Wasted many a late night of my first years of uni on playing MUDs (Kobra, a star wars mud, and Genocide, a PvP mud). Incredibly addicting, even if it was “just” text.
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Oh yeah. PvP muds got intense. People took it very personally. I was a little psycho and would try and betray people tho in the middle of quests and shit. There’s a reason teenage boys shouldn’t be trusted with anything, ever.
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Do BBS’s count as the internet? Well if so my first distinct “internet” memory is of a pedophile attempting to groom me. I can’t remember where I got the phone number to dial into whatever BBS it was - classified ads maybe? He asked me if I was gay, said no, he asked how I knew if I hadn’t tried it. I’m totally guessing but I think I was probably 10.
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Oh shit, I remember playing Jeopardy on usenet when I was in college. You had to be the first to type “alex [answer]” to get the points. Once I got the timing down, I got pretty good at it.
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To paraphrase our president, Doom II was my personal Vietnam.
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Only if the BBS’s had connections with other BBS’s, Usenet gateways probably come close. I did Prodigy and AOL and had an account on io.net for a little while. That was the service provided by Steve Jackson games, the GURPS people. The only time I’ve seen a stripper was at an AOL meetup in Ohio, some very weird chat rooms on AOL as I recall… There was some early game site, I think run by the same publisher that did Leisure Suit Larry, Sierra Online maybe, that had various games you could play with other people online that sold subscriptions by the hour and I remember getting hooked on some essentially text based dungeon crawler so bad that I use up my 25 or 30 hour monthly subscription in a weekend, a coffee brewer on the desk next to the computer. This was when I was working in the theater making a whopping $400 a week so it was a big chunk of my disposable income.
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I remember that game. I think there was a disembodied head that would give you a blowjob.
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this is like asking if a soapbox derby car and a modern F1 are the same thing
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I think my first experience with the real internet was going to my dad’s office, watching him open a page in Netscape, and seeing a bunch of those “image still loading” icons
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Thats beautiful
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