What is the earliest thing that you can remember seeing or hearing online?

That I was the millionth visitor and I could claim my free iPod.

I remember the "to download this answer this survey and win a free iPad" and being smart enough to know it was a scam but also dumb enough to think it might be real and just enter the info of the vacant house down the road and check it every day to see if it had came
- And also smart enough to invent a safe test.

"Under Construction" gif and blinking fucking html.

But really it was "connecting to 087762534 BEEEEEEEEEEE BEEE BEEEE BEEEEEEBEAOOOOOOKSCSHSCSHSVSHSHSVSVSVSHSVSVSVSVSVACHSHHHHSHHHSHSCSCHHHSHSHSHSHSHH..."

Though that was audio.

I can still tell you if the connection is gonna be successful by hearing it.
- Easy! It makes for a pretty fun mobile ring signal btw. I get a lot of laughs with that one. :)

BBSes. My first modem was for my Commodore 64. All you could connect to were Bulletin Board Services which were simply someone else's computer that was running software. Usually you would get some sort of menu if options when you connected.

CompuServe came not too long after that probably on an 8088 or 386 PC.

The dancing baby

My high school mass media teacher thought it was the greatest thing ever. Looking back, that experience should've told me exactly what the internet would become.

I hated it instantly, and I KNEW what Internet would become.

I was not disappointed. I mean, I was, desperately, but you know what I'm sayin.

Depends on what you mean by online. If anything internet related counts, it was e-mails I got from teachers at university. That was totally new at the time and only people in computer science and related courses had access.

My first multimedia experience was with Usenet. The internet access was from a terminal account on a UNIX host. I had to telnet into that from a Windows machine (3.1 had just come out). There was this post in several parts named "cute girl getting it up the ass". I had to download all the posts as text files, stitch them together in an editor and uudecode the whole thing. Then i had to ftp it to the Windows machine and install a JPEG viewer on that (similar procedure). Then i could finally open the Jpeg, which took about a minute on that machine. The girl wasn't actually that cute.

I never figured out those binary files. Such a gyp every time. I can't masturbate to that!
- uudecode for the win! But yeah, took me quite a while to figure that out too. Especially tricky when you have to do it all with one hand!

Some pictures loading pixel by pixel, first in very large pixels, then a bid smaller, in finer resolution, and by the time the smallest pixels start to appear, you are already finished.

Dial up modem sound. Followed by the AOL portal site.

I didn't know what a URL was, so I was stuck with going through the kids section of the site, which I believe was a webcrawler that grabbed sites that had games on them. That was pretty much the internet for me.

What you need my friend, is a web portal!

Besides the dialing sound? Good question. Maybe ICQ sounds.. annoyed the hell out of my parents probably

That annoyedme right now, I could hear that uh-oh!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhGHerssyk4

The very first time I got internet, it was by hooking my BBS up to an internet provider in Colorado. Every night my computer would do a dial-up connection and exchange email and Usenet via UUCP. I was the only BBS that was connected to the for-real internet that I know of. Probably the very first things I accessed as I was getting the account set up were Usenet and poking around on anonymous FTP sites for major universities. They had all kinds of random nonsense there.

I moved away from home for the last two years of high school, so I had no internet, but we got email through the high school in my senior year. It was a big deal; among other things it meant I could exchange email with a girl I knew who lived far away instead of sending letters. It was her dad's email account though. She had no email of her own. You kids have no idea how lucky y'all are.

The first time I messed around with the web was at a summer programming job; it was very rudimentary at that time. We basically didn't use it; the day to day job was effectively disconnected from anything aside from the work we were doing locally on the machine. Pretty much the only thing I remember from the one machine in the office that was hooked up to the web was the Rome Lab Snoball Cam.

In college first first couple of years I used an extremely rudimentary DSL-type system for accessing email and things from off campus. Text only. Computers on campus were web-aware; mostly Unix machines with Netscape. It was as I was going through school that things like the web started to become really ubiquitous on all PCs, and by the time I'd graduated it was everywhere, mostly the modern version, and all computers were assumed to be hooked up to it.

The first Internet thing I remember actually doing is my friend helping me sign up for my first email account, on Hotmail... In high school computer lab, so it must have been 96 or 97.

I do remember reading about the Internet and trying to find a way to connect from home on our Packard Bell... But we were remote... It would have been some extreme long distance bills..

When we got internet for the first time when I was a kid, and I immediately went to the cartoonnetwork website because it was shown on TV between cartoons.

I also remember that there was a vote held between a number of cartoons, and the one to receive the most votes would be shown 24h after the vote. I voted for my favorite one (some girl that secretly travels with some aliens on missions after school or something) and I realized that I could just vote again. So I voted like 100 times haha. Don't know whether it was my doing, but that cartoon was being shown the whole day after the voting ended.

