What is your earliest Internet memory?

[imperfect_cupcake]

I was about 26 and went to Uni (be in 96-ish). I went online and used Dogpile to look up something and then moved on the linked journal data bases for research.

The first social thing I ever did on line was look at match.com. Met my first long term gf that way. Then I found a blog (weren't called blogs back then. it was just sort of a profile web page) of a femme writing about being with a stone butch and all of a sudden the world hit me. I followed her links to the butchfemme dash site. That was in 99. my first chat room was there. I never did IRC or AOL. No point.

[snowbrdr303]

BBS services accessible via telnet and what not. Early/mid 90s....My friends and I would stay up late trying to find various BBSs with games (entirely text based, don't fool yourself). Or building our own and connecting to one another's computer. All the while trying to muffle the sounds of the obnoxious dial-up modems from our parents. Thank god for broadband.

Then after that came Prodigy (remember Prodigy? Yeah exactly) and AOL.

I still mess around with computers all day. :/

[Cailin]

I remember downloading on windows 95.. midi files... When things were only byte, and kilo byte size (not this mega bytes we have now).

But i will always remember infinity chat. Some of my best friends came from there. I met my friend marcie almost 20 years ago, and we still talk all the time.

[Daniela]

oh wow, talk about dating yourself. lol

I used to read alt.gothic between 1995-1997 (I was about 21 at the time and yes, I was a goth ). Holy shit, times have changed since then. I remember waiting to download pictures people would post...and it would sometimes take about 10 fucking minutes before you were able to see some grainy crap photo that wasn't worth it anyway.

[DapperButch]

I remember Prodigy. My girlfriend at the time was living with her ex-boyfriend's family (don't ask), and they had a computer with Prodigy. I didn't really understand it all but remember the bulletin boards. This was the early-mid 1990's.

Soon (maybe 1995?) I got a computer and was on AOL personals and their gay/lesbian message boards. I remember when aol personals changed over to match.com and I remember the aol message boards fading out. I also did the aol gay chats. Until about 5 years ago I was still friends with a woman from Utah from the aol boards. AOL is still my email and I am still a member.

By 1997/98? (whatever year it started), I was on butch-femme.com so that satisfied my loss of the aol boards.

I can still hear the dial up sound too, in my head. I remember getting "booted off" if you didn't disable your call waiting. Or just getting booted off for no reason. It was very frustrating if you were in the middle of a conversation! Everything was slow.

If it wasn't for the internet us lesbian/gays/queers would still only have the bars to find each other!

[Cin]

I remember using a computer in school first before I remember anything about the internet. I took a programing course and everyone was trying to learn computer languages like fortran, although then it was FORTRAN. It was the popular thing to take at the time. There was a mainframe computer. And there were IBMs and Macs with word processing programs; they were like giant typewriters. Then I remember personal computers becoming somewhat affordable and my roommate had one with dial up AOL. Napster was big fun then. There were mailing lists for butches and femmes and I had fun with those for awhile and of course there was b-f.com in the late 90s. Damn I am old. And still technically challenged.

[Kelt]

I remember computers form work before personal computers and doing back-ups onto a tape drive. The 'cartridge' was about 18 inches in diameter and someone had to take a copy home every night.

Not too long after home pc's started coming out with the 286's. It was all DOS and I couldn't make head or tail of it. I really didn't see any use for them at home but my best buddy was all kinds of into it. He bought a 486 and kept trying to talk me into getting one too. I ended up being in a car accident and it was clear I wasn't going to be doing much but sitting for quite a while and he finally talked me into it as something to do. I was clueless and just gave him a bunch of money to get me what he though would be best. He managed to spend $4000.00 and came back with a 486 with 4mb(kb?) of RAM and 2 drives the 5 1/2 and the sure to be a hit 3.5 that nobody was using yet. The OS was windows 3.0 It took me a while to not be afraid of breaking it and the first thing he managed to get me interested in was accessing the public library. I found out that I could get anything I wanted brought to my local branch and I loved it.

Then I found out there were girls in there. I was hooked on BBS's.

The rest is history.

[GeorgiaMa'am]

My first computer memory is excitedly going to my uncle's office with him in the middle of the night. "I think I found another one!" he said, I recall. We were going to play Adventure on his gigantic office computer, a RPG that was completely text based - no graphics, just white ASCII characters on a black screen. It required a 5-1/4" floppy disk, and took forever to boot up. The people at the electric company where he worked were really excited over it; there was a giant, hand-drawn map on the wall over the computer, showing the parts of the maze that had been uncovered so far. This is also my first beloved memory of gaming addiction. I was about 12, so this was in the late 70s. That would have made it several years in advance of the actual internet.

In college I had a student email account, and a little exposure to BBSes. I didn't have much interest in the internet until I managed to get my own computer, around the early 1990s. I started out with Compuserve, and joined a forum for pagans. We had full moon rituals online in chat, which worked in some ways and others not so much. The first time I was in charge of part of the ritual, I typed out my part in notepad in advance, planning to copy and paste it into chat one line at a time. I had never tried this previously, and did not discover until too late that I couldn't paste into CS's chat. Furiously switching from window to window, I hastily tried to type it all quickly ... I occasionally still think of our attempts to invoke the God and Goddess electronically. Probably by now, there is an app for that.

[imperfect_cupcake]

My first computer memories are different to my first internat memories. I could not get the Internet unless at school. It was too expensive to get it. I couldn't afford a computer that did it. I had an old machine that did DOS to write papers on at home when I was 24.

But my first computer memory was the computers at my dad's work, at his lab, at the university. They ran on cards. Punch cards. Students would be using box lids to carry their PhD thesis in them. Dad said he watched a student trip and fall and watch the cards go everywhere. They have to be in the right order, obviously.fed into the computer.So the student freaked out.

But the net was too expensive for me to be able to get in a house full of early 20 something artists, none of whom had any use for the net. We were too busy painting, playing music, drinking and having sex.

Only when I realised that I was more interested in research that the Internet became more important - libraries weren't exhaustive for journals. And then the idea to look for perhaps maybe women scientists on match.com entered my head... Because the university I then moved to, away from college, only had these separatist, angry and really snobbish lesbians who wouldn't speak to me because I was bisexual (at the time).

That's how I found my first butch (into femmes. I knew oodles of leather butches into each other) Though, I had zero idea at the time that was what she was or what was coming...