This thread is named wrong, it should be: "When did you start downloading porn?"

=P

I also looked up the release date of Mosaic, to make sure I wasn't mistaken in my estimate.

For me it was rather cheap at the time. The university was my service provider and phone calls cost only one unit at night regardless of length, so I could browse and download whatever I wanted overnight. Later it became one unit per 30 minutes and then per 5 minutes, IIRC.

Other than really brief forays thru Prodigy, my first internet connection occurred during an ice storm in February 1996. I had just signed up for the service 2 days before and then, thanks to mother nature, I had like 5 days to explore (we didn't lose power but couldn't drive due to the ice). US Robotics 56k modem (state-of-the-art at the time). Didn't go DSL until 1998 when we moved to our first house.

Well, no. We traded floppy disks with gifs and early "movies" (does "Poor Mandy" and "More Mandy" ring a bell?) on the schoolyard years before I hit the internet. That actually was 1996 when I attended university. Did sink an insane amount of time into a MUD and still managed not to flunk the exam.

1995

But it was the days of infamous AOL days and I happen to stumbled into few questionable chatrooms. Was put on restricted Internet time until '03. I shuddered to think of those dark days. :(

Only a decade later than most in this thread, in 2004, the same time I owned my own PC for the first time (a second-hand Pentium II that used to be my mother's, running Windows 98). I still got the first mail I received on my 33rd birthday. My computer was connected with a 56K ISDN modem, so I was unreachable by phone when I got on the net and it cost my loads of money. One year later I switched to ADSL, so my phonebills got cheaper and people could phone me again when I was online.

About 1992-93 for me. I recall downloading this new, strange UNIX-like OS, and having to store it on something like 30-40 floppy disks. :-)

Linux certainly was a pain to install and dual-boot at first though! Not to mention jumping through many more hoops than nowadays just to get things to work.

Around 1998, I guess. At that time, I didn't have an internet access at home though. In fact, I didn't get one until 9 years later or so ...

I started using the internet to play StarCraft. 56k dial-up FTW

I first used the internet to look up a walk through for monkey island 2 on my uncles computer. He worked for Apple at the time, so he had a network of maybe three AppleMacs in his living room.
I do not remember the year, but it was about one or two years after monkey island 2 had been released, because my dad had bought a computer for his work / our school work, which i played games on after supper.

1997 I guess, maybe 1998, with AOL. We didn't realize at the time how it worked and thought the 'unlimited' thing we were paying for was the only thing we were paying for. Bit of a shock when the phone bill arrived, haha.

I met a bunch of people through AOL looking up local people, I guess I was about 14. All of the meetings were incredibly awkward and I have no idea why I did it, it's a wonder I wasn't murdered.

I used the internet at school or at a family member's house here and there but it was very rare. I got my own access when I got my computer at age 14, that was 2005.

About 15 minutes after the first pic of boobs was posted.

But seriously, 1995 I'm thinking, right after getting my branny-spankin' new NEC Pentium 90 PC. Remember Earthlink? Remember 14.4 kbps? That was me.

Earthlink dial-up in early 1997, when they just introduced 56K speeds and a reasonable monthly flat use rate; no X MB of data monthly restriction. Definitely a leg-up from many of the other dial-up providers at the time.

Still remember connecting the fifty-foot long phone cable from my modem to the phone-outlet jack downstairs so I could play Diablo online.

Data was so much more difficult to come by, buffer, and download in those days. Kids who grew up in a world always with high-baud Internet have no idea. You could spend all night downloading a video clip. or a few MP3s, and if you got interrupted and kicked off by an incoming land-line call you had to start all over again. I will say "GetRight" download manager was my best friend back in those days.

I preferred the cleaner layout to many webpages, especially online magazines like Salon, Slate, sites like Everything2 and Gamespot back when it focused on PC games online. Easily to navigate, load, and digest content without endless flash ads, pop-ups, and extraneous crap featuring click-bait articles clogging up the columns.

Back when Google was not yet king and Yahoo and Lycos were still chic, there were all sort of search engines competing for the same eyeballs. I remember using Hotbot and Dogpile the most.