Heh, my first site was also Cartoon Network. And I remember the voting too, we had them in my country too. I can't recall if I ever voted myself, but I remember some of the 24 hours days. Sometimes I loved it when it was a show I liked and sometimes I would be like "Well what do I watch today now?" if I wasn't a fan.

“Welcome!”

https://youtu.be/QUj_KHbJDlI

“You’ve got mail!”
This is about all I can remember for my first online experience. Just remember opening AOL and not exactly knowing what else to do except click around random links, looking at whatever websites I came across, all with that classic 90s basic HTML look.

A list of usenet groups on my dad's computer around 1989. Porn groups, I think, but that may be mixed up with another later memory.

Ask your dad when you're old enough.
- Lol, he's dead

Porn lol

I don't know what the very first thing was back when I didn't yet have internet and could only use it when visiting my uncle who did.

But I remember the first site I visited after I had internet myself. I went on the Cartoon Network site to play some of the games they had.

I vaguely remember watching someone demonstrate email around 1989 or so. It sounded like a way to send messages that very few people could read, in a very difficult way, over a very expensive long phone call. Instead of a letter or phone call. Crazy.

But first contact? Maybe 1993, using a dialup BBS at a local library. I noticed it could launch some sort of browser at a link list with a ton of topics.

Also, some FTP sites. Trying to sneakernet some software home over Kermit transfers and floppies. Didn't succeed most of the time.

There was a Usenet client with even more reading. I'm not sure if there was even an IRC client or did that come later, but some people were playing MUDs. There was an email client as well, and that started to make a little more sense.

It was a keyhole view into a bigger world. And it would only keep growing.

Stick fights and blue waffle/lemon party/hamster dance.

One of these things is not like the other.

Super fly

Definitely some sort of Christmas Santa whatever 3D animation on yt that made me feel uncomfortable. That was back when my parents thought I was too young to explore the internet on my own. Couldn't tell you what video it was because that's too much work for my brain sinc that was around 2008 if I remember correctly.

I was like 5: I typed in yahoo.com, searched “pop” because it was the only word I could think of at that moment.

Earliest interesting thing: I played the old flash game where you get X-ray glasses and you look at people’s junk when I was like 6.

I liked star trek as a kid, so my dad would download me, I think usenet, messages from a boards discussing it. But he didn't want me overwhelmed, so maybe only 30 messages a day I could read after school, so I'd get random snippets of people arguing whether Kirk or Picard was better, or discussing the difference in klingons between the two series.

Does the screaming and screeching of dial-up modems count?

Depends on what you call "online".

I would say Q-Link on a commodore 64.

my mom logging into yahoo

My first memory was also your mom logging in to yahoo.

Probably Yahoo. I had dialup in the 90s and Yahoo was the gold standard for search.

I remember trying Ask Jeeves later, but always went back to Yahoo when it inevitably failed to find what I wanted.

I played a ton of Yahoo games and remember getting into their "gambling" games as a kid (mostly blackjack, but also holdem on occasion). I would play at night when my parents were asleep because I want allowed to tie up the phone line during the day unless I headed to for school.

I remember setting up actual black jack games during recess in high school. I would be bank, and the other kids would play. I made decent money before the games got busted by the teachers.

I also brewed hooch in my locker.

Yes, I am very proud of who I was then and now.
- We did something similar, but with a game called "13" in high school, but we played in Biology class and during lunch (we didn't have recess in high school) when we finished early.
  
  My brother also sold candy bars in middle and high school from his locker. He'd go to Costco to stock up, then sell for double, then rinse and repeat. A bit more same than your hooch ;)
Yahooligans was elite.

i remember going on some kind of video game tips website that had user submitted tips. The only one i remember was someone saying that if you did some like, crazy amount of fights in Super Smash Bros 64, you could unlock Goku

Earliest I remember?… searching for “Mario 64 tips & tricks” in the Internet Café on Yahoo and printing a novel length convoluted “cheat” to unlock Luigi

I might be an odd one out here. By the time I was forming memories the internet age was well underway.

The first thing that I can remember was some old flash game about guiding a worm through a maze.

That game was unforgiving, tiny me had to be on point with their trackpad movements.

Hmm. I guess the PointerPointer website? You might have guessed, I'm not very old.

I have a very early memory of being showed a grey web page with just a list of blue hyperlinks, extremely rudimentary. I think it was an early form of Yahoo! search.

The first thing I remember doing on the web unsupervised was looking up cheat codes for N64 games on Ask Jeeves.

Honestly the original Runescape is probably among the first things I used internet for

EDIT: Oh! Also Stickdeath

Café Eblana: a final fantasy fan site. I think I saw a reference to it in a Game Players magazine, and looked it up on a school computer around 1996.

I think it was when my friend showed me how to ping google.com in the Ubuntu Terminal. My first ever OS was Ubuntu but I didn't used the magical Internet very Mich back then.

Hampsterdance, and this video.

"Goomba, fuck you" was hilarious to my 5 year old self.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this video.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.