I'm a little older than you, so I remember all of that but I was a young adult when it was happening. My dad was an early adopter of technology (he went to MIT in the '60s and he was an OG geek, programming mainframes with punchcards) so my earliest exposure to going online predated the actual World Wide Web. I remember watching over my dad's shoulder as he used BBSes throughout my childhood in the '80s. This was all text, and I mean it was TEXT-text, because hypertext and links weren't invented yet. But you could upload and download software, which was my main interest in it, because that was how I got most of my games. Some of it was shareware/freeware but a lot of it was pirated, which my dad had no qualms about and actively taught me that it was okay, so when the moral panic about software and media piracy came about much later it made me feel amusingly like I'd been raised in a crime family or something. (Would you download A CAR??? That depends, how big is the file and how fast is the modem?)
Now, when I was in middle school, my parents divorced and I ended up living primarily with my mom. She was not a tech savvy person, but she did have a computer with AOL, and she did let me use it unsupervised. At this point I had a friend who knew more about the internet than I did, and she showed me how to escape the AOL walled garden and access Usenet and IRC. (Discord is actually a lot like a multimedia version of IRC, which might be why it was easy for me to adapt to it.)
My friend also introduced me to online fandom and fanfiction. We were both into X-Files, which was a brand new show at the time, and it was the first major fandom that was kind of "native" to the internet. Obviously fandom itself wasn't new and had always had a presence online, but XF and the internet were both taking off in popularity at the same time, so it got really huge really fast in the early-mid '90s, much like how Harry Potter fandom and LiveJournal mutually accelerated each other's meteoric rise in the early-mid 2000s. In fact, XF was one of the first TV shows to actually have an official web site, which was advertised on the commercial breaks, so the producers definitely knew they were tapping into something big. (I remember the announcer very carefully reading out the URL... "Aitch tee tee pee... colon... slash slash...")
I also remember the waning days of the era when most people used their real names online because either their school or their ISP had assigned them an email address that was just their name, and in a lot of venues your email address was just how you were known (obviously on mailing lists, but also on Usenet). This kind of went away with the rise of AOL and web-based email services like Hotmail, since you could have as many email addresses as you wanted rather than just being stuck with whatever they gave you. Then of course real names came back around again with social media, which is a practice that always felt very retro to me.
no subject
Now, when I was in middle school, my parents divorced and I ended up living primarily with my mom. She was not a tech savvy person, but she did have a computer with AOL, and she did let me use it unsupervised. At this point I had a friend who knew more about the internet than I did, and she showed me how to escape the AOL walled garden and access Usenet and IRC. (Discord is actually a lot like a multimedia version of IRC, which might be why it was easy for me to adapt to it.)
My friend also introduced me to online fandom and fanfiction. We were both into X-Files, which was a brand new show at the time, and it was the first major fandom that was kind of "native" to the internet. Obviously fandom itself wasn't new and had always had a presence online, but XF and the internet were both taking off in popularity at the same time, so it got really huge really fast in the early-mid '90s, much like how Harry Potter fandom and LiveJournal mutually accelerated each other's meteoric rise in the early-mid 2000s. In fact, XF was one of the first TV shows to actually have an official web site, which was advertised on the commercial breaks, so the producers definitely knew they were tapping into something big. (I remember the announcer very carefully reading out the URL... "Aitch tee tee pee... colon... slash slash...")
I also remember the waning days of the era when most people used their real names online because either their school or their ISP had assigned them an email address that was just their name, and in a lot of venues your email address was just how you were known (obviously on mailing lists, but also on Usenet). This kind of went away with the rise of AOL and web-based email services like Hotmail, since you could have as many email addresses as you wanted rather than just being stuck with whatever they gave you. Then of course real names came back around again with social media, which is a practice that always felt very retro to me.