What is your first Internet Experience?

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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:25 am

I was very late to the game. There weren't many household personal computers in the rust belt and even fewer modems. My family never had a computer in the house until after I left for college. However, I still have three anecdotes:

My lust for knowledge was insane in the nineties, but books and libraries didn't cut it. This led to a very restless lifestyle spending as little time at home as possible as soon as older friends started to drive. I was heavy into zine culture and picked up as many as I could from local shows. I was in a city large enough to sustain multiple scenes, and I and my social circle gravitated towards the garage punk scene, which had a pretty remarkable number of attendant zines for such a niche subculture. I read everything cover-to-cover but was still left feeling a little forlorn and desaturated by informational dead-ends. I was aware that the Internet existed, and as soon as one of my friends from the block got a modem we went online and tried to absorb as much information about lost bands (i.e. ones we had heard single tracks by and which had disappeared off into the aether) as we could. In those nascent days, of course we found nothing. I'm almost sure this was spring of '97, though it could have been spring of '98, and only represented a handful of brief experiences.

Growing up I was good friends with a girl who was an only child and whose parents were always off in Central America, leaving her home alone from a young age. Her house was the party house up until I moved out. I always had my suspicions that her parents were drug traffickers - she was one of my most knowledgable friends about drugs from a young age, and though they hid it well, they had a little more money than the rest of us. They had a modem and she would regale us with tales of her sexual chats with older men online - she was only about 14 when this was happening, in and around 1994. I remember having difficulty wrapping my mind around what exactly she was doing but was disgusted that they knew she was 14 and liked that.

Even earlier than that, I was friends with two kids a year younger than me from the scouts who somehow had institutional knowledge of phone phreaking and confidence gaming, though they were basically two 12-year old script kiddies who made weird home movies most of the time. I have no clue how they would have learned about this stuff, but it was always entertaining to spend time with them. Though I never actually touched either of their computers, being friends with them was my first time being introduced to the concept of "the internet" and whatever I watched them doing went way over my head at the time.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby NeonLX » Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:41 am

Circa 1994, I was discussing racism on a Usenet group. This was when we were in the process of adopting our daughter from India. I met a person who became my best friend and also my daughter's Godfather. He hailed from Amritsar, in the Punjab state of India. It was amazing to think that I, this dumb midwestern hick, was having a conversation about racism with some guy from India.

alt.forums.racism. I'll never forget.

Those were heady days indeed.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby RocketMan » Thu Mar 10, 2016 11:06 am

I don't remember the details, but it involved downloading copious amounts of photos of Claudia Schiffer and Tyra Banks circa '94. Thinking back on it, it's amazing the amount of photos of supermodels there were online already back then, like they pre-date the internet, were waiting around to be broadcast from the Aether. :mrgreen:
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby Nordic » Thu Mar 10, 2016 2:47 pm

Probably in 1993 or so, went on AOL for the first time. And the first thing I thought was "I want to buy AOL stock". I have a friend who did, and he made out quite well. I didn't have any spare money (story of my life for the most part) so did not. Also wanted to buy Starbucks stock at about the same time. Same story.

But yeah, I was fascinated by who you could end up talking to in chat rooms. An above story reminded me of a girl who, when I was first checking out chat rooms, wanted to do sex chat, but she told me she was 15. That seemed just sad and pathetic to me. I pictured an asthmatic girl in a wheelchair in the upstairs of her parents house, realizing she could finally get attention from the opposite sex. I didn't engage her. I did, however, meet a married professional woman from NYC who really enjoyed sex chats with men who weren't her husband. So I tried that out. In meat space I would never have an affair with a married woman, but in this case, it was just words on a screen. It seemed harmless and not real. Once she got going she would do all the typing. It was weird but kind of fun. Later she started sending me pictures of her family, then suddenly her husband blew up at her (wonder why) and they were getting divorced. After that she seemed too depressed to engage any more, and we both moved on.

There were also chat rooms where people would send a random porn photo to everyone in the chat room. This was a way to collect a lot of porn photos. Trouble was, it was a complete grab bag and you never knew what you were gonna get. I stopped doing that when some really horrible photos of some horribly young people suddenly appeared on my screen. Awful and frightening.

