When my uncle first got the internet I went and filled a few floppies with midi files. Nirvana, metallica, a bunch of other bands I’d never heard of. Although they were just midi files, it really felt like I was cheating something. Plus I could plop them in guitar pro and get approximate tabs to learn the songs.

Then when we got it at home I mostly used AOL chat rooms. I also found out I had a fax software with the modem so for a while my friend and I used to send faxes to each other. Just one Word page with silly bitmaps and word art, it was really cool.

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

I bought a yoyo and paid for it by mailing a cheque to the vendor.

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

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

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.

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!

When I first entered the internet, I think I was looking for essays for school or university. I don’t remember exactly whether I had finished school or had already entered institute. It was the era of dial-up and modems. The internet was damn expensive, so I had about an hour a day. A few years later, I found Ragnarok Online in the expanses of the web and used to hang out there at night, because tariffs like “all night for 3 bucks” appeared. Although it was still expensive.

And also, a friend and I once set up a dial-up to dial-up bridge and played some games for free that I don’t even remember anymore. It was a fun time. I even had to scavenge a warez Windows XP preview from the market because it had the ability to set up a modem pool out of the box. I remember not understanding how to activate it because it was the first Windows with online activation, and I called the Microsoft Russia line with a pirated key. Ahaha. It’s still funny to this day. It turned out there was just a crack on the disc.

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).

Gamefaqs at the library.

My dad had just gotten internet at home and he helped my sister and me visit the fox kids site. It didn’t load properly, but it was exciting.

very limited usage for animal facts for a sloppy research project in HS, when internet is pretty “newish”, and then you "know what later on, when i had full access to my own computer for the firs ttime.

Find cheat codes for GTA 2

Flash games

Looking up animal facts. This was December 1994 when I was a young boy.