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[jough]

Well, I don't know how being on the internet in 1992 could be "kinda late" since that's the year the web happened.  Were you using just FTP, e-mail, and gopher before that?  Dialing into BBSs?

Anyway, the WWW didn't really take off until ISPs started cropping up around 1994.  By 1996, when I put my first web site up, it was already commercial as hell.

fuck*ng internet.

[slink]

Well, I don't know how being on the internet in 1992 could be "kinda late" since that's the year the web happened.

By 1996, when I put my first web site up, it was already commercial as hell.

Because indeed, if I'd been involved in it earlier I would have been using BBS' before I started with IRC (although before that it was all DC for me) and the odd bit of gaming.

I had my first site up in about, oooh - memory sucks - 94/95 or thereabouts, since I learned HTML (which back in those days involved about three commands, aaaah the good old days) when I moved to England.
It seemed pre commercial then. But agreed, by 1996 it was horrid in fifteen different styles.
Now it's just TV. What with live-action fuck*ng commercials cropping up!
Then again at least it's uncensored TV where you can find the odd piece of factual information. And say fuck lots.

[CortJstr]

I was on in about '93 but it seems like like '96 was the main threshold when suddenly every product had a url on it and people noticed there was more than just Prodigy. It's also when AOL created and entire fictional town in Virginia.

[V-Adore]

Wow, I feel like a gigantic whippersnapper for not having gotten seriously addicted to the Internet until late 1996.

(What got me, in the end, was MUDs. Sure, the Web was shiny and sort of hypnotic to poke at, but MUDs combined hack-n-slash fantasy gaming with talking to geeks in a geek-friendly environment. Coming out of the nerd closet as I was then (coming out of the server room?) MUDs were an immensely good thing. And now, hell, I'm comfortable enough talking to geeks online that I can create Faulknerian wads of nested parentheses and italics like this very paragraph.)

[slink]

I came this close ( >< ) to getting onto MUD's. But then that would have got me started on the old text adventures again, and then before you know it I'm off quoting Wargames, bleeting about Tron and demanding my fifteenth cup of coffee like a drunk in a bar.

[sjlimmer]

Wow, I feel like a gigantic whippersnapper for not having gotten seriously addicted to the Internet until late 1996.

(What got me, in the end, was MUDs. Sure, the Web was shiny and sort of hypnotic to poke at, but MUDs combined hack-n-slash fantasy gaming with talking to geeks in a geek-friendly environment. Coming out of the nerd closet as I was then (coming out of the server room?) MUDs were an immensely good thing. And now, hell, I'm comfortable enough talking to geeks online that I can create Faulknerian wads of nested parentheses and italics like this very paragraph.)

MUDs are what did it for me, too.  I got my first email account when I started college in '91, to communicate with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, who went away to school in Maine.  Back then, I had to check my mail on the Macs at school, so I didn't really get the whole "online" thing until I got a modem for Xmas in '92.  For the next year or two, until my school started shutting down accounts that were being used for gaming (those were the days...) you couldn't pull me away from either of the MUDs that I frequented.  I finally broke down and got a non-school ISP (so I could keep gaming) in ~'94-95, but I was still using an old Mac Classic w/ a 9600 baud modem, so everything was text-only baby.

The Web was quite a revelation to me when I eventually moved up to a windows box, and I still tend to be a little old school (like using Pine to check my email...)

Wow, that's more than any of you could ever have wanted to know.

[jough]

to communicate with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend

Dang.  When are you going to break the news to her?

And I hope she doesn't read this board. That'd be kind of a shitty way to find out, huh?

[CortJstr]

It was all about the Star Trek trivia room on AOL, baby. Back when enclosing a sound effect in double colons instead of the clearly more correct asterisks was enough to ostracize you weeks.

[Carlos del Vaca]

(What got me, in the end, was MUDs.

Me too, actually.  I hung out at NAILS round about 1993-94.

[V-Adore]

Terrifying realization:

Somewhere on storage, I still have a copy of the pastiche someone on my MUD wrote of Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life," using MUD personages as the characters in the movie and featuring songs like "Every Elf is Sacred." The existence of this document terrifies me, but there it is.

(I was one of the women who died at the end. I had one line: "After-Mirk Mints?")

Now, to attempt to find "The Meaning of Mirkwood" wherever it's ended up...

[sjlimmer]

to communicate with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend

Dang.  When are you going to break the news to her?

And I hope she doesn't read this board. That'd be kind of a shitty way to find out, huh?

Foiled by the English language yet again.  See, this is why I:

a) Am a science/engineering grad student, not a humanities/social sciences/arts/whatever grad student (no matter how bad my writing, and brother is it bad, technical journals don't seem to mind that much, and I do a better job than many non-native speakers)

b) Don't normally talk to, you know, people

Anyway, to get sort of back on topic:

Happy birthday, birthday-having people.  And Happy Lunar New Year, while we're at it...