I got my first PC in the mid 90s. 1st task was to take it apart, but after that, I first learned about the internet through friends, and we had a few computers at school in the library or the BASIC programming classrooms. My primary uses were the Blizzard chat rooms and playing OC starcraft with my friends (though we’d usually just get together at someone’s house and LAN for that.) I had AOL for a while, but couldn’t really afford it and neither could my parent. There was a thing called netZero I used for quite a while…it was free dial-up internet that displayed an ad banner on your desktop, but it wasn’t very intrusive, especially if you had a crazy high resolution (crazy high at the time being > 480x768). My primary uses were picking 2-3 mp3s to download overnight while I slept so nobody would pick up the phone and disconnect the internet, sharing dangerous and stupid amounts of personal info to basically anyone on IRC that asked (a/s/l anyone?), playing around with kitchy little hacker tools (one of my favorites allowed you to attach a malicious executable to your picture you’d send to people that would allow to do goofy shit like open their cd rom or flip their screen upside down). My mom’s only complaint about the internet was when she couldn’t use the phone (so I mostly browsed late at night). It was harder to find things, and there wasn’t much content…what was out there was just text since even images took 10s of seconds to download sometimes. Security and parental controls (beyond fear mongering) were practically non-existant and even when someone’s parents were competent enough to try and lock it down, most of the pare tal controls could be overridden with the local admin account, which we all knew the passwords to because we had install the stuff our parents wanted on the computer anyway.

Good question, thanks for the trip down memory lane!