Once I was using a utility to find some erased files, and I discovered some chats my long-time girl friend (with whom I shared a house, and a computer), had confessed to some random guy in a chat room that she had cheated on me! This was quite a shock. But the chat was all there and I read it. Later I confronted her with this in marriage counseling. I also confessed my own transgressions and we actually both started laughing about all of it. It was such a release to get that shit out there, to confess everything. But it didn't last.

After I broke up with her, I had some bored and lonely nights where I went into chat rooms to find female company. I found a french canadian college student from Montreal who started telling me she was having bisexual feelings toward a certain female friend. Then one night she was went into great detail telling me how they'd finally gone for it together. I was young. It was great. We got along really well and I wanted to meet her for real, but there was no way to make it happen.

I got a new girlfriend, younger than I by quite a bit, and I introduced her to the internet. One night I woke up and she was sex chatting with some guy, who she then told me had actually called her on the telephone on another night, and they had done phone sex! I was pretty fucking shocked. We stayed together, though, for about three years, and as far as I know she didn't do it again.

It just opened up so many new ways to connect with people, it seemed kind of crazy. I guess it was kind of crazy. People had to invent entire new rules, and boundaries. Defining "cheating" had to be redefined.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby yathrib » Thu Mar 10, 2016 3:11 pm

Posting on Dargonzine in 1991.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby yathrib » Thu Mar 10, 2016 3:13 pm

We didn't really know just how exposed we were back then...
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby NaturalMystik » Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:09 pm

yathrib » Thu Mar 10, 2016 2:13 pm wrote:We didn't really know just how exposed we were back then...


Fortunately neither did those who would wish to exploit such things, for the most part... Back in the early days you weren't even supposed to use the internet for commercial purposes. Seems ludicrous now...
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:47 pm

I met a girl in some alt.linguistics something or another newsgroup in prolly 1995 and we were starting to hit it off and decided to go on a date as we had very similar interests. She was going to school in Boulder. So we set a date and I drove there from Denver. Since I was a craven little kid all I can say is her name made her sound hella sexy. I won't divulge the last name but who wouldn't want to meet a gal named Ciona who was studying language at CU?

She turned out to be ugly as sin and I didn't didn't follow up. Didn't dump her or nothing. Because I was young I just let it go. I always felt hella self-conscious about flaking out on her because of how she looked. Today, from what I know now, I would have found her far more attractive no doubt because I would have been way less judgemental.

And so it goes.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:59 pm

Luther wrote:

I was very late to the game. There weren't many household personal computers in the rust belt and even fewer modems. My family never had a computer in the house until after I left for college. However, I still have three anecdotes:


Here's how I got baby's first 386. There was a guy in my neighborhood who had a computer and I asked him if I could come over and write a paper on it. He said sure. I had just gone shopping that day and got a cool new sweater (don't even remember what it looked like). But he said he would give me the computer if I gave him my sweater. So if memory is correct we made the trade.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 5:23 pm

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=31779&hilit=greenpeace

Cyberia The first Internet cafe in the UK
Image

It was a sunny end-of-summer day in London in 1994. I remember coming in and saying to one of the early geek-girl on staff there..
"I have never seen a website - could you show me how to do it"
A couple of minutes later, she dropped me off, with a fine latte, in the Log of the Captain of the Greenpeace ship protesting the nuclear tests in French Polynesia. I found out what the weather was like. What the crew ate. The colour of the previous sunset. What the mood was like. I saw pictures, the colours of the Polynesian sea.
The first immersion in remote connection. It lasted for twenty minutes. I remember they just did twenty minute tickets at first. Everyone wanted to do it.
'Unplugging'
I will never forget the feeling of emerging out from the Cyberian cave into the astringent sunshine.
Part of me was still located on a boat floating gently near a Polynesian atoll and sipping it's sights sounds tastes and smells; I was no longer fully here.
I knew I never would be, either. Some part of me would now be forever elsewhere.

