Remember your earliest internet experience???

[L A Woman]

No, I'm not talking about sex, you dirty birdies!!!

I mean when you first started using the internet.

It was 1992-ish and my boss put prodigy on my computer - my e-mail address was something like [e-mail]. there was hardly anything on the net at the time. a few chat groups and things like that. and it was so expensive...

you?

[no name no slogan]

1. Late 80s at college, using Usenet

I had an account on the VAX timeshare machine, too. This was pre-WWW (web was invented in 1991, after I graduated college), so we contented ourselves with Usenet and Gopher.

[swag]

10. Do you remember the black day in 1994 when AOL unleashed its hordes

onto Usenet?

I don't remember the day, but I remember pretty much every newsgroup nosediving into uselessness in the months that followed.

[no name no slogan]

12. Yeah, it was pretty awful

Usenet because Uselessnet right about that time. All you could find was spam and pr0n after that (well, you could always find pr0n before that, too).

[billyskank]

14. The September That Never Ended

:7

[hyphenate]

16. I wouldn't say that was true for me

I was entrepeneurial at the time, planning a big science fiction convention, and used some of the Usenet groups through AOL for publicity. Of course, I was catering to a specialized group, so it didn't harm me. Alt.fandom.cons is still one of my favorite Usenet groups. However, nowadays, I hang out more than anything at alt.binaries.fonts. :) (Not that I don't belong to enough other groups pushing fonts as well, but sometimes Usenett has a lot of experts hanging out there.

There was also Deja News online in the late 90s which had more of the Usenet groups than AOL, and a news search which was unmatchable.

[kwassa]

19. they became known as ...

AsshOLes On Line.

They used to beg people to make their posts shorter, because AOL couldn't handle it.

Clueless about netiquette, but it was the beginning of the end for that.

[eyesroll]

2. I was on Prodigy in 1991-92, too.

I was a member and later president of Chemical Youth, a Queensryche fan club on the music boards. (Laugh if you must.)

My first exposure to the "real" internet was in 1993, when I was in college.

[dolo amber]

30. *points and laughs*

:rofl:

[astonamous]

3. Ah...the olden days of Prodigy and bulletin boards.

I was actually having a back and forth with someone the night they did the sting on Marion Berry (D.C.Mayor) and arrested his ass. That is how I found out about it. I didn't have a TV at the time and this other person saw it when it was first reported.

That was the point when I really knew that being on-line was going to be very important to me.

I also booked a complete trip in 1990 from Washington D.C. to Wyoming. I booked the flight, the rental car and the hotels. And I thought that was so cool.

Trudy

[Atmashine]

4. AOL in 95

I remember it saying downloading updates...and then after the bar filled it'd download another update. On and on... it was kinda addicting watching that bar reset itself for an hour. But I'm messed up like that.

[LSK]

5. in late 1994 we viewed a virtual tour of the University of Illinios

I was at that campus for a conference and they gave us a tour of the campus using a new program called Mosaic. Shortly afterwards, our campus computers had Mosaic and my web addiction was born there. I rememeber downloading the 1st netscapes and trying to figure out how to get SLIP to work to get online at home.

[radwriter0555]

6. 1982. Chicago, Illinois. Oak Street.. Ron B.'s apartment. First time I

really saw a genuine, actual computer being used for the internet.

Ron showed me how he 'chatted online' with other people.

He'd put his handset (phone) in the modem cradle, and the green caret prompt came up.

He typed

"care to chat"

to the someone on the other end.

Ron was a rich, well connected guy who had lots of cool things.

[swag]

7. I had been on a lot of dial-up BBSs in the 80s, but my first Internet

account was with Holonet in SF in 1992. I had gone to the OneBBSCon conference in Denver that year (it was great - I met Vinton Cerf and hung around with Tom Jennings who invented Fidonet) to get some info to help me set up a BBS for some tribes and agencies that were collaborating on solutions to the Columbia/Snake River salmon migration problems, and talked to somebody at Holonet about a low-cost public account. Modemed in to a UNIX shell the next day and signed up, then ported Internet email via UUCP to a Wildcat! BBS to give all my BBS users Internet email (of sorts - it was very crude).

All of my users sent out first tentative email messages that read pretty much the same: "Testing the Internet connection!"

At the conference, Vinton Cerf was talking a lot about browsing the web with Mosaic, which was still a new thing to most of us, and would "Internet Packet Video" crash the Internet, and stuff like this. He hadn't yet signed on with MCI at that point to upgrade the backbone and all that shit.

Well, this is a boring response. Sorry. It was all shell access and a lot of protocols and tools that we would probably consider very crude today. It was a lot of fun, though, finding all sorts of crazy shit on FTP sites in Finland and all that.

[no name no slogan]

13. The world owes a lot to Vint Cerf

He's just as important as Tim Berners-Lee, IMHO. :hi:

[swag]

28. You're making me want to reread some history.

Cerf is a great lecturer, as you probably know.

He dissected TCP/IP for a roomful of us rookies for two hours and we were all just spellbound.

[tjwmason]

8. 1997 - when I first went up to university

I'd been incredibly technophobic before then but I had met a chap in my hall who was studying Computer Science and so he dragged me to I.T. Services to get an e-mail password...within a month I knew basic H.T.M.L. and was utterly addicted to the internets.

Welcome to D.U. L A Woman :hi:

[WCGreen]

9. 1994......

I was on the free net from Case Western Reserve....

And then, I joine prodigy and got censured for attacking the Pig Man on a site...

I quit then and there....

Then got on full time with MSN in 1996....

[trackfan]

11. Prodigy in 1995

I remember, shortly before that, a friend of mine who had internet access at his job, saying "the part of it I like is called the World Wide Web". That was the first time I'd ever heard that term.

