Your first internet experience...

Mine was as a young man studying the law circa 1995.

The University had free internet on I think Wednesday nights, and I went along once to see what all the commotion was about. The host- Netscape Navigator if I remember right. I remember this photographically- they were Mac monochromes and there were about 3 people per computer.

Everyone at our Uni got a free email as well but no one used it. Then cell phones came in and so did email.

Where were you initiated? 

I had messed w/ my brother's TRS80 as a kid and had been exposed to computers in school in the 80s but it never clicked. So, all pre-internet. 

When I grew older, I considered them nerd toys.

In the mid 90s, I used to work in a bar which also happened to have a "internet café" section, equipped w/ 2 amazing Pentium 100 and modems. 
 
I remember 2 of the girls in the staff used to stay after hours to go online and chat for hours. My best buddy and I thought they were insane, and that the whole internet thing was absolutely unhealthy, like a drug addiction. We thought the whole world had gone crazy and we were pretty much just like two old men shaking their head in despair at the youth. Except we were 20-something. 

Anyway, we hated computers and we despised the internet. We despised it a bit less when one of the girls showed us a bunch sites dedicated to Hendrix. I think that that's the first time I actually sat in front of a PC. Finding Jimi related information made the internet acceptable.

I grew up with the internet. First time I remember getting online I was 11/12, dial up and waiting for the connection and pages to load. A few years later I'd sign up for myspace and the whole social media thing happened.

I can't remember when I switched from time-shares to billboards to the internet...

My first internet experience involved Gopher, and later Archie. This predates the World Wide Web and Mosaic. It was wonderful! I was an X-Windows coder at the time and before discovering a community of X-Windows coders via the internet I felt like I was the only person on the planet doing it. Surfing was slow in those days; I shared a single 96kbs modem with about 30 other people!

1984, not the George Orwell novel the year, I had a subscription to Compuserve and an 1800 baud Acoustic Coupler, there was only 1 line for the dial up in this area(New Mexico and west Texas) and at certain times in a day it would take a while to log on. Most BBS's were text only (ASCII) and either nerdfests or College and University research. That was before the World Wide Web that Al Gore invented

I remember the thrill of being able to order from Sears for Christmas and making the pickup on Christmas eve. Saved me from having the Kid's find out what they were getting.

I guess that's the reason I don't B*I*T*C*H about it too much these days.

I think it was shortly after getting my first computer @1992 from Radio Shack; IBM Pent 100.
IIRC it was very much like the first time I used X2...after a few minutes of waiting a picture showed up of AOL wanting money. I turned it off.
Later on my wife messed with it long enough to "surf"...
I should load X2 on her computer. :) There's a thought.

In the late 1980s I worked for a networking company that built processors and software for connecting terminals to mainframes (think old green-screen CRTs). At one point they were thinking about building products to connect with the fledgling internet and asked me to research the technology and write up an overview document on the architecture. I used telnet to log on to BBN servers and spent several weeks reading the RFCs for IP, TCP, SMTP, FTP, etc.  

After I finished the overview document, they decided not to go forward with the project. About 1990 I went to another IT company and eventually got to work on some of that company's earliest web projects. Mosaic was the first browser I had any experience with, and I remember it was a big deal when inline graphics came along. Besides getting to work on an emerging technology, the best thing about being at that company was having access to a really fast network connection. At the time I could justify looking at web sites during work as important research.