At the time I had no pc in my house, I could only use it at my grandparents house. They got AOL, and like a week after getting it he checked his email and it was a porn spam with a big image of 2 lesbians using a double sided dildo and he called that day and canceled AOL and he switched to a smaller local isp(back when those existed). I still cackle at that, with how ubiquitous emails like that are.
Me with my koi pond, before I discovered that most other pond owners are elderly right wing conspiracy theorists who don’t believe in crazy stuff like the nitrogen cycle or that mailing invasive plants like water hyacinth or water spangled is illegal.
I was online when I was 11 also, back in 94. No google. No yahoo. No youtube. Just non-stop unregulated pornography as far as thee eye could see. Then yahoo showed up and had yahoo chat WITH NO BOTS. They even had a Webcam feature on dialup. I was 14 by then and I remember going into a Webcam room with a woman in Australia in her 40s and she made me watch her use a huge black dildo. The original rickroll was goatse, or this website that infinitely loaded popup windows until it crashed your pc.
Truly a golden age.
I vividly remember as a young teen watching a completely free Webcam feed from Amsterdam of unpaid amateur people who liked to be watched have sex(on dialup) with a little watching counter in the corner. It was literally front page, didn’t even have to goto a page and click a hotlink. Or how Whitehouse.com was a porn site and kids would regularly go there by accident in the school computer lab doing projects.
I never used TOR until like 2004 and by then I was in my 20s. In 2007 I came this close to buying $40 in bitcoin to use on silk road when they were less than a penny. I could be a millionaire right now if my ex hadn’t talked me out of it.