I was in 7th grade in 1997, fall. That's when we got the internet full time.
My dad had AOL in 1993 or 94, but it was a long distance phone call. We paid by the minute. So, we didn't keep it long. I never had the chance to do much with it. In 97, a local dial up exchange started, and we got the internet full time that fall.
I still distinctly remember getting home from a middle school football game in September. My dad didn't go. He surprised me and my mom when we got home with a new PC with internet. He was showing us a search engine called Excite and how you could chat on it. Around a week or two later, I got hooked up with a Tanarus account and started internet gaming.
The irony is our connection at the time was 33.3 k/bs. At my parents house, right now, their internet is 1.2m/b/s. Infrastructure in the Appalachian mountains does not improve fast ;_;
Funny man,similar story for me.My Dad was teaching computer science at that time so we had internet but Napster was slow as fuck.lol