re: When did you first hear about the internet and what was your impression?

We ditched dial up in 2003.

First internet site that I ever visited was JoesApt.com

We picked a HP computer back in 1999 and through Napster I filled the hard drive with just about every song imaginable.

Did anyone else get their dial up porn fix by downloading x-rated Winamp skins?

Usenet newsgroups around 1989-90.

Kinda like the old Reddit format but in monochrome at the time as VGA monitors were not around. Not too different a format from TD even, with about the same Search functionality

I built my 1st pc in '91 and Christmas '96 got a WebTV from my bro-n-law. By Summer '97 was writing webpages, coding by hand. (WebTV set top box was about the size of a DVR and cost $325 for the 2MB, yes MB, hard drive, thin client, translated webpages to 640 x 480 display compatible with CRT TV's)

Man that brings back memories

1993 playing putt putt golf. A kid who was nerdy and pretentious was talking to me while we waited for a group ahead to move through.
He asked me which provider I used. I had no idea what he was talking about, but heard of prodigy and said that not wanting to not have something someone else had.

He went on to explain why prodig ywas shite.

Having always had a computer since I was a baby, I wasn't foreign to them.
My parents put ther internet on our crappy IBM, and I was quickly bored with it.
It wasn't until a couple of years later that I really got into AOL chat and downloading things.

It was dial-up, and slow, and there were no retail or social media sites initially. I didn’t have a lot to do online for the first few years.

Back in the early 1980’s, I used a modem to access bulletin boards and download new versions of DOS, games, etc. There were several boards locally in Baton Rouge. Then, probably around 1984, I signed up with Compuserve (I think). Their big selling points were that you could check airline info and the weather and interact with other members of their community. They had about 15 chat rooms based on different topics but called them CB Channels, since that was a concept most people could relate to. They sent out a magazine periodically and I remember an article about the first marriage by two people who met on Compuserve.

Remember how expensive it used to be?

It was like $25 for 60 minutes of internet access.
Was a huge deal when AOL was $19 a month.

I remember when I first heard about Amazon.
"Who wants to buy books online instead of a store?"