I grew up in the mid to late 90's, so probably about 5 years later than you. My first real exposure to the internet was through my year 7 English class. My Eng

I grew up in the mid to late 90's, so probably about 5 years later than you. My first real exposure to the internet was through my year 7 English class. My English teacher was I guess you'd call an early adopter he was one of those people convinced technology was going to be revolutionary he somehow signed our class up to be a part of an email pen pal program with a school in Japan. One lesson a week we would go to the school library (where there was a computer with dial up internet) we would tell the teacher what we wanted to say and he would type 2 or 3 sentences from each student in our class and then send it using a program called "Eudora" (pretty sure we were using the teacher's personal address) and maybe a week later the teacher would show up to class with a stack of printouts. He would hand each of us the printout from our respective pen pal full of broken English. We did this for maybe a semester. That was my first exposure to online "social" use of computers. A few years Later people started to get internet at home ICQ (a chat program became pretty popular) this was around the time of Napster so there was a lot of downloading songs sharing them with people on ICQ etc. A little after that Online gaming was starting to be possible, I remember playing Quake, Starcraft and Diablo 2 with my friends online. I think around year 11/12 Counterstrike came out, it was a mod for the game Half Life and was very popular. The latency was normally pretty bad but it slowly got better. In the early days bandwidth was so limited it really restricted what kinds of social activities you could do on line.