I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
I’m new to the internet. Only got access to it 3 years ago. Didn’t own a smartphone until last year. I’m curious how it was for people who discovered it earlier.
First internet experience for me was 2013 as a child. Back then our home connection had a usage cap of 10GB, but the ISP hosted a “free zone” website that contained a bunch of cartoons and mirrored ABC (Australia) content.
We would watch YouTube videos together as a family because the bandwidth was considered that previous and laugh at those fail compilations and whatnot.
Otherwise about a month or two into having internet, I realised that this would open me up to online gaming, and I excitedly put Mineplex’s IP into the cracked copy of Minecraft that I had on a USB from school, only to get an authentication error because I hadn’t bought an account. Managed to stumble into some Dutch server that was cracked and despite the language barrier, had tons of fun trying to work out the game.
Edit: that Dutch server was on a server list and I remember being mindblown that when I was on, the website would update to show that I was playing and my username was there. “A website with my name on it? I must be famous!”
Hang on, core memory unlocked.
About three years before that, a neighbour set up a WiFi network but had open authentication on it.
I remember seeing it on my little EEE PC and connecting to it. I remember completely not knowing what it was, if it was going to cost my parents data money, or if I’d otherwise get in trouble for using it.
I had friends on the same street as me, so I showed them this WiFi network and they weren’t really sure if it would charge my parents or not either.
I had been playing a game that came on a shareware disc called “Wild Wheels” (later learned that was the publisher’s name of the game, the actual name was BuzzingCars) and it referenced ceebot.com as a place to download more demos.
Well, that was the first website I ever visited and I downloaded a 26MB setup for Colobot, an RTS first person space exploration game that had you literally program robots to complete missions. I was still so anxious that there’d be some massive bill in the mail (hence the setup size still being burned in my head) so that was all I downloaded.
And oh boy did I play the shit out of that, and I attribute that game to why I still enjoy computing and programming today.