How many years?....

Sorry, I can't help you.
I just know that I've been around teh intarwebs since either '98 or '99 and even then, I don't have much to back me up other than memories and a (somewhat) recently rediscovered old site of mine from September (?) of 1999.

Perhaps the oldest name you remember going by into every search engine you can find would show up something?

Well my first grand expereince with the interent was in Decemeber of 1995. Though I didn't get internet access at home until February of 1997. For the longest while I just browsed the internet and went to a few generic chatrooms. It wasn't until late 99 that I started posting more on forums and making a name for myself.

I've been on the internet since I was 14, I remember this because I lied about my age and claimed to be 16, and nobody noticed I was 16 for three years.

I made a website in January 2000. Or 2001. One of those years. Anyway it still exists to this very day, but remains hidden from all.

All this time, AND WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT?

... Well, I like you guys =( thus I have the powor of friendship. It'll just make it harder to kill you all later.

Because Maul might order me to.

I'll see you dudes later, I have to be a bad enough dude to shoot the president. In the KNEECAPS.

Y'know, reading through this and typing this up, I now remember the full history of my introduction to the Internet.

My first introduction was a bit of a false start. Sometime in... what I think was probably '97, at my local community center, there were a few computers. I remember fiddling around a bit with Paintbrush back then on them. Anyway, the place's computer caretaker was getting a dialup modem to work on one of them, and I was looking at what he was doing.
What was that? The Internet. Ooh, I heard of that on TV, I think. You can look up a lot of things, right? That's right. Can I try? OK, but not too long. Look, here's a searching website, try looking up something. Hm... "Sega".
The next thing I remember I was looking at a site that had a review on Comix Zone.
A little later on, I just randomly typed in "www.sonic-the-hedgehog.com", which took me to the Archie Comics website.
I saved a couple of pictures, and soon after, I was told that I'd have to clear off again. So I did.
It wasn't until much later when my REAL internet life began.

It all started somewhere probably late 98.
Alberto, My mom's boyfriend at that point had a new computer, and a modem! Whoohoo!
I asked him if I could get on the internet, because I had bought a magazine shortly before, and it had this small article on programs being made that were capable of playing old Sega and Nintendo games, without needing the cartridges! It even had a couple of links in it!
Now I already knew that something like that existed, but I never realized it came from the Internet - my friend had once given me a diskette with Nesticle on it and a ROM of the Legend of Zelda. Back then, I figured it was just a PC version - I mean, I'm a Dutch kid with existant, but still limited knowledge of the English language! All I knew was that "Load Rom" meant that the game was going to start. =P
But anyway, I took the magazine, paged to the article, and entered the link in the address bar...
That's right, the first site I remember visiting on the Internet was the now dead Emux.com.
Cramming diskettes full with Roms and emulators for the crappy 486 I had at home, I was overjoyed playing all the games I'd want to. KGen 98, NESticle and MEKA were shortcuts on my desktop back then - I remember playing and fully finishing Phantasy Star 4 at HALF SPEED on that 486. =P

A period of time occurred when, due to difficulties with living space, my mother and I lived at Alberto's place for a year or two, if I remember right.
Time passed, Alberto eventually got cable Internet at some point which pretty much caused me to claim the computer as my own for almost the entire time, a fact which I'm actually silently ashamed at, since I don't remember many instances at all anymore where Alberto himself actually used the computer. XD;;;
I also remember he had a good number of pirate collection CD's ("Oh No More Games"), which held many such classics as Jazz Jackrabbit, The Incredible Machine, Psycho Pinball... and I remember playing a LOT of Sierra Adventures in particular. Freddy Pharkas, Mixed Up Mother Goose, Space Quest, and of course all the Leisure Suit Larry games (which, granted, I was probably still a tidbit too young for back then. I only played those when no one else was home).
When not playing the games however, I started making my first steps on the Internet.
Alberto guided me through getting my first Email account, as well as something of a nickname.
Ruubster@dds.nl, long since defunct, was my first and only email account for a long time, and Ruubster was my nickname for a good while. (If you look at the SOST site, you can still see the Sonic 2 MS Speed Shoes discovery being credited to "Ruubster", something that has been so ever since I mailed it to Jan Abaza. =P
Yes, Jan Abaza was the first Sonic scener I ever emailed.
Somewhere during this time, I found another Sonic site which as of today still exists, and has updated a grand total of three times since the first ever time I visited it.
"The Moogle Cavern?"
No, no. Of course not. XD
It was www.suneet.com , better known as Suneet's Sonic Zone.
I noticed the place had a section to shout out to fellow Sonic fans - three of them, in fact.
A Guestbook, a "Graffiti Wall", and a Messageboard.
The Graffiti Wall was my first choice, but it didn't work well for some reason. The guestbook was host to a comment or two, but I quickly realized the REAL discussion was going to happen on that "Message Board", whatever that was supposed to be.
So I checked it out. I had to register a name.
So I thought about it a little. Was I just gonna keep using "Ruubster"? I wasn't sure.
The name started to sound a little bit weird to actually have people refer me to, and I kinda wanted to be "in with the crowd", y'know. I realized I needed a Sonic nickname.