As I walked down the street, I wondered if others could sense this and if I looked different, like after my first teenage kiss.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 5:44 pm

http://hyperreal.org/ on university computers in 1994 ish (I think, memory is a bit hazy about this period :) ). Was also about this time I discovered early digital image processing programs and electronic music in general. I may also have had a computer generated fractal poster on my wall :lol:
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 5:54 pm

This is perhaps one of the chief reasons I moved to Seattle:

In 1994, Gretchen Apgar and husband Mike opened a cybercafe in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood with Mike's brother Tyler. They started out with offering connectivity and email services in the area. Customers at the cafe expressed a wish to have the ability to check their email from other locations than just the cafe and a series of terminal stations were set up at various bars around town. These terminals were marketed under the label, "Rainmail." As computing power expanded and the cost of computers diminished, customers began to express the further wish to access their email from home. Speakeasy put together a bank of modems and offered a dial up service. As of 2008, dialup through Speakeasy is still available for $19 a month. The move toward DSL took place in 1998.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakeasy_%28ISP%29

The cafe burned down in 2001.

https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/spe ... t?oid=7435
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 6:26 pm

82_28 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:47 pm wrote:I met a girl in some alt.linguistics something or another newsgroup in prolly 1995 and we were starting to hit it off and decided to go on a date as we had very similar interests. She was going to school in Boulder. So we set a date and I drove there from Denver. Since I was a craven little kid all I can say is her name made her sound hella sexy. I won't divulge the last name but who wouldn't want to meet a gal named Ciona who was studying language at CU?

She turned out to be ugly as sin and I didn't didn't follow up. Didn't dump her or nothing. Because I was young I just let it go. I always felt hella self-conscious about flaking out on her because of how she looked. Today, from what I know now, I would have found her far more attractive no doubt because I would have been way less judgemental.

And so it goes.


I took to reading alt.magick on usenet early in my time on the internet (1994).

Someone (if I look I could find his name) offered up 62 books priced individually.

The sale offer turned into a massive thread about whether it was ethical to sell the books in general and whether alt.magick was the correct usenet group (as there was an alt.magick.something to do with buy and sell).

I dropped the fellow an email and offered to buy the entire lot for $600 and he would pay shipping and insurance from Denver to Corvallis, OR.

So I sent him a money order for $600 being a trusty soul.

About 10 days later I got a box with about 1/2 the books, mostly the less desirable and softcover. I wondered about the other books but did not press not wanting to jinx. Sent an email saying I had the first box and was waiting for the second.

The second box finally came.

In another thread at RI I listed al the grimoires that I have collected.

Until this purchase I had one Crowley and few other magick books (but had met some OTO folks in Berkeley in the 70s). About 35 of the 62 books are collectors quality. There were two Crowley first editions. There were books by Barrett, Levi, Regardie, Fortune, Spare, Bardon, Blavatsky, Ophiel, Grant, Pascal, Parsons, John Dee, Agrippa, and others; a classic ceremonial magicians library. Some were pamphlets (such as The Book of the Law printed, not published, by the OTO). The newer books were purchased between 1950 and 1975, the trade books purchased new from a bookstore in Hollywood, CA. The seller also included a blank leather bound notebook that I have never used.

I had to learn about these people and what they thought and why they did what they did. I asked questions in alt.magick. I found out about an email list out of University of New York, Syracuse that was national in scope and members were professors, students, and other scholars of the hermetic sciences. I applied for membership and was turned down because I mentioned I was interested in Crowley, other magicians, I Ching, RAW, and PKD. I asked them to reconsider and told of my library, my interest and other library in American Indian anthropology, my academic background, and the fact that I did not practice magic and did not foresee that in my future. My primary interest was and is now in how people think and how magic influenced science and spirituality and vice versa. So I got to listen to these folks and pick their fine brains for four years. My magick and mysticism library grew and grew and I found sources for true collectors until I had some setbacks and could no longer afford the purchases I would make.

I also was on a PKD email list for years; the list that evolved into jazzflavor. When I look at PKD stuff I still see many members of that mailing list. Someone on that list mailed me Salvia to test. :starz:

Maybe I will type later about romance and the internet. :whisper:
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 6:26 pm

edit oops double post
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 7:09 pm

I dropped the fellow an email and offered to buy the entire lot for $600 and he would pay shipping and insurance from Denver to Corvallis, OR.


Holy shit. Do you remember his name? I might know the guy. PM me if you want. I worked in bookstores in D-town. Not that I would remember his name. Hell, just give me some of the titles he sent to you and I'll see if the titles ring a bell.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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