When you first went online..

[The Curmudgeon]

Remember the days before the internet? Yeah, me too. I still get cold sweats.

Anyway, when you first went online many moons ago, what was your initial reasons? What did you first do?

When I first went online, I LOVED internet chatrooms. Honestly, I thought they were the greatest thing in the world. Now, maybe its me, maybe its the rooms I've seen recently, but nowadays it seems that to hold a conversation in an internet chatroom you have to have had some form of brain damage. I sit looking at the fucking mundane awfulness on the screen and struggle to remember what the hell I spent my time on.

Ebay was a big "wow" moment for me as well. In fact, I remember spending a good hour just typing random stuff in the ebay search engine and seeing what I could find. The fact that I could now easily buy those long lost rare CD singles (for a fraction of the price found in those dedicated magazine ads) was just brilliant.

And the rest? My memory's not so good anymore.

So what brought you to the dance?

[trashcanman]

To quote a sample used in an Iron Maiden song ("The Prisoner"), "We want information, information, INFORMATION"! Endless knowledge about any subject at my fingertips is why I started. Come for the infinite knowledge, stay for the por... er, I mean online auctions. Seriously, shopping online is damn near the only way I buy things anymore.

[Benjamin Haines]

Ten years ago, at the age of nine, my parents took me to see a movie at the theater by the title of Godzilla. It was the year 1998, and while I didn't realize at the time that the creature I was watching on the screen was merely a pretender to the throne of the King of the Monsters, I can't say that I cared one little bit, because I was soundly mesmerized.

My dad told me that there were a lot of old Godzilla movies in addition to what I just watched, and when I asked him how I could ever get them or find out about them, he suggested I use the internet on our new family computer to search on the subject matter. After a Yahoo search, I came upon this wondrous classic of a site:

www.godzillatemple.com/

For a kid like me discovering Godzilla for the first time, Barry's Temple of Godzilla was a treasure trove. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that that website, along with the 1998 Hollywood feature and the shopping opportunity of Amazon, took part in changing my life.

[trashcanman]

I used to go there all the time before the last run of films ended. Wow, I grew up with the original black and white Godzilla and it's innumerable goofy sequels only to find the 1998 version hateful and ineptly Americanized. But if it brought you into the fold, GINO was good for something after all. Man, I wish you could have grown up in the 80's. Saturday afternoon was a wonderland of genre flicks: poorly dubbed kung-fu, Godzilla and Gamera, Conan, Hammer films, Hitchcock; those were the days.