One of my buddies had a AOL birthday party where we got the internet for “30 days free” and we just spent the time taking turns chatting with people in chatrooms.

I’ll do you one better…we’d use the internet together. Probably the inspiration for that well-known NCIS hacker-fight scene, except one of us would be on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.

I hope I just unlocked a core memory for a few more lemmings.

Remember when nobody had internet service for the most part and you had only a little window of time to use Freenet?

I used to phone the internet and sometimes it’d be busy and I’d have to phone it back later.

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Sure I memba!! I also memba getting yelled at for tying up the only phone line 😭

10? I guess if “Compuserve over slow dial-up” counts as “the information superhighway”, then sure. Web browsers almost certainly weren’t a thing yet. Hypertext had more-or-less just been invented.

I remember my, well, the house’s first computer, a Windows 95 machine (no idea about the actual specs). Shit was magical to my then 5 year old eyes. The internet only came some 3 years later and time online was heavily regulated because of the phone bill, also because someone might be waiting for an important call or whatever, which was usually my older brother waiting for a friend or girl to call him.

“Get off the computer, I have to make a phone call!” -My childhood

In the mid-90s my dad bought a Compaq Presario and the LucasArts games multi-pack. X-Wing, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones. Amazing. I was like a God.

I also remember playing a game called The Neverhood, which was a claymation liminal space game. Gave me nightmares of being trapped there, but it was still one of my favorites.

We actually went to a local department store (Karstadt), where they had a few computers lined up for people to play around with. It was all really expensive and very very beige, as was the style at the time. So we went there to “try out” the computers until the store clerks would approach us, eyebrow raised, asking if we were intending to buy one. Yes Mister, I am 10, and I would like to buy this computer that is about 5000 times my weekly allowance! I used to visit a neighbour who lived in the same house who actually had a computer that was hooked up to a TV. He was developing a game for it, and I was his alpha tester. It was way cool. It was so long ago that I forgot what the game was really about, but I loved going there and playing it everytime he finished a new part of it. Later, my mother would buy an Atari Mega ST 1 with an SM124 screen and one of those break-your-wrist mouses they had at the time. She had to chase me away from that to get any work done. It wasn’t until 1993 that I would get my first own PC that I could use as much and as long as I wanted. Internet I got when I got a 14.4k modem. Dialed in to a BBS first, which only gave me usenet. Then later, the first internet provider opened in our town, and so I had ‘real’ internet. But damnit, did that shit cost money. Not the internet access itself, but the fees for the phone line, because we had to pay per minute even for local calls.

I’d say good times, but then I remember things like having to edit your startup files every time you wanted to play a different game, and how slow and horrible and expensive (not to mention beige) everything was.

I’m guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.

That was pretty normal when I was 10. I was born in the 80s. It was novel like TV in the 1950s or radio in the 1920s.

I remember my friend showing a BBS that his uncle had got him set up on and being blown away. Also, I guess my parents were impressed by Spokesdude Bronson Pinchot (The Bronster), because they got us a US Videotel console for almost a year.

I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.

Maybe 1996-2001?

So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.

But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.