What is your earliest Internet memory?

[Venus007]

I loved computers from the moment I met them.
I used to prowl around the University of Notre Dame when I was like 11 and I would see the students with their punch cards in boxes rushing about and looking terribly intelligent and important.

My first personal computer experience was at my friend Adam's house, his parents were wealthy and his dad had a computer, it was HUGE. We read that we could cause it to generate tones at particular frequencies and tried to control the toaster via sympathetic hZ tones. (We were like 13 or 14)

I took a BASIC programming class in the 9th or 10th grade (early to mid 1980s) and became besotted with computers and programming (I went on to take COBOL, FORTRAN, and Assembler)

A friend of mine had CompuServe (we paid to connect hourly and it could rack up FAST) and I remember being able to read the NY Times and the San Francisco Chronicle digitally. There were also odd conversations with fellow tech nerds (we didn't even call ourselves that at the time)

The CompuServe connection was done through an acoustic coupler that the phone receiver fit into


After that it was AOL, when I started there were an amazing number of people on, like 35,000 (heh)

After that it has been a continuous connection throughout my life.
I met several love and ahem other interests via the web
Some of my very best friends were met this way as well