My then local Library/ISP - Rasmus Lauridsen

Let me see, I remember it was using Lynx on a dial-up, I'm pretty sure it was the CIX BBS http://atulchitnis.net/writing... - Aaman (Clone of FF)

Mine was Beck.com in 1996. I was one of the first to try out my 6th Form college's internet-connected computer (dial-up of course). I was a huge Beck fan so I tried out Beck.com and was disappointed to see that it was just a splash image for his album Mellow Gold. It's come on a bit in 13 years: http://www.beck.com - Martin Bryant

yahoo off course - Atif UNALDI from IM

telnet info.cern.ch 8080 (via www linemode in the spring of 1992) - ianf ⌘

CNN.com in '95 or '96. I was either 12 or 13 then (Baby Boomer parents who grew up in modest settings = NOT early adopters) - LANjackal

Probably one between altavista, lycos or excite - Roberto aka postoditacco

I think I'm the same as Roberto - Mitch

whitehouse.gov. I had to do all kinds of crazy things on an ancient Mac to get TCP/IP stack, browser, etc. All because I wanted to hear Socks the cat meow... - Dave Hodson

ha! found the site in the wayback machine :-) http://web.archive.org/web... Good times, I remember sitting there with my sister reading the setup instructions, ftp'ing into the library's ftp server to get Netscape ?? and then loading this site. oh and the library was by far the cheapest minutes were only 25% of regular calls!! yes thats 0.25 dkr for one minute. My webchatty sister racked up some humongus phonebills still lol - Rasmus Lauridsen

yahoo in '95 - Serkan Unsal

WSU's homepage in 1994 in Lynx! - Jennifer Dittrich

More than likely it was Yahoo. - Adi

probably something that mentioned '404: Error' of some sort - Morgan Haley

National Geographic - jcunwired

hotmail. Just wanted to get my email id before anyone else. And it was in 1998. Now its been ages since I visited hotmail - Sidharth Dassani

Wow that's a long time ago, probably either Bath.ac.uk (homepage then) or altavista in 1993 - Richard Cunningham from iPod

http://www.willemwever.nl to play some games :) Was by my uncle at the University of Twente, Enschede, NL, but don't know which year exactly, think somewhere in 1996. - Reüel

I can't remember that far back. At least, not with any accuracy... - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

altavista - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

@Richard Cunningham - for AltaVista try 1995/1996 at the earliest - unveiled 15 Dec 1995; web crawled first on July 4th, 1995. [source: http://www.clubi.ie/webserc...] - ianf ⌘

http://www.yahoo.com - Gustavo Munoz from twhirl

It was so long ago I think it was a.net ;) - Robert Hafer from iPhone

@inaf well I know I was on from 1993 so I don't know how I searched for anything. Was using NSCA Mosaic for a short time before started using Netscape. - Richard Cunningham

You didn't search for anything, Richard, because there was no websearch then. The closest I can think of when searching for new servers was grepping <http://linux.die.net/man...> the "http\:\/\/www" string in the folder of news:comp.infosystems.www.announce at the Unix end [though it may have been called something else then in Usenet, pre-Dejanews, pre-Googlegroups days]. Mosaic 0.1 appeared first in March of 1993 <http://www.eskimo.com/~bloo...>; prior to that there was only Tim B-L's text-only NeXTbrowser, and Nicola Pellow's TTY www-linemode. Later for a short time I also used the [text-only] MacWeb 1.01. - ianf ⌘

This thread - now a post on The Next Web: http://thenextweb.com/2009... Thanks for the memories, everyone. Keep posting your memories of the web way-back-when :) - Martin Bryant

[Administrivia] I much prefer to have you summarize relevant FF-originating comments on your #TNW site, Martin, to having them automatically reposted there, as previously was the case [http://ff.im/4bZK6]. Well done! - ianf ⌘

Ian, that still happens automatically (although it won't pull all of this thread in as it's not linked to the post). Still, this has worked well so far so we'll probably do something similar again at some point. - Martin Bryant

I suppose it was the Mosaic site. But real men used gopher. :-P - Jason Huebel

I think the first site I ever visited was http://web.louvre.fr in Mosaic. Yes, french sites used "web" instead of the prefix "www" back then. - Brome

Probably Dr Fun, http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave..., early 1994 using mosaic. - andrej koelewijn

aol.com, probably. - teh Dork Knight

Martin, I'm not talking specifically about #TNW's ab/use of reposting, but it opens a whole can of worms. Because, if you do it, and I do not vehemently object to it, then what is there to stop further parties from reposting my other content from still other places to their own, and potentially harmful-to-my-reputation, sites? Were that to end in court, I sure would name you as co-conspirator (or something; now, don't you go there all puffy thinking of your new hard-won Internet Menace Status, nor go ordering <http://www.cafepress.com/cp...> - a different crime altogether ;-)) - ianf ⌘

i really can't remember now, but i was definitely using Mosaic. i think i got it via gopher or ftp from some university. - Joe Silence is not dead

@Jason Huebel - real men used WAIS, gopher was for sissies. [Amend: and before that modified finger-daemons to facilitate command+singleAddressString text delivery/publishing, as in %> finger "scip+fi%danny"@orthanc.cs.su.oz.au ] - ianf ⌘

Probably yahoo - Rodfather

It was probably www.ocf.berkeley.edu, using Lynx in 1994. But our university-issued UNIX shell accounts were configured to start up in Gopher by default. - Victor Ganata

I managed to FTP Mosaic from somewhere. First site I recall was MIT School of Lockpicking, which I guess made an impression since it had images. - ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ from iPhone

plato....1974 - Bob DeMarco

I don't remember my first 'web site.' I do remember using Gopher to visit Adam Curry's MTV.COM, though. - John Craft

@Bob: plato wasn't a website. :P - Joe Silence is not dead

Plato's was a Retreat [Ansonia Building, W. 73rd and Broadway, New York, N.Y.] I wasn't aware they had computers wired well into the future (or any other activities bar the, hmm, basic ones). - ianf ⌘

prodigy, '96 - Jim Carter

WWF (the wrestlers, not the wildlife). The chat rooms were the first I had ever visited and had me hooked. "mum im talking to Americans...for free..!" Other than that I remember Lycos being one of the earliest as it was the default homepage for all of my schools computers. - Jamie