The first time I ever went online, I couldn't have been more than three or four -- which would place the date around 1993 or 1994, on a laptop running Windows 3.1. The first site I remember visiting was this weird educational thing about Australia, which had educational games and stuff. I never found it again, though. Prior to about 2002 (which was when we got highspeed internet and I no longer had to ask my parents to put in a password every single time I wanted to go online) most of my internet memories involve nick.com. Does anyone else remember that col 3D tour they had of Nickelodeon studios? Oh, also, my first exposure to pornography was online and on dial up. Even back then, the internet was very much for porn.
Around this time, I also remember Macromedia having a website that showed off the best things people had done with their Flash and, especially their Shockwave products. There were videos, but also a lot of games. I remember this one fully 3D game that involved tanks fighting in an urban setting; I didn't see anything else like it until years later.
Moving forward to 2002, I spent a lot of time lurking on Gamefaqs. It got to a point where I had been lurking for so long that I was actually too embarrassed to create an account and start posting; I knew a little bit too much about the users on the boards that interested me, and it would just be weird to come in with 0 karma but having memories of the board going back far enough that I should have been on the edge of being a vet. I remember Newgrounds.com being pretty big around that time, and it's also when I started gaming online.
Shogo: Mobile Armour Dvision was my first and, for several years, only online game. By the time I stopped playing it (around 2008), the skill level needed to compete was so high that I, a completely mediocre player (made worse by the fact that I didn't learn that you could turn off mouse acceleration in Windows until a year or two later, let alone that it would make a difference) was so much better than the few newcomers that we would occasionally get that any time someone new came in, I was accused of cheating. I'll never forget the time I went roughly 50-2 K/d with two noobs double teaming me.
Anyway, the internet was really different prior to Youtube. That's when the whole web 2.0 thing started happening, and flash started being used as a basic part of web design, instead of as a method of making crappy (
and not so crappy) cartoons. It's hard to describe just how different things looked, but everything was boxier and less fluid looking; the internet was mostly text based, with pictures being used more to spice up a boring design than as content in and of themselves. Most design was done in HTML, not PHP, and certainly not Flash. It was actually so heavily text based that, if you want to look at some old bulletin board and usenet posts from the early part of the last decade, you'll actually see people complaining about how all these new-fangled pictures were detracting from the real content, which was of course the text. How things have changed.
Isn't there a hackers site of similar name still out there?
