planet Namek (shudders) in 2002, and found out what the real spelling of Saiyan was.

OtakuBoards has been my "local" hub for 3 years, I don't get into chat rooms as much now, since they keep gettign flodded all the time, so I spend a great deal of time here and on other message boards, but mostly here. In 2004 I got broadband, yup, now hte internet is very fast, and I can view OtakuBoards much more efficently than I coudl on dial-up.

I still visit the Holden Commodore pic whenever I can, loads in half a second now, but, oh the memories![/color]

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1]I think it would have been in 2001 when I first got online, on a school computer. As far as I can remember, all just about anyone used to visit was Ezone or Neopets. Oh, the joy of flash-games. Around that time I was really into Pokemon, and I found OB through a search. I joined under a different monikker, and spnt a while here. Unfortunately, I didn't have my own computer back then, and so I drifted away and forgot about this place over school holidays.

Between then and 2003 I got my own computer and dialup. In May of '03, I remembered the site URL for some reason. Why? Who knows. Maybe it was destiny.

*cough*

Anyway, I came back and signed up under my new name which I used for anything [which has never been changed] and spammed my way around for a bit. Particulayly in the dot Hack forums, because that sounded interesting, even though I had no idea what it [i]actually was[/i]. I had no idea that it was a cartoon, heh.

Anyway, I gradually cleaned up my act and since then I've wasted thousands of hours on OB, and other thousands exploring the rest of the interweb.[/size]

[Goodbye, Face]

[font=trebuchet ms]It's safe to say that the first webpage I ever saw was TheOtaku. It was blue and white and didn't seem to have as much info as it did in towering amounts of pictures and sound files of DragonBallZ, which was the big thing at the time.

I have Zidane11 to thank for being here in the first place.

I got the internet in 2001 and joined OB either November or December of that year as Cloud Strife00, changed names to Axel--Ignition later.

I left because I got attacked a few times by certain members, then my computer go hit by a nasty virus that rendered it completely useless.

When I got a new, temporary, computer Dragon Warrior dragged me into his RPG. I wanted to avoid the year-old stigma with my old name, so I made a new one: Kill All Trends.

I left again after the RPG and had a pretty bad year followed by a few breakdowns. I changed a lot and came back as RiflesAtRecess.

Honestly, I don't use the net for much else than OB. Blame dial-up.[/font]

[Her Black Wings]

I actually hadn't even know what the internet was until I hit 5th grade lol. Then it was all about diablo 1. Wayyy back in the day. I used to be absolutly obsessed with neopets. My friends and I would argue over who had the best guild, damn addicting website. For some reason I remember my internet connection being much faster. Probably the days before spy/adware. Haha.

[Gavin]

[SIZE=1]Interesting, most interesting.

Like most people I started out using the internet, albeit for a reason I've never actually admitted to anyone. Back in 99, the year everyone will remember as the year people were convinced that computer systems as we knew them were going to cause the end of the world because of programming laziness. I got into the internet after a cousin showed me the WWF chatrooms, yes I finally admit it, I got into the internet because I was addicted to professional wrestling, I must remind people I was twelve at the time. Anyway I used to just have fun in the chat rooms talking to other fans, slurring Stone Cold and declaring The Rock was the true champ, Triple H wasn?t even worth mentioning. Back then I used even try and use email addresses in search bars, God above you remember stuff like that and wonder how it could have happened.

Anyway as time passed I became interested in a new craze that had struck Cartoon Network, that craze was called Dragon Ball Z and I caught the fever pretty much instantly. I spent the next year or so browsing every website I could find on the subject to increase my insatiable appetite for DBZ info, finally I settled on one very informative site called DBZ Realm and spent my time merrily there just gaining knowledge, however at some stage in mid to late 2000 DBZ Realm mysteriously shut down and I was forced to seek a new source of info, this quest led me to a little site known as TheOtaku, which I happily perused although I must admit it had less info but a more friendly feel to it. This was also to be my first foray into Otakuboards which would have been either V1 or V2 at the time, as I don?t know when V2 was launched. I didn?t join back then as I have no interest in message boards, and so no reason in joining.

After a few more months I reached a turning point in my internet browsing, as TheO closed down for revamping and OB V3 had just been launched so I thought what the heck and joined. The years was 2001, the month was probably September and it was to be a decision I would never regret. I learned how to role-play something I still partake in occasionally to this day ;-) , and made some very solid friendships that have lasted to his day. In between OB I also started using sites like Gamefaqs, Yahoo Games, and search engines which made life considerably easier. And for those of you complaining about having to use Dial Up in the late nineties and early new millennium, there are still some of us using Dial Up, like my own current connection of a measly 26.4 kbps.[/SIZE]