Yesterday while wandering on eBay (dangerous hobby, I know…) I stumbled on the registration date details of my profile.
“User since 2005”. 20 years.
It’s exactly when I’ve joined the big internet circus, the first forum, the first online purchases, some friendship that even continued IRL.
Leaving aside this obvious sadness, when did all started for you?
How long you’ve been around and do you have any Pokemon-related memory about your first glimpse on the WWW?
Probably around the same time for me. My parents didn’t have home internet until Christmas 2005, when the Thunder Moo dynasty was born on RuneScape 2.
I would play Pokemon mini games on the official Pokemon website at my Mom’s work around the same time. I was more into Yu-Gi-Oh however, I remember looking up cards and dreaming about being able to open a booster box someday.
For online forums it wasn’t until later in high school, when I was into cars and guitars. Ive looked back at some of those accounts and die of cringe 
Yeup. Circa 2003-2004. Remember (and still have) the old iMac I used to use to connect via dial-up to whatever the AOL Kids portal was (extremely limited and safeguarded access to the Web.)
I used to go on POKÉMON(dot)COM and play the Celebi game where you had to dodge Scizors or something. And spend an hour or so loading the “song” videos they had on there. Brock’s song is particularly stuck in there.
Jenny, oh Jenny
Joy, oh Joy
A one woman man’s what I wanna be
But there’s two perfect girls for me
Officer Jenny, oh can’t you see
You can lock me up and throw away the key
Jenny, if loving you’s a crime
Then sentence me now and I’ll do the time
Ahahahahha the Brock songs!
I’m re-watching the first anime series with my daughter on Netflix.
I’m looking forward to these days, but also not looking forward to finding out which episodes get “child has fixated on” status and have to be rewatched to death!
The year 2000 I started collecting with my Dad as a kid. Would take me to card shops in the mall and I was in the Pokémon league.
Fast forward to high school when Pokemon wasn’t cool anymore and girls and parties were my main focus. My childhood cards sat in a dark storage unit and collected dust. Out of sight out of mind.
Fast forward again to 2016. Browsing on my phone in the garage and I remember seeing an online article about vintage Pokemon cards. It inspired me to get my childhood collection out (still have to this day, will never sell them for sentimental reasons). Shortly after I was shopping at my Walmart and walked past the Pokemon display. Grabbed a few packs for nostalgia. It was xy evolutions. I was shocked to see base set art from my childhood. Well that lit a fire in me! I found this forum shortly after. I’ve met a really great friend here. I’ve been in the hobby ever since. Consider myself a serious collector. It’s greatly impacted my life in a positive way. I love Pokemon cards. I’ll be a collector until the grave.
To sum it up, I’ve been collecting since 1999-2000. Seriously collecting and part of the online community since 2016. 2016 is when I created my eBay and purchased my first card online. PSA 9 base set Zard (old label).
Thanks,
Zac
2007
Bought my moto KRZR (slimline RAZR) mirrored blue finish, silver buttons. Peak style.
Soon after I bought my Masaki Gengar, and the collecting madness was on… I remember finding these unique pikachu trophy cards listed for about 500K, and thinking, “what ludicrous buyer would pay that for shiny cardboard?” (It was Scott). That listing has been on my watchlist ever since. 
Dang. Crazy to think.
2014
XY flashfire charizard EX set. Loved it so much I would just sit down and admire my cards.
Now kids look at me confused when I talk about how annoying the “gummy bear song” and I realize I’m becoming old.
I don’t know my exact first card and the exact time I joined but it was around the ages of 4-5 but here is the first vivid memory that isn’t just going to be me trying to fill in the huge gapes between little parts of memories
When I was around 4 my older brothers and me went over to a family friends house and they were playing pokemon, one of the kids who was a couple years older then me gave me a couple base set and other gen 1 cards the ones I remember the most being, jungle meowth, fossil shellder, mysterious fossil, base bulbasaur and of course my first squirtle card, much later I found out that the squirtle was shadowless
That’s how I was introduced to the hobby then I was in and out of collecting till around 2021 then I started to go deeper into it, looking back I probably read 20+ e4 threads before I realized that they were all from the same site
I’ve been sick for a while
And no, I don’t read your messages.
I made my ebay account to flip US Mint releases and giftcards my roommate and I would win on penny auction sites. Thought briefly about buying Pokemon cards, but think I just spent any money on silver coins and pizza. I’d been using my parents info on eBay for at least a few years before that, though.
My first internet memory is taking the AOL free trial CDs from Blockbuster and booting them up on my dad’s computer. It was so annoying to get disconnected when someone called the home phone 
I entered the WWW likely around 2004-2005.
And I’m pretty sure I’ve only used a computer in general in 2002-2003, playing old Windows 95 games with my parents. One was Bomberman, and the other I can’t remember anymore (all I remember is that it was a lot of fun, and when I tried to search for it a few years later, I couldn’t find it anywhere..)
If I look back at my old emails, the first few are apparently from the start of 2006 when I was playing FlyFF. But I know I’ve played RuneScape for about 1.5 years prior to that. 
I was probably using an older email or we might even have had a family email back then.
Anyway, looking back at old files on my PC and these old e-mails, it did fill me with a lot of memories. 
Certain games I’ve played back then: RuneScape; FlyFF; Rappelz; WoW; OGame; Halo CE; etc. Certain social media account I had that are extinct these days: MSN and Hyves. Some (very bad) books I wrote back in 2007 (that reminds me, I should continue the proper book I’ve tried to write back in 2017 - too many hobbies, not enough time, as usual). hackers.org (which has long been gone it seems), which was a website to learn the basics of script kiddies stuff through games and small challenges. I even found some extremely cringe email/MSN conversations I had with a random girl I met online in FlyFF.
Buying online came much later for me. Apparently my eBay account is from August 2010. Not even sure why it was made in 2010 though, since the first thing I remember buying online was probably some twisty puzzles in 2012, when I started that collection, which weren’t even bought through eBay.
Greetz,
Quuador
My first attempt was with a school computer in 2002. Failed at minesweeper a few times and learnt how the power button works. Then more fuckery on the newly acquired home computer until I mastered dial-up and browser sometime during 2003. Serebii and dinosaur paintings were a big part of my early foray into computer literacy.
My eBay account is dated 2005 but I had my first pc (and internet connection) in 1998, I remember because it was last day of school, it was running Windows 98 with a 56k modem 
I don’t have any Pokémon related stories btw, base set came out the following year and we bought the packs directly at the newsstand, good old days
