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.
I’ve been online since 1993.
Originally we just had CompuServe, which was kinda like AOL (or at least what I remember of AOL being shown off at the tech museum in San Jose). “Websites” didn’t exactly exist on it, though the WWW became publicly accessible that same year.
I really only remember two things from CompuServe: the chat rooms, and their MUD “Neverwinter Nights.” Not to be confused with the Bioware RPG, though it was based on the original PnP D&D module.
Not sure when we switched to the “real” internet, as it is now, but back in the early days it was pretty wild. Funky aesthetics, low res images, no video to speak of. It was super common to just type random words sandwiched between www. and .com to find interesting websites (search engines didn’t exist at first and then kinda sucked once they started being a thing).
It was a place almost exclusively populated by geeks and enthusiasts so it was extremely weird. But that’s what made it so fun.