So in a burst of SHEER INSPIRATION AND EXTREME ORIGINALITY, my fingers ran across the keyboard and soon after, the Register form's Name Entry slot soon read five simple digits...


.... "sonic"

"I'm sorry, this name is taken. Try another."

I was irked by this. I mean, come on! WHY would someone on a Sonic-related messageboard name himself Sonic? Other then me, obviously.
Ahwell. Let's try again. "tails"

"I'm sorry, this name is taken. Try another."
"knuckles"
"Taken."

THANK GOD I quickly realized that this wasn't going to work. I never bothered adding numbers or some random crap like that to it, because even then I realized that numbers behind your name look nothing short of lame.

So anyway, I still needed a name. Something mildly orginal, but it'd still show the fact that I liked Sonic. Sonic the Hedgehog. Hedgehog. Hedgehog... H Hog...
Hm. H Hog. That's... actually kind of catchy. I swear, if this doesn't work I'm gonna stop trying.

"Thank you for registering, H Hog! Please check your email for confirmation."

YES! I was in. So, with my newfound identity, I started making aquaintance with my first set of Internet friends.

Sestren, a Sega fan with a particular love for House of the Dead, Crazy Taxi and Panzer Dragoon.
Robochar, who was actually a bit of a Pokemon fan as well, but still really liked Sonic a lot.
Auston Acorn, who became one of my best friends there at some point.
Beefnbird, who... I really don't remember much about aside from his name.
Dr. Big Robotnik, who... also seems to stick out in my memory only for his name.
The rarely seen Suneet himself was there once every so often.
And then there was someone who named himself "The Sonic God".

Time went by, and discussions passed about stuff like the at that point brand new Sonic Adventure, an article in Mad Magazine that listed the Dreamcast as one of the dumbest things of the past year, complete with mutilated picture of a stubble-faced Sonic kicking apart a Dreamcast on a fictional Toys r' Us advert, and eventually...
I don't EXACTLY remember how or in what context it happened, but at some point, "The Sonic God" posted a link to a website that, back then, utterly SHATTERED my view on Sonic's universe.

The website of Fatalis - Furry Hentai artist, with a whole section dedicated to pictures of Amy Rose, Sally Acorn, Bunnie Rabbot, and other such ladies... and they were NAKED! And they had NAUGHTY BITS! GAHH! This was... so WRONG!

Nowadays I really think I overreacted a bit, but back then, I was really... kind of freaked out by this, and I was sure to let him know that.
I remember pretty much everyone hating him for it - not so much the link to the hentai itself, but moreso the fact that this somehow also inspired Suneet to shut down the entire messageboard, replaced by nothing more then a message that a new board would appear soon.

It never happened.

Well, that's to say... He DID try to put up a new board, but no one seemed to be able to register, much less actually post.
Eventually we all gave up, and remained in contact with Sestren and Auston through Email, and sadly, those two people were the only ones I actually had the email address of.
I later would reunite with Robochar however, and I even talked with The Sonic God much later and sorta kinda patched things up with him, too.

Somehow in the middle of it all, through links and probably sheer blind luck, I stumbled across a hoax archive at one point (I think it might have been Vegemite, not sure though), including a certain hoax made by a certain guy calling himself Andrusi.
In this hoax, he plugged the other websites he had uploaded hoaxes to, among which... www.iwaynet.net/~moogle.
You guessed it... The Moogle Cavern.

I laughed HARD at some of those hoaxes, and decided to make some of my own.
Relayed through Andrusi, I passed on my hoaxes to Kulock.
I haven't a clue why I didn't mail Kulock myself, nor do I know why I chose Andrusi to relay the hoaxes.
All I know is that, through a good bit of coaching on how to improve my hoaxes, and a slight misunderstanding regarding the pixel size I was supposed to send my hoaxes in at, I eventually got my own little bit on the Internet.

