Not being able to get online because my dad was using the internet at a wholly different location for work.

Also the screams of a dialup modem through the tinny speakers of a first-gen, puck-moused iMac.

6th grade computer class. I grew up playing video games and liked medieval era stuff despite not knowing how to spell it, so I thought I’d try to type “midevil(dot)com” into the URL bar. At the time it was some kind of BDSM site with a black background, red font, and multiple cats-o-nine-tails slapping to and fro like animated gifs (were they gifs? idk). My blood ran cold and I closed the window. I wasn’t caught thanks to the teacher also not knowing that browser history was a thing.

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

It was a lot better back then, then it became about money.

Cartoon Network games! I remember one set of adventure games that I loved to play but I couldn’t understand English very well yet so I’d always make my dad play with me and translate. Resort something. I look them up on the Wayback machine once in a while.

CBBC website

The earliest thing I remember with certainty it’s correct was my friend across the street, who was older than me, asking me to look up “naked girls” for him.

I met a girl on an MSN chat room and we talked for awhile and enjoyed each others’ company. We found out we lived pretty close and were the same age but went to different high schools. We decided to meet up in a public place for a date so I fired up mapquest and printed off directions. She did as well. Well, I took a wrong turn and couldn’t get back on track so I disappointingly went home to get back on MSN to give her the news that I got lost. Turns out she did as well! lol. Next time I just gave her my address and we dated for a bit ha

I remember clicking on a YouTube video and waiting about an hour for it to load. When it finished loading the whole Family gathered in front of the screen and watched it.

Quake online

Good

9600 baud > 14.4 > 56k dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms.

building websites on GeoCities. I had one that had “haxing tools” and how to use them. the different phreaking boxes and how to make them. etc.

around the same time I was war driving phone numbers and telnetting into whatever I connected to.

I found an unprotected early porn site with questionable content. I deleted their entire server.

I stopped doing it when I accidentally connected to a state police server.

skip forward a few years and I was on Napster, Limewire, a couple others I can’t remember now.

skip forward a few more years and I was hosting my own online forums and websites.

few more years I was hosting VPN’d LAN’s for Xbox tournaments between friends when we couldn’t get together(this was long before xlink kai). the lag was terrible sometimes, but made for some epic kills.

now I’m a full stack software developer and get paid to build and break shit.

BBS on a commodore64 and a tiny bit of compuserve.

Got dialup as a young teen in the 90s - first with CompuServe, then usenet and the early Web. Usenet was amazing, fun communities, kibology, and great for dialup, and as someone who lives in the country, I still wish sites had more options for downloading stuff in advance to view when out of signal.

A less positive part of usenet was back then it was completely uncensored (or at least, that child me had unrestricted access) . At the time I thought it was normal and good to be able to get porn with people my age, instead of weird adults. But now I feel pretty sad and icky that this was my introduction to sex, and horrible if I think abiut the situations behind those pictures.