What was the thing that first made your jaw drop and fall in love with the Internet?

What was the thing that first made your jaw drop and fall in love with the Internet? For me it was in 1998, a few months after I bought my first PC. I was listening to a live stream of a Rock station out of Auckland New Zealand while watching a live streaming video of people on their morning commute in Vienna Austria. All the sudden the significance of what I was doing and experiencing hit me like a ton of bricks. Been hooked every since.

 

Back in 1992 went online for the first time using the Magellan navigator 1.0, but in my naive eagerness I would jump online by clicking on the browser icon forgetting about the preceding step to use the dial-up connection through the provider, and instead I was getting billed like I was executing regular phonecalls around the world with the phone company. Ooops! A month later I got a bill for $1200. Praise be to Allah and all holy matrimony the internet was working so slow back then and a lot of times I would get discouraged after just 10 minutes of browsing.

 

Aside from what made my jaw drop and on topic what captivated me, I think it was the Cycad webworks which I found very inforrmative. It was then I realized that an alternative media exists.

 

I have a clear memory of playing Red Alert I for the first time, the first time I'd played any video games - on my parents' old Windows 95' behemoth. This would have been around 1998, so I was like 5 years old. Come to think of it, I have no idea why they had Red Alert, my parents know nothing about gaming at all. I guess a higher power put it there because it's still probably my favorite RTS of all time.

For internet gaming it was definitely Deus Ex. Best game ever. If you haven't played it buy it right now, it's like a few bucks on Steam. Pinnacle of video games. I can't get over how fresh it still feels 12 long years later. I play through it around every 6 months. Anyway, it had a really great multiplayer mode with everyone making their own maps and mods (full conversions to Stargate SG-1 even, complete with stargates!).

The internet has to be the most significant development in technology since electricity. Perhaps flight. It's absolutely insane the stuff you can do with a computer and an internet connection these days. Just 250 years ago you'd probably be burned alive for practicing witchcraft if you did some of this stuff. It's like magic in real life!

 

Internet poker. It was VERY lucrative in the early days.

 

For me it was in 1996, and it was my first seach on one of the early search engines, wherein I searched "Mount Everest" and found a wealth of websites and a live cam of the base camp up there as well. The top of the world.

 

I believe it's plural...

"internets"

 

porns.

 

The same as everyone else...

bewbs

 

(*)(*)(*)(*) it they beat me to it.

So instead I'll just say ass.

 

Yeah but right after that it was boobs right?

No to be honest for me it was gaming at first. Because here I was playing with and talking to people from all over the world. It seems that the answers how ever different they may be come down to making the world a bigger and smaller place all at once.

Shortly after gaming it was political forums like this.

 

lol, naw, porn on the net was not much of an attraction, late night cable TV in the late 90's was even better. I mean watching dial-up porn vs. the Playboy channel... not a hard choice to make.

I am a gamer too. Although in the late 90's I was playing TFC and UT, had no voice chat... heck, can't even remember if they had text chat in those games back then. Playing WOW introduced me to a huge in game community... I spent years playing WOW with people from all over the world and loved it.

 

teh pron... it pwns.

 

it was around in the nineties too, first time I saw things that made my pleasure centers in my brain overload.

but now it is like any drug addiction, the euphoria wears off after awhile.

 

What is TFC?

I still play UT 2004, but not online, just against the bots.. I have the action mod for it.. sweet.

In the mid 90's or something we had AOL.. Nowadays AOL is obviously (*)(*)(*)(*) but back then it was pretty cool. I did chat rooms, complete with telling everyone your "A/S/L every 10 seconds" and I don't know why because looking back it was highly lame and completely pointless... (but that's the case for lots of things you like when you're a kid)..

Team Fortress Quake was the first online game I did, actually the only online game I ever did besides Guild Wars.

 

Internet Chat rooms. Still in my teens when internet chatrooms like MSN chat become dominant. I was dreaming and having crush on some girl in London sitting from my computer in New York City. That was in the late 90s and early 00s.

My second wave of internet interest comes in the communication within self-help community. I was obsessed with Anthony Robbins. Around 2005-2008

For the past three years I was enlightened by the growing wave of cyber libertarianism. 2008 Ron Paul sounded really like an interesting guy. By 2012 I know the nation was doomed when Ron Paul was not elected. I am more of a Gary Johnson type social liberally, fiscally responsible, who likes to evaluate policy on a cost-benefit pragmatic approach.

 

TFC (Team Fortress Classic) was a Half-Life mod and took the place of TFQ. Now there is Team Fortress 2 on Steam, not as good as TFC IMO, but still a very good game. Unfortunately I am almost 50 y/o and my ninja reflexes have all but abandoned me so my online shooter days are long since over. If I were to play a multiplayer action game now, the kids with the twitch reflexes would just use me as cannon fodder.

 

WX....

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