OT: When did you first start using the interwebs?

I was part of a tiny Mac-based graphic design company.  Within a year I was coding websites.

What I really remember however was when our first hard drive failed in 93' (200mg I think & about 3/4 full)

The sales guy said they just got in these awesome new hard drives that were the largest size you could get . . . ONE GIGABYTE!!!

He said it was the last hard drive I'd ever need to buy.

It was full 6 months later.

I used to actually pay money to STATS INC. to log onto their service and get live game updates and same-night boxscores from baseball games so I could see how my fantasy team was doing.  I actually needed their service for some other work I was doing too or I probably wouldn't have done it. 

Of Usenet when I worked at Bell Labs in 1984 or 1985. I also was a Compuserve user in 1994 and hopped on AOL with a 28kpbs modem in its early days. I remember when Ethernet was 10mbps over fat coax cable with huge transceiver boxes at each tap. StarLAN was one of the first Ethernet solutions over twisted pair wire and I setup one of the first networks at a customer location. Anyone remember TCP/IP over X.25? Ah, the things I did with my Computer Engineering degree in the 80s and 90s.

I remember using the UofM mainframe back in 1978. I actually kept one small stack of cards from a fortran program as a memento. A friend from UofM was so excited to get one of the first gen IBM PC's in the early 80's.  I vaguely remember the internet way back before it was cool . . . somewhere between 1985 & 1988. That was also the time of the first home computer in our apartment . . . I believe a IBM PC XT clone? In the very late 80's, for a short while, I worked with a wholesaler out of NYC to put together desktop computers to sell to fellow grad students. At that time, the markup on PC's was huge. I could save fellow students hundreds of bucks on a PC, and still pocket a couple hundred.

I think we first got dial-up at home in late 1995, maybe early 1996. We had email at my elementary school right around then, probably 1994 or 5. We got broadband (or was it called Roadrunner?) ~1998 or 9. We always had a computer, though--my dad bought a Mac in 1984. To this day, I've never owned a Windows computer. I still have no idea how to do anything on Windows. It's totally befuddling.

Compaq presario with Windows 98, prolly in 1999  with a pentium processor and like 64 gigs hard disk, 256 MB of RAM and of course an 56kbps modem, at least it was something a friend of mine was stuck with an IMB with win95 and an external 28 kbps external modem until 2006 or something of the sort.

Edit. Before that my dad gave me his old Printaform, it didn't ran windows, it was an msdos machine with a ton of games in floppy disks, and of course no internet nor mouse, it had like a car safety sort of key to lock it and a turbo processor with blazing 28 Mhz  speed.

When I discovered porn.

played parsec all the time

A two floppy drive / no hard drive PC (back when floppy disks were floppy) and a 300 baud modem.  When someone was using the modem, the phone line was tied up.  When we moved up to a computer with a 20 MB hard drive and a 1200 baud modem, we thought we were really something.  I had a friend who thought he knew about computers who was convinced when IBM came out with OS/2 that the computer he bought to run it would be the last computer he would ever have to buy.  He actually believed that that was the zenith of computer and operating system development.

A two floppy drive / no hard drive PC (back when floppy disks were floppy) and a 300 baud modem.  When someone was using the modem, the phone line was tied up.  When we moved up to a computer with a 20 MB hard drive and a 1200 baud modem, we thought we were really something.  I had a friend who thought he knew about computers who was convinced when IBM came out with OS/2 that the computer he bought to run it would be the last computer he would ever have to buy.  He actually believed that that was the zenith of computer and operating system development.

If we're talking connected network, then Prodigy back in, I think, 1991 or so.  But real "the internet"?  Probably 1994/1995 when I went to HS.

As far as I remember it was in 96 and I was a freshmen at UM and had access to the computer labs.  NUBs mostly, or the Alice Lloyd basement computer lab.  My parents had a computer prior to that but I don't rember them having internet.

Bulletin boards back in 1990. I didn't technically use them, but a friend showed me how HE used them, etc.. I remember thinking that was so damned cool and yet extremely intimidating (ironically I'm a software engineer now).

My first personal use was I believe in 1994 on AOL or Netscape (it was probably AOL since Netscape was really just getting started in 94).

Got our first computer in 95; it was a Packard Bell, and ran Netscape I think. Can't believe that was 20 years ago...

Never have.  Don't believe in them interwebs.  Damn government conspiracy... and, no, i still ain't buying we ever set foot on the moon.

My family had a computer ever since I could remember. Some of my earliest memories from the late 80's are my sister and I playing Titan Cronus and Major Mayhem on our old Apple IIe. As for the internet, my first experience with that wasn't until my middle school got it, probably in '97/'98. I guess we were supposed to use it for research only, but it was all about playing chess on Yahoo for me.

Early 90s in college...mid-90s for early Net porn.

56K dialup, Jenna Jameson and a box of tissue.

The Internet is a fad. Give it 10 years and we'll look back and laugh. Same with computers, another fad.

And my first computer was a Mac LC II with a 14K baud modem. I was using computers and accessing the internet during grad school in the late 80's, and remember playing "Adventure" on the University mainframe back in the late 70's.

