The Internet or "on-line?" First time on any sort of system was around 1990 or 1991 when I was introduced to the wonderful world of BBSes. My dad and I found some where you could download games. Some would even send you a paper catalog of the games they hosted, complete with file sizes and short descriptions. We would pore over those catalogs, trying to determine, from that very short description, whether the hour it would take to download a 1 MB game was worth the time the phone line would be tied up.

I was at a summer program, hosted by a university, in '95 and a friend I had met there would go to the library and use their computers to telnet to a shell account he had and check his email. That was my introduction to the Internet. When I got home from that program, I called some ISP and requested a similar shell account. Then came the wonders of graphical email, the gopher protocol, and surfing the web with Mosaic.

My Snapzu origin story: a member of one of the recent waves. Wish I had found it earlier, though :)

Around 2003/2004 when I was 13/14, dial-up first became popularized in Nepal. I was obsessed with U.S. pop culture back then, particularly the show Friends so I found a message board that was cozy and super active; quite the community really and starting engaging in it very frequently (I was actually on off-and-on it for the next 5-6 years until it's demise around 2010). From there I got into fanfiction, and then Harry Potter shortly after, and became a part of fanfiction.net and mugglenet amongst other things. Now I am only on Reddit, which feels huge and impersonal, and Snapzu, which I joined last week and loving it! :)

I didn't really encounter the Internet until college when my classmates introduced me to local bulletin boards on the school's network. The web wasn't a thing at the time, it had just been proposed a few months earlier and work wouldn't begin on building it until the following year. So I learned about BBS, telnet, ftp and all manner of online frivolity.

I didn't really touch the web until five years later and my first exposure was through the Unix-based system of Lynx. It was all text-based with no mouse control and I was not terribly impressed. But two years later I began my career in IT as a Help Desk technician on a graveyard shift supporting Compuserve and I was forced to learn to use the earliest browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. In my boredom of the wee hours of the morning I started looking up tutorials on building web pages and learned to program HTML from scratch. My very first webpage is still out there hosting my poetry and short stories, but since I try to keep my online persona separate from my real identity I'm not going to tell you where. ;)

My adoption of the web was a slow, gradual affair but it's become part of my daily life now. Any time there's something I want to know the first place I go is Google.

I used to get dozens of those AOL CD's every year advertising free 100 hours of internet and then the low low price of 20 bucks per month. Used most as coasters, but I did give it a go and stuck with em for a few years. The very first thing I printed out was a picture of titanic. I frequented Yahoo chat a lot, and generally spent the bulk of my time playing text based games and surfing aimlessly.

A friend told me about the internet but I wasn't sure what to make of it at first. I thought it's just some way computers work like phones where people can play games with each other, and since I was doing just that for a while I didn't really investigate it until later. July is looking hectic for me, but I'm going to give Snow Crash a go when I get around to grabbing it on Amazon sometime this week.

I don't remember the first time I went online. I have the worst memory possible, I'm sure most remember such an important moment. I do know that early on I was into making sprite comics. I joined up with some communities, collaborated with some people. it was a fun time, all the comics were awful but it was fun.

I'm not quite sure about the first times on the internet, but it was probably whatever search engine my uncle had setup on his dial-up ISP on Netscape Navigator (probably Lycos given the timing). Once my parents got our own brand new Packard Bell Windows 95 machine, most of my internet time was spent exploring my hobbies at the time. There were two core places where I spent a significant amount of time: one a Magic the Gathering hub on AOL's Message boards, where we played online matches against each other. And another forum that played Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition in AOL Chat rooms.

The internet was just this mystical place where you could meet anybody, and do anything. But noone really knew what the rules were. Somehow in those early days we made due with 5 hours of internet a month for the whole account.

Glad to be on Snapzu now, although I'm only recently joining. Feels like the early days of Reddit did before it got too popular (although less technology based), and it seems like there's enough people on here now to help continue the momentum of a small growing community.

I remember using the free dial-up included in Juno Web Mail to create a backdoor allowing me to access the internet while I was checking my email.

I spent most of my first years using the Internet for finding information for my school homework. In highschool I was in the chat rooms all the time, and had my own myspace and skyblog (popular blog platform in France at that time). For about 3 years I was a very active player at Neopets (had pretty rare neopets, was making good virtual money, and collecting avatars). I was in a guild and chatting with Americans, and basically discovered albino black sheep. Later on I moved to Livejournal, where I was a very active/popular user of "ask me anything". It was really fun.

I was born... A poor black child...

Excited about the book club. Heading over to amazon after this post to buy it.

My origin story is boring since I'm so young. It was the early/mid 2000s when I started using the internet. My first website that my parents allowed my to use was Neopets. What a weird site. From there, I slowly branched off into a couple of forums, like the original nsider (R.I.P). I remember I checked out nsider2 a little after, but the moderation was just terrible. Finally, around middle school, my parents stopped monitoring what websites I went on. I started going on the everday websites everybody goes on. Youtube, Facebook, etc. Not very interesting but it gives an idea of what its like for somebody to be introduced to the internet after it has actually been developed rather than being around since the early 90s.

I don't specifically remember the first websites I visited really... Some of the first were probably places like Cheat Code Central and similar ones looking for cheats for my brand new PS1 around 1999 or 2000. One time I was looking for Spyro codes and found an ad for Neopets, and got addicted for a couple of years. I also found GameFAQs about the time Kingdom Hearts 1 came out and I loved KH, so my username was something like kingdomhfan. Ummmm not much more besides that. I remember I got my own computer when I was 14, actually the first day of school that year. I think soon after that we upgraded to cable or something, where I hit an amazing max speed of about 200KB/s.

Wow, my fiction book won. I don't know how to feel about this (yay? hope it doesn't suck?).

There was this file-sharing client called ODC. That's where my internet life started. Back then there were "neighborhood ISPs", and everyone in the hood would gather on ODC and share files and discuss. That's where I met two guys playing Lineage 2 and I started playing too. I grew addicted and wasted two years of my life playing that game intensively. I can't say I regret it, but I feel like my time could have been better used in other directions. Meh.

Snapzu origin is that I wanted to go to a place where my opinion matters. It is working great here so far.

Gonna enjoy my days off, tonight I'll do some reading, I need to finish a book before I start the one we're about to discuss!

Great day to you all.