Coming of age at the same time as the Internet is a wild experience that can be hard to explain to younger generations. At a recent stand-up event, comedian Josh Johnson found himself in a mixed-age crowd discussing early Internet use. He quickly realized just how difficult it would be to explain how people got online in the early 2000s. For one, the process of getting onto the World Wide Web would likely sound made up to anyone under 30. And honestly, is there anyone who fully understands how it worked? Still, the comedian gives it his best shot, and hilariously struggles through it in a clip shared on his Instagram. Josh Johnson.Photo credit: Hayden Schiff/Wikimedia Commons “When I got the Internet, it was on CD,” Johnson reveals. “To this day, I don’t know how that worked. What…what…what is on the CD? What is that, because I thought you had to have…” That’s when he realizes he’s going to struggle with the explanation. Johnson warns the audience the process is going to be annoying, drawing even more laughter from those watching. Audience members laughing.Photo credit: Canva “Some of you are young, and this is going to sound fake, but you used to…” he says before pausing to laugh with the audience. “No. You used to get Internet…okay…you would get an offer in the mail. They would mail you Internet. You would open the mail, and it would be Internet in the mail, but it would be a CD.” He then explains that a CD is a compact disc, and that Internet companies like AOL would send them through the mail as free trials. They could also be picked up at grocery stores near the checkout lanes. The comedian says that when you received the CD, “you would put it in the computer and for whatever reason, you got like 30 hours of Internet, which was a lot back then. I know y’all use it up in a day, today, but 30 hours used to be a lot of Internet, and you would surf the web. It was called surfing. We had a name for the World Wide Web, that’s where the WWW comes from. Do you want to hear any other facts that sound like they’re from the Middle Ages?” View this post on Instagram The more he explains, the more ridiculous it sounds out loud. With the Internet now easily accessible through Wi-Fi—not weird discs that mysteriously connect you—the old way feels almost unbelievable. But it’s true. There are likely storage boxes and landfills full of free Internet trial discs, long forgotten after cable Internet replaced dial-up. People can’t get over how the world worked in the early days of the technology boom. “Wait until the youths find out Netflix used to send DVDs to rent through the actual mail,” a commenter writes. Audience members laughing.Photo credit: Canva Another person writes, “Not to mention we would have several different internet providers because of all the ‘free trial’ disks. Each month or whenever you ran out of internet from the previous disk…what a time to be alive.” Someone else jokes, “They weren’t just mailed. They came flying in like letters to Harry Potter’s front door…” One person says, “My frugal midwestern mom had us on dialup for ages bc she hoarded all the AOL free trial CDs. I will hear that dialup tone on my death bed good lord.” “And had bout 8 different email addresses so you could keep getting multiple free trials,” another person writes. The post Comedian struggles to accurately explain how people used to get online with AOL appeared first on Upworthy.