I really didn’t get online ‘til Jan. 2000, and I wasn’t much of a ‘Wired’ reader. But I do remember a lot of pr0n ads in the last pages of just about every B-grade computer mag of the day.

I remember the internet as early as the mid eighties as a connection between school and university libraries and other research facilities around the World. Big woop I thought, who cares. I had geeky friends who had computers IBM, IBM clone and Apple with the large format (actual floppy) floppy discs in high school. They were expensive too ~$2k IIRC.  The first computer I had was in university and used the later smaller format hard floppy discs and had a 2G hard drive and cost ~$2600.

I remember a prof showing me his wireless internet connection through his mobile phone in 1993. Big ‘ol Motorola flip and some kind of equal size modem device plugged into his laptop.

I was online at home in 1994, the thing most notable other than the staggeringly slow load times for images was that the vast majority of websites were non-commercial.  I remember a webcam online meeting ~’95 using some program called cucmee or something like that.

CU-SeeMe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

Somewhere around the start of the 90’s I had an AppleLink account (paid for by work) and a CompuServe personal account. AppleLink (in the UK) was even more hideously expensive than in the US, so it was only used as absolutely necessary. CompuServe wasn’t cheap, but it was a little less like being raped, and had more fun shit to do.