I'm old. I used the Internet before there was a "World-Wide Web" - so no web pages. I used telnet to connect to other computers, where generally I had to have a login. At home I only had dialup, but the school computers had Internet access. Those connections did include Usenet discussions, which were kind of like a primitive version of Lemmy.

I remember something about a fully naked Pamela Anderson and a 30 day ban from using the school's computers, but other than that... Kazaa and MSN, I think.

I've been online longer than gmail. Its like asking me to remember my birth.

I remember connecting to the internet frim a Windows 3.1 pc using Trumpet Winsock that I downloaded from a BBS to get on gopher and look up the song lyrics to a Kate Bush song, Running Up That Hill.

I know this seems trivial but at the time it felt like a superpower.

Web games :3

Boobs. But they took 15 minutes to load.

Opening a telnet connection to a friend's workstation who had started studying at another university.
Using the UNIX "talk" command to chat. Yes, I am old.

Let's say Usenet.

When I gained access at university, search engines hadn't really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn't know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)

However, the university also provided Usenet access.

Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.

I don't really remember, but almost definitely something to do with games. As a youngling I was on forums a lot. Good ol' phpBB.

I'm really old, so it was in the mid to late 1980s, for work, and I'm struggling to remember the details. I had a Tandy device that fitted over the handset of a landline phone, you dialled the number and the data (from an electronic word processor) went chirping down the line. I once had to do it in a public phone booth, that was fun. Several times I was in a hotel room and had to ring reception first to explain I was going to make a data call, and please not to interrupt it.

A/S/L?

If BBSs don't count, the Tolkien-based text MUD in the university's computer labs, and later a Discworld MUD.

Edit: Common set of commands in Middle Earth: e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e...

Mainly email, research, eventually Napster, irc chatting, and entertainment. Things were not fast on 14.4 or 28.8kbps dial up. When I got 56k,it took about an hour to download a 5MB mp3. Those were tough times. File downloaders were necessary apps, which would recover and continue your download after your modem connection quit halfway. It was also unheard of to have to log into a website. HTTP wasn't the only show in town, some other older nerds may remember Gopher (you can still browse it, too).

Downloading ASCII drawn guitar/bass tablatures from freenet in the early to mid 90's.

Back in 95 I used it to chat with people. Then computer games. So much diablo 1 and age of empires. Then Ultima online and started downloading warez... So games and more games. Also IRC which I still kind of use for the same chat room 30 years later.

To sail the 7 seas! 🦜

Shockwave games

probably some AOL chat room.

I used Gopher to access the CIA world fact book. Don't remember the year but I do remember it was 2400 baud.

It was 1992. I attended a small technical college in Norway. We would telnet to an irc server in NYC to chat. After that: email, ftp, gopher, Usenet, irc, and eventually the www and setting up the college's first web server.

Usenet, FTP. From a mainframe. TN3270.

Probably resolving a hostname to IP address via DNS.

At an application level, not sure. Maybe sending an email via the VAX/VMS MAIL command.

EDIT: Actually...hmm. If it was actually MAIL, it might have been using DNS to do an MX resolution, looking up a mail server for a given domain, not resolving a hostname.

First thing that come to my mind was Caramail (just in French) which was an open chat plateform where you could talk with other people of your age, I was preteen at the time, it seams crazy now, I don't know how much pedocriminal were there but it didn't seams to be a big concern at the time

No profil pic, i dont think there was way to send images neither, full binary with blue for boys and pink for girls... but still the first interaction was often "ASV" which stand for "Âge Sexe Ville" (Age Sex Town/Location) ....

Yeah... i don't think I had deep conversation at the time

I grew up in a quite rural area, so Internet only arrived in the mid 90's. I remember my first time on the internet was at my cousin's house, asking him to download for me the Pokemon Blue rom to play on an emulator. It was available on a website called "la-pagina-de-jl-picard.com" and it had several game boy roms to download. I remember the day it was finally available (a saturday) I rode my bike from my house to my cousin's (roughly 10km each way) with a couple 1.44 floppy disks to get both Blue and Red so me and my brother could play them. Coming back at home before lunch was a race against time because I was so hyped about this game. Good times...

We didn't have PC but the family my mom babysitted for did. I used it to look up and print guides and pictures of Pokémon. I fell for every fake guide on how to get mew.

High school computer. Mid 90s. I'm almost positive it was looking up stuff for Vampire: The Masquerade rpg. I remember finding someone's webpage of the biological/scientific overview of vampires and their anatomy. Like a mock essay. It was really good! Never could find it again. The internet used to be such a great place.

