First Internet Experiences

Probably just like everyone else, my first encounters with the internet were brought on by Oregon Trail, although I really don’t remember much about the game. I do remember the whole class, including myself, being so happy when the teacher announced we were going to play it that day. It was like an extra period of recess because we weren’t cooped up in the room listening to the teacher.

The thing that I used the most on the internet during middle school would have to be AOL and AOL Instant Messenger. AOL had e-mail, games, news, chat rooms, movies, and other things that were very useful. It was like the Swiss Army Knife of the internet. You really didn’t need to go anywhere else on the internet, because everything you needed was right there. The only thing I really didn’t like about AOL was the voice that was say “welcome” or “you’ve got mail.” I found that incredibly irritating because every time you signed on, you were going to have a new e-mail, it was inevitable. AOL also had a feature called AOL Instant Messenger. My AOL Instant Messenger was pretty much on all day long. Everyone and their mothers had screen names. Mostly I went online to talk to my friends about the happenings of the day or say something to someone that I probably couldn’t or wouldn’t have said in person. I remember my parents would get mad because I would be online till very late at night, but that’s what everyone did.

Another big thing that I used on the internet like everybody else was Napster. I thought it was the coolest thing ever created. All the music I wanted was on this one site. Although with dial-up internet it took about two hours to download one song, it was well worth it because it was free. I didn’t have to go spend my money or get my mom to buy me a cd that was label as explicit; I could download whatever I wanted. My computer was full of songs. Some songs I just heard once on the radio and would go home and download it and then realize that I really didn’t like the song.

Another thing I used the internet for was checking statistics of sporting events. My friends and I were big into fantasy football, even at a young age. We would draft our teams, but there was no way of getting all of the stats from the games to compile the scores and see who won. Every Tuesday after all the games were done, I would go onto ESPN.com and gather all of the stats and calculate the points for every player. It wasn’t fun, but it was made a lot easier by ESPN.com, because before I would have to search in the newspaper for every individual players stats. Shortly thereafter, ESPN.com became my favorite site to go to and still to this day, I look at it at least twice a day.