Printing the lyrics to Bone-Thugs songs and looking at dirty pic on the library pc. We were so bad with it it, the librarian restricted internet access to us. RIP Netscape. Every now and then, I still find AOL disks in drawers and boxes. I truly think after a nuclear holocaust, the only thing that will be left are cockroaches, and AOL disks.

1997. Still have an espn account from that year. I remember I was obsessed with this wolverine nation webpage that showed awesome pictures from the 1997 season. I was 13, most kids are on the ne by 6 these days

As a member of LSA Class of '77 I had an abacus.

I worked for ITD. I remember our inability to change uniqnames came up when a guy came to me, in the middle 90's and asked if he could do it. He needed to because he'd just been accepted to the law school and his uniqname was 'lawsucks'. :-)

old bulletin boards/Compuserve (not sure if those count...)

'91 when I got to UM. Used Pine for email (hated Eudora zealots. ;-) ) and Mosaic or lynx to cruise the 'web, such as it was. :-)

I also was working at ITD when DOOM first became available and its requests for game sharing would sometimes bring out network to its knees. :-O

When I went to UM during the spring, I think most of the computing sites are gone. Nubs, the Union site. Not sure if Angell is still there. 

1978 - thought I might be interested in this new computer thing - attended first meeting of a computer programming class at Michigan and ran out - I was not going to be a slave to punch cards. 1984 - first serious discussion with friends in our field of work that we could fully automate our files. 1988 - first job that was computer-reliant in terms of database use. Digital communication was point-to-point and then only to a very few outlying points of contact. 1991 - first use of a computer, a Zenith laptop gray/green screen) and 9 pin printer - did a master's thesis on that baby, and printed it on my neighbor's hugely expensive and giant laser printer. 1994 - bought my first home computer, a non-color laptop with a 10 Mb hard drive, for the then princely sum of $1k. It was obsolete almost immediately. 1997 - first real internet access, and first realization that we were all in the computing Wild West at work: co-workers' uneven (open) file use and maintenance, virus spread, and access to Internet sites that were, let's say, not work related. 1999 - first use of a handheld device. I used a Palm Pilot to take all of my class notes for a solid year in another master's program. First reassurance that I could back up data to a mainframe in case my handheld got lost or broken. 2000 - first use of a home computer for personal commerce - eBay ordering through phone-modemed AOL. Flash forward to today - surrounded by computers that access the internet (the OPs question!). They are inexpensive, mostly efficient, and ubiquitous. Currently thinking about how to wean myself from the blinking lights.

Started using the Apollo workstations in the Dow Building to do engineering analysis. They were connected to UM servers that, in turn, were connected to other universities and research centers around the U.S.though the Merit Network and NSFNET backbones. I got a lot of research done that way.

Around 1993. I used to play trivia in an AOL chat room. I would answer with something about OJ Simpson if I didn't know the answer.

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My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word twenty. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles. 

Now, I'd like to digress from my prepared remarks to discuss how I invented the terlet...

It was sometime in the mid to late 90's, '96 or '97, at work. I remember the tech guy explaining that I had to type in www. before the name of the place I wanted to go and that it stood for worldwide web. 

I first used a Vax and Unix machines at OU. I accessed Netscape and a couple Usenet readers through command prompts. Just that Unix has come in handy even recently jailbreaking xboxes and PS3s

1986 with a Commadore 64 and a dial up.  The concept of chat rooms was VERY exciting!

1995

Sometime during my freshman year in high school for a report about ivory poachers. I think I was using gopherweb.

Spank the monkey

I believe around 1990, had America Online(AOL), when it first started.  Back in the day of 4k internet when the meme, hot hot hot, omg dude, was coined from.  I was 6 and remember back when chat rooms weren't full of pedo's(I think).

I remember sharing 56k with 3 people in a Starcraft(original), LAN Party.  God that crap was painful.

Went 286 all the way to pentium(was a game changer), installed 95 with 50+ spanned hard floppys(remember running dos games off 5 1/4 true floppys).  Dad had them early it to help his brother with stock market/investing.  And my gpa had them because he was a tinkering engineer and enjoyed building them back when that was the only way. I suppose apple prebuilt for people, couldn't stand them even then though, probably because the ones at school always had issues.

Then in early school, I learned computers as our cheap printers never worked and it was either fix the computer, or use the dreaded typewriter, and if I was lucky.... We had correction ribbon.  I still think it was rude everything had to be typed when quite a few students still didn't have computers/printers.  Now I'm still fixing computers/working in IT except it's i7's instead of 7mb HDD's.

Got a 1650 modem 300 baud and the later saved up my paper route money for a 1670 at screaming 1200 baud.  Mostly BBS stuff, and then later on the CIN which Compuserve ran.  Spent way to much time with Grues,

I actually got on Usenet in 1986 as part of a project Battelle, OSU and the Us Military did involving High School students and coming up with possible solutions for issues like SDI, Iran/Iraq war, etc. 

1990 moved from the Commodore world to PCs with a 386DX with like 4 MB of Ram and 120 MB hard drive.  Used it for game like Wing Commander and later X-Wing.  And at that time got a Prodigy account, but also connected to OSU.  Like some of you from Michigan, I have a really old, but still valid email address, though there was someone else, that got mylastname.1, so I have [email protected].

I recall the early days of websites and when altavista was the google of its day.  And Netscape as the preferred browser.  And early sites like the Twinkie Project.