During this, I had already started on what I was planning to name "H Hog's Zone", my own website! I mean hot damn! I was still a newcomer on the Net, and one of the things I really wanted, not unlike a certain blonde haired Ninja boy, was to aspire and become known through the Sonic community as a cool person.
So first, a host. Xoom? Hm... unlimited space! Cool. Let's do it! Now, what to put on there?

The thing I kept in mind, regardless of wether it actually worked out, was to make my site sort of a portal for other people to submit their works to.
Fanart? Yeah, that's a good start. Fangames? Yeah, good idea. Hm... Hoaxes! Of course, how could I forget?
The hoax archive was one of the only things that people actually submitted things to, in the end.
I eventually found that I really didn't have enough content on my site, and needed something beside hoaxes to get people to visit my site.
Then it snapped. Everything came back full circle as I uploaded them...
Every Sonic ROM I had, including all hacks I had found at that point. I even had the rarer ones, like Sonic Pocket Adventure, and I also mirrored the Sonic Arcade ROM I downloaded off of the Moogle Cavern shortly before. So, predating sonicstrike.net by a good few years, I like to think that for a short while, I was the first website that dedicated myself to having (none other then) all existing Sonic Roms archived.

This did not amuse Xoom, and my site was swiftly deleted without any sort of warning.
Having subsequently had my site on f2s.com, Geoshitties, SSNTails.net (AJ Freda), fpforums.net (Suitcase), and Sepwich (Sep and Epon), my site now rests calmly on Echidno...er... Doorsclosing.com, with space on loan from Eric.

Wow.
THAT'S a deep archive of my brain I just opened, there. ;;;

Off the top of my head:

I first joined the internet in '94 at age 7, starting with IRC chatrooms using mIRC. I was made an operator of a channel called #kidspalace
Made my first webpage in 1995.
After #kidspalace died out, I really had no social internet life until about '99/'00; until then I pretty much just downloaded free/shareware games from Lord Soth's games on the Internet.
In '99 I got my first REAL e-mail address (which I still use today) and AIM screen name.
Soon after that I joined a DBZ RPG chatroom called 'dbzbar' on Bravenet. (There weren't ops but I was made a "bartender," which is kinda weird because my character was a baby... XP)
By the end of 2000 I made a DBZ Goten website on Geocities, which actually got some decent traffic.
dbzbar lasted for awhile, but when it died out, I still kept in touch with a bunch of my friends in there through MSN messenger. (By this time I was already a hardcore anime fan ¬_¬)
Soon after, I had just gotten Sonic Adventure 2 and started lurking a few Sonic communities including the MC (which I found through Jamie Swiftrunner's site, IIRC) and the GHZ, and unfortunately started following Fireball20XL.
I almost started a god-awful sprite comic/Sonic info website a few years ago, but looking back on it, I'm glad I canned it.
Today I frequent mainly the MC, but also #lemonade, the GHZ and rarely Sonic CulT; and co-admin Sepwich and run Nothing for Free (still not officially up).

Oooh, I love these topics!

Way back when in the year of 1995...

My father said to me, "Hey, Chris! There's this thing called the INTERNET. You can find a little bit of stuff there from all over the world!"
" Daddy, get me on it!"
Well, we tried for a bit AOL... with our brand spankin' new 14.4 modem (Only $75 at Warp Computers!) and armed with our 486/66 beast, I slipped gingerly into the world known as the internet. It was about this time that I decided, "Hey, I've always wanted a Sega Genesis!"(Mind you, the Nintendo 64 was on the horizon at this point) and saw Sonic 2 played at the now-defunct game store. "Mooommmm, I wanna SAYGAH!" "Save up for it." I saved and saved for four months and bought myself my $40 Genesis and 3 games: Terminator 2: The Arcade Game, Fire Shark, and of course, Sonic.

Sonic was too hard for me, but that didn't deter me from attacking any merchandise I could. I collected all the Sonic 3 McDonald's toys and devoted my hours to the second level of Sonic, attempting for months to beat it. The internet was forgotten!
"What if they have Sonic online?"
We never were able to get AOL to work. We got Earthlink and I began my quest to find happiness. I thought to myself, "Megaman!" I began my search(Hotbot 4tw)... and decided to create my own website. (http://my.cybersoup.com/zero)... I realized the Internet is a place for games, had a brief Pokemon stint, and came here when I was... 7. I promptly registered as the proud TailsFlyingFox or some mess like that, forgot about the community, and then returned to become 'shadowhedgehog27616'... Stuck around until the phpBB was the norm, dabbling with one Pikaben in Furcadia for a while and then disappeared until Sonic X was new in Japan. La-dee-da-dee-doo. I've been corrupted by the internet.