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I think I first started regularly using the internet in the early 2000s, when I was a little older than 10.
I mostly remember looking up N64 game walkthroughs on “GameFAQs”, reading some big text file with occasional ASCII diagrams. I think I’d sometimes print them. I also used MSN Messenger to talk to some friends. Not many people had microphones so often I’d still use the house phone to call a friend if we were chatting over MSN but wanted to say a lot over voice.
But for most of my PC gaming time before that, I would just ignore the (network) multiplayer option in games, since I never had a LAN party and mostly only had dial up, where you would tie up the home phone line, and I assume actually call the person you want to game with, or maybe call some specific server (and I was too young to do that on my own anyway).
But I remember one day playing StarCraft (the original), realizing that I finally had a dedicated and decent internet connection, and that I’d be ignoring the multiplayer button unnecessarily. I joined a random multiplayer game, a 7 vs 1 “comp[uter player] stomp”. It was quite novel for me to get to play a computer game and chat with random people, I remember showing my parents. Later I played “James Bond: Nightfire” on PC a lot with randoms, and joined clans and all that. Later I played Runescape and most of the rest of my friends and classmates eventually played too.
It’s kind of sad now that everyone is on the internet, and that we’re “always” on. You don’t really say “brb” anymore. I kind of liked when the internet was something that you’d only get to see when using the shared family computer, not something that’s constantly accessible to us at all times. I even wrote this when I meant to just relax in the sun, not scroll on my phone.