The Knewton Blog


What was your first internet moment?

Posted on December 2, 2011 by

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One of our software engineers, Trevor Smith, talks about his very first experience with the internet in this video:

After hearing that, another one of our developers, Brad Baebler, shared his first experience:

I had the exact same first experience with the internet… I was in middle school and at my dad’s office, except instead of a picture of Saturn, it was this page: http://www.pixelscapes.com/spatulacity/button.htm

That got us thinking. How cool would it be if everyone shared their first internet moment? I’m pretty sure mine was when a friend showed me how to download a shareware version of Doom.

What was your first internet moment? Let us know in the comments! If you tweet it use hashtag #1stinternetmoment

Posted in Inside Knewton, Knewton | 7 comments



  • Jessie

    We got our first family computer when I was in 4th grade, and boy was she a beaut –  top of the line Compaq Presario 5000, all the bells and whistles. I knew that the Internet was inside of the computer, and I knew I could use it to find whatever I wanted. I felt empowered by that knowledge. I sat and thought about what kind of stuff I really, really needed to find out about. It took 7 seconds to decide on my first search query and 4 minutes to type it into the NetZero search bar: “where are pictures of Leonardo Dicaprio with his shirt off”. I remember being disappointed that he had his shirt on in most of the results. And that’s when I decided to become a Marketing Coordinator. 

  • David

    We got Prodigy when I was six.  It was terrible.

    • Anonymous

      Mine is also a Prodigy memory. I used to go to my grandpa’s house to play “Indiana Jones and the Secret of Atlantis” and “Loom” on his computer, and then suddenly he had access to tons more games through Prodigy. There was a great 3d maze game that I would love to play again now.

  • http://twitter.com/davezwieback Dave Zwieback

    I was a junior in high school when I got access to the Internet as part of Saturday Academy of Computing and Mathematics (SACAM) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was 3 years before the Netscape Navigator was released, so I spent most of my time on IRC and e-mail. Good times.

  • http://robbiemitchell.com Robbie Mitchell

    In 1995 my middle school let me spend one class period a day learning about the internet and HTML. I don’t remember my first moment on the internet, but I distinctly remember my mom buying me a paperback edition of the internet yellowpages (!!!).

  • Stephanie

    I signed on to AOL for the first time when I was in fifth grade using our 2400 bps modem. At this time, AOL hadn’t even introduced the “world wide web” and charged by the hour. I was amazed by the chat rooms and content… our $100+ monthly bills certainly reflected this amazement.  

  • Brian

    2 memorable moments – when i was freshman in college, ARCHIE was running on one of the machine’s in the computer lab, and i remember hitting the mighty mighty bosstones “website” which rendered a text bio of the band and a song list. that was wild. the next year, the first mosaic browser was out, and a friend of mine showed it to me on his dad’s PC – we typed in whitehouse.gov, and and i felt a rush as the image loaded – we were so giddy, you would have thought we had hacked into the president’s secret files ;-)