[hyphenate]

15. It was 1989

and I'd just bought my first computer. I laugh hysterically when I remember it: a 30MB, 16MHz Epson Equity One Plus, 8088. I paid $2600+ for it, including the Dot Matrix Printer.

I bought a modem (100 baud) and was going to have the company I bought the computer from install it for me, but they wanted $100 to do it, so I said, shit on that, and installed it myself.

I remember my first internet interface was Compuserve. It was all text, the old green on black. And it was expensive. My bill in one of the first months was $57, and that was when it was a "per hour" charge.

I then discovered the BBS board, and quickly became a downloadaholic for shareware. Everything was in DOS--Windows didn't exist yet. I think the last version of DOS was something like 3.3, though I could be wrong about that. We moved onto Windows from there.

The first word processors I worked with were Wang, Multimate Advantage and IBM--I think it was called Displaywrite.

That seems like forever ago now.

[kwassa]

17. Usenet in '93 before that DEC's world-wide live time intranet

The late great Digital Equipment Corporation invented some of the protocols for terminals for the internet, and had a huge intranet that was like a live-time series of bulliten boards. Lots of users, too.
During the first Gulf War in '91 I was talking live with a guy in Australia and I was in California, as we both listened to the CNN reports. The size of the world disappeared.

I became addicted right away and engaged in massive flame wars, which I got out of my system.

I met my wife-to-be on Usenet in 1994. We've been together 11 years, now.

the old Unix newsreaders! Pine, and Tin.

[Shine]

18. I was relatively late to the internet world.

didn't really get into it until around 2000.

By that time I was 36. I'm a late bloomer, I guess. :eyes:

[Beware the Beast Man]

20. Late '94. My campus had VAX terminals for e-mail and MUDs.

[SteppingRazor]

36. Ah, MUDs... those were kinda fun! n/t

[kentuck]

21. Prodigy had one of the better discussion groups in earlier days..

I met some interesting people there.

[YankeyMCC]

22. 1992

Using telnet, ftp...then early in 93 using lynx and an alpha version of Mozila - now that was something!
:)

[khashka]

23. Early 90's.

I was in grad school and convinced everyone I needed a computer for school. Of course, what I really wanted it for was porn :)


But Usenet was great back then. There were real communities and standards of behaviour. But now Usenet is pretty much worthless..... I miss it.

Khash.

[mdmc]

25. 95

using a text version of yahoo

[hunter]

24. 1979, I was a student at one of the original internet universities.

I recieved an email from across the country. It was amazing.

My first non-student, non-work, non-my-ass-covered-by-pirate-friends internet account was through delphi (now delphiforums). They were one of the first online services to provide a straightforward connection to the actual internet. Most of the others, AOL, prodigy, etc., were still only doing internet email then.

My first home modem was 300 baud. That's very, very slow. If you wanted to download a picture, you'd go away and do something else while the picture was downloading, and then if you didn't have a color monitor and video card (CGA was not really color) you'd have to render the picture yourself into 2-bit monochrome. I had a few programs I'd written myself that did that, including one for the PC that worked with the weird 720×348 field of the early Hercules graphics cards.

Pretty women in amber, which was much better than green, the other common monochrome monitor color then.

[Left Is Write]

26. Yes. I used IRC to chat.

[ForrestGump]

27. 1992, starting graduate school. Got a telnet account.

Found usenet groups, explored the wonders of Gopher...and then there was Lynx, then Mosaic (wow! graphics!) and, finally, Netscape.

The Web was so tiny back then. You could see it grow before your very eyes. The search engines that predated Google would initially return no results for so many topics but within a year or so that became less and less an occurrence...the Web grew so quickly once Netscape happened.

[puerco-bellies]

29. About 1993 Usenet To download and upload Assignments

Almost all web-pages were text. E-mail was unix based so kinda hard to write and edit messages. Graphics were pretty difficult with a 1400buad modem, so to see an image you pretty much had to go to the computer lab to see any. MUDD's cost me a grade point! :-)

[Magrittes Pipe]

31. 1995 IRC. It was with a 19-year-old girl named "Jenny"...

...who was actually a 47-year-old man named "Steve." x(

[hunter]

37. I think there was a time when many of the women on the internet were men.

I suspect my old girlfriend used to know most of the women on the internet.

Most of these women thought she was a guy.

[GreenPartyVoter]

32. '91 or '92, did IRC at college on these beastly old machines that could

do nothing else.

[RandiFan1290]

33. Mid 80s

I was about 9 or 10 and I remember my Dad bringing home one of those cradle handset modem dealies and I think he had Q-Link software. I remember him being all excited about it and couldn't wait to hook it up. I believe he used our Commodore 64. I watched as he set everything up and he finally got connected. It was only text pages and I lost interest very quickly. I remember being worried too. The only time I had ever seen a modem was on the movie War Games. So I was convinced my dad was going to somehow launch a missile ;)

He only used it for 2 nights or so and he had to return the modem to his friend. When he got the bill about a month later it was some crazy amount like $1200. He didn't log off correctly and it was charging for every minute online. :)

[ghostsofgiants]

34. 1997, I was 12.

I had just started at a new school, and unlike the school I attended up until grade 6, this school had the internet in its computer lab. Basically, I was hooked ever since.

[beyurslf]

35. 1993 Christmas. We got a new computer and AOL. Version 2.0 I believe.

[Oeditpus Rex]

38. 1992

I was at a friend's house and she showed me this new thing called America Online. She was going out of town for a week and had asked me to feed her cat, and she let me have a screen name on her account.

I was pretty much instantly addicted to chat, and AOL was $3.50 per hour back then, so she wasn't too happy when her bill came for that month. :o