We started using this in 1995 or 1996. Someday it was just brought home by my stepfather who always liked the latest tech stuff.
Nobody I knew had Internet before us or was even talking about it. But a friend's father used BTX on his TV before there really was Internet he also had CompuServe but not sure if before we used AOL.
There only was AOL, CompuServe, T-Online and MSN. Any of those needed its own client. CompuServe somehow existed already forever. The other three started in 1995.
We already had ISDN with 64Kbit/s because I always was blocking the phone line before, for a short time we got two lines but then ISDN that included two lines was cheaper I think.
But I once discovered I didn't need to use that AOL software. When I was logged in to AOL I could run any browser outside that environment.
Netscape Navigator (later Communicator) that is now Firefox was my first browser. If you don't wanted that bloated AOL software running in the background, there was a dialer that I think was even integrated in Windows 95 and simply called the AOL number, not sure how I discovered that one.
At first Netscape was implemented as AOL browser but they changed very quickly to Internet Explorer. Not sure why but I already hated it from the beginning and never in my whole life used it as main browser.
There was an article that reminded me of those times lately, were I already wrote this... I mostly used FidoNet in the Crosspoint (XP) DOS client because you dialed to a local BBS (Bulletin Board System), we called it just Mailbox.
Just for receiving and sending new messages. That was much cheaper than paying AOL per month + per minute in addition to the phone costs that came on top per minute and month.
It was like a forum with reading the boards you subscribed to and private messages offline. Then replied to everything and sent the answers all at once with a "poll". Usually this was only two under one minute calls per day, sometimes more often if you waited for an urgent answer.
When we finally got an unlimited data/calls plan in 1998 or so, Napster was running almost 24/7. And I was blocking both lines the whole day, on the phone and Internet. My stepfather always got angry, especially when I used a 30m ISDN cable from the living room to my room upstairs. 🙈 Funny times.
And of course I used the AOL messenger that was included in the AOL software and later became also separate and was renamed to AIM. My second messenger then was ICQ, but I always kept both. Later there was Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger everyone liked both more than AIM and ICQ but couldn't they couldn't decide which one to use, so I just ran all of them, I also couldn't decide.
I also used Fido much longer and later switched to IRC for chatting with my best friends. They were a little nerdy. I learned very much from my best friend und just by myself already in MS DOS 3.1 on my 80186 with 6 MHz. I even used that one when I was 6 years old. Sometimes it was brought home by my stepfather, when he had to work on the weekend and when finished his work, I was allowed to play some games that somehow got on it an there were always a few more.
Later I learned this CPU was rarely used and I even had two of them but I only used the one with the 20MB HDD the other one only had 12MB. Now both are gone. I iwish I kept at least one of them, but they got trashed.
Otherwise they had been identical. With 640KB RAM and a 360KB 5.25" floppy drive. I even upgraded it with a Soundblaster 2.0, ISDN card and an external SyQuest EZ Drive with 130MB hard drive disks in a plastic case. Networking was only possible with serial or parallel cable from one PC to another and extremely slow.
I always wanted a color display with at least EGA graphics. But it only had CGA 4 color with a monochrome green on orange monitor and nobody new were I could get anything better for that old PC. I think there were even 8-bit VGA cards. But where to search without Internet? I only knew a guy that repaired computers and asked him for parts, but he didn't have any and ordering them wasn't worth it for a teenager, especially with a mew monitor.
My best friend already owned a 486 when I still was using that 186, but before he "only" had a C64 and I at first knew more about PCs.
I don't think I used Internet on that 186 PC, only FidoNet. I got a 386 DX 33 after a few years and the next one was a 486 DX/2 66 with a Cyrix CPU, that was my first really new PC and I got in in parts to build it on my own.
I also remember those coaxial network cards that had been used before Ethernet was widespread and we used Novell Netware in DOS to play games together. It always was an adventure to create a working LAN with those.
Why am I writing so much?
Maybe because I still live in the good old times before I got sick without much of a real life...
