I did download porn early on.......unintentionally. Descript-less 8.3 gifs dumped in one place were a risk. It made me learn that if the filename is of a real first name, it's probably porn.

I remember landing on an empty quake server and some guy telling me to go to another server where all the people were at. This was the first time I 'talked' to anyone on the internet. It was a strange feeling.

badmojo wrote:

Uh huh we get it, there's porn on the internet.

yes, but there's nothing novel about it now, is there? our generation was the first to experience digital p0rn! That, is indeed, special. 😀

Dunno what generation you are referring to but ASCII pron existed before the WWW and it was digital. Also Clip Art late 80's which while primitive was much better than ASCII and could get the job done.

From the readme of a Graph-XXX viewing disk (images created 87/88):

1Graph-XXX images are collected from a variety of sources such as;
2Û bulletin boards, mail order, shareware houses and other businesses throughout
3Û the United States.  Many of these sources will provide a large selection of
4Û images.  However, in most cases these vast libraries offer little quality
5Û control resulting in a substantial investment with sometimes disappointing
6Û results.  This makes Graph-XXX a very good value.
7Û
8Û    Graph-XXX images are best divided into categories based on the monitor
9Û types(CGA, EGA, VGA and Super VGA).  Each image will use a monitor to its
10Û fullest ability.  This does NOT limit one's selection to his/her monitor
11Û category.  In many cases images can be shared among all monitor types.
12Û Certainly someone with a Super VGA display would be able to view all images
13Û to their fullest quality.  On the other hand, someone with an EGA display may
14Û want to shy away from the Super VGA images.  Catagorizing just helps in the
15Û selection of images.

DosFreak wrote:

Dunno what generation you are referring to but ASCII pron existed before the WWW and it was digital.

Well, yes. As soon as I clicked submit I realised this was probably true. I suppose I mean images you don't need to squint at to see properly 😜

And of course, as mentioned, animated GIFs was where it was really at...

Wait... what?! People mail ordered CGA/EGA/VGA porn?! WHY?

brassicGamer wrote:

And of course, as mentioned, animated GIFs was where it was really at...

Not animated. Just a dithery, digitized print porn

In light of the very much expected derail 🤣

Sidenote : I remember watching a World of Warcraft clip with this play on the background (back in the early days of Youtube, circa 2005)

Classic 🤣

alexanrs wrote:

Wait... what?! People mail ordered CGA/EGA/VGA porn?! WHY?

Because downloading with Kermit or Ymodem could tie up the line for hours on end, and all you would get is 4-5 pics. 😄

ScoutPilot19 wrote:

I first used the Itnernet in 1996 - when we bought a pentium-1 machine... It was a dial-up connection through Sportster 14 400 com port modem. As being a tolkinist the first site I went was the http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/ - "Arda na Kulichikah" - main Russian site of Tolkien's fan and RPG players - not computer RPG, but ones, when people spend some days or weeks in a field, "living" life of a medieval peasant, Tolkien's noldor or WWI soldier, etc.... Also on my first time in the Internet I found a site with humorous stories "Heroes of our youth and childhood in the computer age" - a lot of parody poems and novels... There was a famouse then text "Winnie the Pooh and 1200 baud"))) Also I downloaded a huge collection of the tolkinistky poetry, which looked really cool and mysterius being viewed by the Norton Commander...)

I started on BBS, remember those, but don't remember the first time I was on the internet.

Kodai wrote:

Because downloading with Kermit or Ymodem could tie up the line for hours on end, and all you would get is 4-5 pics. 😄

Yeah but they are crap as far as image quality goes. I can imagine one downloading such images: convenience over quality, but if you are going to wait for something to arrive at the mail, you were better off just getting some printed version without the same limitations and, probably, better quality control.
I DREAD to think what CGA porn even looked like. Its not like image viewers back then were anything like 8088MPH. Oooh and if they used the default palette...

alexanrs wrote:

Wait... what?! People mail ordered CGA/EGA/VGA porn?! WHY?

You obviously have never played Artworx Strip Poker on a Commodore 64 before.

Kodai wrote:

Because downloading with Kermit or Ymodem could tie up the line for hours on end, and all you would get is 4-5 pics. 😄

Ahh, the days of 300 baud modems.

Remember q-link on C64 with 300bps? I already had a 1200 in my first PC, when I first used q-link on my C64. Yet the 300 modem and C64 seemed so much faster considering its GUI vs the text interface of things like CompuServe. Perception was the key there. It felt like you got more out of less time, and that was important since almost all major online services were metered back then.

Kodai wrote:

Remember q-link on C64 with 300bps? I already had a 1200 in my first PC, when I first used q-link on my C64. Yet the 300 modem and C64 seemed so much faster considering its GUI vs the text interface of things like CompuServe. Perception was the key there. It felt like you got more out of less time, and that was important since almost all major online services were metered back then.

I remember buying a Supra 2400 baud modem and thinking how lightning fast it was compared to my old 300bps unit.

1995, using a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. I used an internet service provider called GNN with a 14400 baud modem. I still have the GNN installation diskette and the package it came in. The first site I visited was a website that was written on a music magazine as it was the only URL I had. I remember the website having very little information, so I then tried to find the weather online. Then the phone rang and disconnected me. I used IRC quite a bit back in those days. Seems like from 1995-1998, I went through a lot of ISPs, like CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Earthlink... In around 1997, I got a dedicated phone line for the Internet.

One of the first sites I visited was ftp.komkon.org as it had games for old computers. That was middle 1990s.

DosFreak wrote:

Dunno what generation you are referring to but ASCII pron existed before the WWW and it was digital. Also Clip Art late 80's which while primitive was much better than ASCII and could get the job done

Not exactly a fan of making light of vility, but there was such thing as Amiga stag disks back in the 80's, and I'm talking the full glory of HAM...

first time I remember going on the internet was in 1995 in Windows 3.11 (using Netscape), I remember the Doom shareware being common.

though I also remember thinking that while I was very intrigued and the whole concept seemed very interesting, in practice it was fairly boring (for a 6 year old especially)

Mid to late 90s at my mom's office (university). I have vaguely heard of this ".com" thing so I started trying common brands + .com at the address bar and sure enough, most of the times a website for said brand came up. Not much later I discovered search engines - Hotbot was the first one and I used it for years, like many here my first real use for the Internet was to look stuff up about video games and TV shows I was into at the time.