Probably not the absolute first thing I did, but my first internet memory was downloading the music video for Prodigy's Breathe. This was pre-napster and I'm pretty sure a 28k modem. Took an hour, was really shitty quality and I'm not even sure if it was the whole video, but it was awesome!

I also have a memory of checking out an rpg game from the aol home page and being really confused why it was just people talking, thinking we were waiting for the game to start and eventually just logging out

1993. First the university bbs, then IRC, bit later Asylum MUD.

One of my first internet memories was when my dad gave me a binder containing a printed out version of the Space Jam website.

The year was 1995. My middle school class took a field trip to the library across the street. We had to access a website (yahoo dot com) then attempt to research a recipe for baking cookies or other dessert. Manually typing the hyperlink took about 5 minutes for everyone in the class lol

I remember playing web games and looking up Pokemon cheats

I remember my father showing me early Yahoo!, my family was into roller skating, and he looked up some stuff about roller skating. Grey backgrounds, Times New Roman and some slowly loading pictures.

The very first thing I ever independently used the internet to do was look up cheat codes for Mechwarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, using Ask Jeeves. At the time, they had this campaign that you could just...type a natural sentence and it would answer. We were a quarter century from that actually happening, but my tweenage ass typed "Where are the cheat codes kept?" and I did manage to bumble my way to a Web 1.0 cheat code site, this was before GameFAQs and those hugely long ASCII documents.

BRB, I'm just gonna die of old age real quick.

Got on a BBS via a long distance call to AOL.

Typed a bunch of typo-laiden words at someone else.

Lots of IRC then hunting for images. I was so fascinated with computerized pictures.

IRC, I think.

flash games as a kid. I also remember my dad looking up some science stuff for me because I was curious.

The earliest I remember is using gopher on the computer in my dad's office to try to find games to download.

Porn!

Jokes aside, it was e-mail. And porn.

Elementary school computer lab, probably Ask Jeeves with the assignment being learning how to use a search engine.

Memorable? Neopets.

At home? I was downloading a Monster Truck Madness demo over 56k. Took 8 hours.

The first thing i remember was watching pictures on google images with my mom

I didn't realize just how old Lemmy is, lol

probably porn.

after that was probably gore like rotten.com.

after that? maybe neopets?

Usenet but via AOL. I was a few months after Eternal September began. I believe “100% certified non-cringe” user MODESTGOD has a post or two that made their way into searchable archives.

It was the year 1998. Me and my buddy wanted to see a naked lady. We searched (I don't remember the search engine) boobs. The pic took a few minutes to load. Worth the wait!

Gopher and IRC.

Mostly talking to weirdos on Usenet and ftp'ing warez from various public FTP sites that had "hidden" directories.

Internet research. Learning all about Henry VIII.

It was early enough I don't remember. I started out on disk computer games, like as soon as I could use a mouse, but there was always an internet connection. It would have had to be after I could read.

I'd love to know what my first search was. I'm also curious if I ever used Netscape; it could have happened, although I'm young enough it seems like an old-timey thing.

prob a bbs with a link out. but after that prob alt.bin…

I probably looked up some stuff on the web first, but then IRC, a lot of IRC..

I mean. im almost sure email. you would login and it would let you know you had new email. I miss the command line days.

Finding out what was up with my favorite band - The Stone Roses - turns out they had broken up.

Porn

This was back in ... 1995 or something, I was one of the first people with a 1Mbit broadband connection, and well, porn it was. However, this is 1995 internet, so porn was really quite hard to find. I vaguely recall barely nbeing able to find anything that was not paid

Research for work. ISP was OCLC, no GUI, no mouse, telnet, Archie, FTP, Wais, Gopher, all that good stuff. My first email address started with X.400.

Looking up guides for Pokemon Red/Blue.

Super Mario Flash and other games on Mofunzone.

Asking Jeeves about command and conquer

Not sure which was first, but looking up videos on albinoblacksheep or browsing pictures on cgsociety.

The first thing I can remember using it for was to play the original runescape. I could barely even speak a single word of english back then.

The first search engine I used was Alta Vista by DEC, I remember looking up pictures of cars and trains....

Gaming, specifically pokemon trading. Sometime after it was WOW.

I think I was about 10 before wifi started to become a thing, and we didn't get internet till after that.

Got an AOL CD in the mail with a few hours of free dial-up time and, once I made it past the screeching of my 28.8 kbps modem to a friendly "Welcome!" (no mail yet though), there was a button promising games and I've been hooked ever since.

Random chat rooms in a public internet café

Going to the South Park site and playing some flash games.

Using NCSA Mosaic to browse some site. Possibly yahoo! in its first year.

Grey background, blue links, web era.

The first two things I remember doing are visiting the official X-Files website, www.trustno1.com, and looking for cool pictures of space ships from Star Trek.