What is the earliest thing that you can remember seeing or hearing online?

That I was the millionth visitor and I could claim my free iPod.

"Under Construction" gif and blinking fucking html.

But really it was "connecting to 087762534 BEEEEEEEEEEE BEEE BEEEE BEEEEEEBEAOOOOOOKSCSHSCSHSVSHSHSVSVSVSHSVSVSVSVSVACHSHHHHSHHHSHSCSCHHHSHSHSHSHSHH..."

Though that was audio.

The dancing baby

My high school mass media teacher thought it was the greatest thing ever. Looking back, that experience should've told me exactly what the internet would become.

BBSes. My first modem was for my Commodore 64. All you could connect to were Bulletin Board Services which were simply someone else's computer that was running software. Usually you would get some sort of menu if options when you connected.

CompuServe came not too long after that probably on an 8088 or 386 PC.

Depends on what you mean by online. If anything internet related counts, it was e-mails I got from teachers at university. That was totally new at the time and only people in computer science and related courses had access.

My first multimedia experience was with Usenet. The internet access was from a terminal account on a UNIX host. I had to telnet into that from a Windows machine (3.1 had just come out). There was this post in several parts named "cute girl getting it up the ass". I had to download all the posts as text files, stitch them together in an editor and uudecode the whole thing. Then i had to ftp it to the Windows machine and install a JPEG viewer on that (similar procedure). Then i could finally open the Jpeg, which took about a minute on that machine. The girl wasn't actually that cute.

Some pictures loading pixel by pixel, first in very large pixels, then a bid smaller, in finer resolution, and by the time the smallest pixels start to appear, you are already finished.

Dial up modem sound. Followed by the AOL portal site.

I didn't know what a URL was, so I was stuck with going through the kids section of the site, which I believe was a webcrawler that grabbed sites that had games on them. That was pretty much the internet for me.

Besides the dialing sound? Good question. Maybe ICQ sounds.. annoyed the hell out of my parents probably

The very first time I got internet, it was by hooking my BBS up to an internet provider in Colorado. Every night my computer would do a dial-up connection and exchange email and Usenet via UUCP. I was the only BBS that was connected to the for-real internet that I know of. Probably the very first things I accessed as I was getting the account set up were Usenet and poking around on anonymous FTP sites for major universities. They had all kinds of random nonsense there.

I moved away from home for the last two years of high school, so I had no internet, but we got email through the high school in my senior year. It was a big deal; among other things it meant I could exchange email with a girl I knew who lived far away instead of sending letters. It was her dad's email account though. She had no email of her own. You kids have no idea how lucky y'all are.

The first time I messed around with the web was at a summer programming job; it was very rudimentary at that time. We basically didn't use it; the day to day job was effectively disconnected from anything aside from the work we were doing locally on the machine. Pretty much the only thing I remember from the one machine in the office that was hooked up to the web was the Rome Lab Snoball Cam.

In college first first couple of years I used an extremely rudimentary DSL-type system for accessing email and things from off campus. Text only. Computers on campus were web-aware; mostly Unix machines with Netscape. It was as I was going through school that things like the web started to become really ubiquitous on all PCs, and by the time I'd graduated it was everywhere, mostly the modern version, and all computers were assumed to be hooked up to it.

When we got internet for the first time when I was a kid, and I immediately went to the cartoonnetwork website because it was shown on TV between cartoons.

I also remember that there was a vote held between a number of cartoons, and the one to receive the most votes would be shown 24h after the vote. I voted for my favorite one (some girl that secretly travels with some aliens on missions after school or something) and I realized that I could just vote again. So I voted like 100 times haha. Don't know whether it was my doing, but that cartoon was being shown the whole day after the voting ended.

“Welcome!”

https://youtu.be/QUj_KHbJDlI

The first Internet thing I remember actually doing is my friend helping me sign up for my first email account, on Hotmail... In high school computer lab, so it must have been 96 or 97.

I do remember reading about the Internet and trying to find a way to connect from home on our Packard Bell... But we were remote... It would have been some extreme long distance bills..

I don't know what the very first thing was back when I didn't yet have internet and could only use it when visiting my uncle who did.

But I remember the first site I visited after I had internet myself. I went on the Cartoon Network site to play some of the games they had.

A list of usenet groups on my dad's computer around 1989. Porn groups, I think, but that may be mixed up with another later memory.

Porn lol

Does the screaming and screeching of dial-up modems count?

I was like 5: I typed in yahoo.com, searched “pop” because it was the only word I could think of at that moment.

Earliest interesting thing: I played the old flash game where you get X-ray glasses and you look at people’s junk when I was like 6.

I vaguely remember watching someone demonstrate email around 1989 or so. It sounded like a way to send messages that very few people could read, in a very difficult way, over a very expensive long phone call. Instead of a letter or phone call. Crazy.

But first contact? Maybe 1993, using a dialup BBS at a local library. I noticed it could launch some sort of browser at a link list with a ton of topics.

Also, some FTP sites. Trying to sneakernet some software home over Kermit transfers and floppies. Didn't succeed most of the time.

There was a Usenet client with even more reading. I'm not sure if there was even an IRC client or did that come later, but some people were playing MUDs. There was an email client as well, and that started to make a little more sense.

It was a keyhole view into a bigger world. And it would only keep growing.

Stick fights and blue waffle/lemon party/hamster dance.

One of these things is not like the other.

Definitely some sort of Christmas Santa whatever 3D animation on yt that made me feel uncomfortable. That was back when my parents thought I was too young to explore the internet on my own. Couldn't tell you what video it was because that's too much work for my brain sinc that was around 2008 if I remember correctly.