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When did you first connect to the internet?

notjustjay said:
tin?
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Wow, that brings back memories. I used tin all the time. Some guys in our engineering school wrote a BBS called Mars BBS that was a lot of fun. It had forums on different subjects, and an irc-like chat room. Somehow, we ended up with people from all over the country on that board.
 
1994 on a Quantex 486/33.

First with AOL for DOS-- had some sort of GeOS GUI front end, stayed on just long enough to download a demo for Jazz Jackrabbit before realizing just how much it sucked. Then tried Compuserve for Windows ("Welcome to WinCIM!"); stayed with that for several months, then AOL for Windows for a free month. Switched to the real Web with AT&T Worldnet afterward and haven't looked back.
 
It had to have been '94 or '95. I was 6 or 7 and I don't remember the first thing I actually looked up, but I do remember looking up cheats for Sonic 2 on Sega Genesis. I still remember them to this day for some odd reason.
 
My first ever time online was at Edgehill Uni in Ormskirk about '97 ish. My mate took me to the library and showed me how to use mIRC and the Uni email. I remember thinking 'What's the point though?' 😀

At home it was about 11 years ago. Inherited and upgraded an Uncle's old PC and bought a 56k dial-up modem off my mate at work. Can't remember the make. It was an external one that connected via serial port and it took an age to figure out how to turn the speaker off 😱

I kind of miss that old PC! Windows 95 and a PSU that clunked for the first five minutes it was on til it had warmed up 🙂
 
At some point in the 80s, I got onto the Dow Jones information network on a 300 baud modem from my Apple II+. I don't think that was really the internet though. My first internet connection was when I got to college in 1992 - my Mac SE hooked to the dorm fiber optic connection. IRC, ftp, eudora, telnet, the unix talk protocol, trying to tunnel Appletalk over IP with various hacks... later Gopher showed up, and then the web. It sure is strange now to see how it became a part of everybody's everyday life. Back then I was just happy when I got my parents a freenet account (yes free dial-up internet before netzero... imagine...) and emailed them so we didn't have to pay long distance charges. Oh, and BTW, you can guess what the most popular FTP sites had, even back then...
 
January 1993, with a Gateway DX2-50 and a 2400kb internal modem that doubled as an answering machine, hooking into Compuserve and the Well. My first couple of months, CIS charges ran close to $1,000 per month. Then I discovered WinCim --- the first thing that made Windows worth using.
 
I downloaded a copy of Mosaic in early 1994 from either CompuServe or Prodigy ( i had memberships to both) and hit the web for the first time. I wish I remember the month but i am guessing it was about March.

The computer was a Gateway 386SX with a USR 9600 Baud modem.
 
I'm relatively new to the Internet; my first connection was a 14.4 via AOL, had to be the mid-1990s. I ended up spending far more time that I should have playing MUDs (I was and still am a huge Zork fan)
 
I ran a BBS from 1994-1996 under Iniquity BBS software. Board's name was "The Haze". In Escondido California. In 1995 I broke down and started using the Internet through Pacbell.net in SoCal. 14.4 modem 😀 Then when Cox started broadband a few years later there I was one of the first in my area with it and paying around 85$ a month for it. That was fast! Then in between Final Fantasy 7 play times I would go online : ). Those were the days.

I miss BBS systems more than anything. More personal and community driven. BBS meets were the shiznit!

*edit I was 14 in 1994. Had my first personal computer too! A 486dx4 100mhz! Then a Packard Hell Pentium 75.

You know Packard Bell is still in business across the pond? I didn't until a few months ago! Crazy!
 
I do remember paying $12 per hour for Compuserve 1200 baud dial up service. It was mostly text because a picture would take 5 minutes to load. You also had to use it after 5pm, or pay double that rate. This was probably 1985.

There were no scammers, spam, flamers, phishing and etiquette was the rule.
 
steve2112 said:
Wow, that brings back memories. I used tin all the time. Some guys in our engineering school wrote a BBS called Mars BBS that was a lot of fun. It had forums on different subjects, and an irc-like chat room. Somehow, we ended up with people from all over the country on that board.
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I was actually still using tin up until just a few years ago. The usenet "forsale" groups were alive and kicking in my city for years even after the popularity of sites like eBay, Craigslist, etc. started to take over the online classifieds. I would log into an ssh session and use tin to read the local groups, and I generally found that my experiences with the people I met over Usenet were much better than eBay.

I remember when Usenet groups became big over the web via Deja News... then Google turned that into Google Groups.

Here's a thought: think back to what the internet was like just a few years ago, in 2004. No Google Satellite View -- I remember paying $50+ to a satnav company to purchase a high-res satellite image of my neighborhood. No Google Earth. No Street View, of course. YouTube didn't exist yet -- in fact, hardly anyone ever watched videos over the web. Facebook was just launching and had hardly any users -- MySpace was the big thing. ICQ was one of the more popular IM clients.
 
'96 I think. Nestcape Navigator 3 and Cyberdog were my web browsers, so it was just before Jobs came back and did the deal with Gates to make Explorer the default browser.

Before that, a modem was just for direct peer to peer to send material to bureaus. One of those old modems where you actually connected the phone handset onto it...
 
ohaithar said:
Mil net?
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Probably the military net, also known as ARPANET. ARPANET was one of the forerunners of the modern internet. It first introduced packet switching, one of the fundamentals of modern networks. It was partly developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and used by the U.S. Department of Defense. Check out a bit of history here.
 
I think it was about Feb 1994 on AOL. We had just bought a Packard Bell 25Mhz machine with a whopping 2MB of memory and 20MB hard drive! I had to add the 2400baud modem.
After a couple months I switched to delphi, then a couple years later, a local ISP popped up.

I also spent a ton of time on BBSs. Daily doses of LOtRD, and some wargame thingy.

Spent some time in the MUD world about 98-03. Almost flunked out of school too. 😛
 
ohaithar said:
Ah....I see..that's cool. Didn't know the history of the internet was very complex
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Yeah, it existed long before the WWW. 🙂 It was originally to ensure communications after a nuclear war.

DARPA continues to fund all kinds of cool projects, like the Grand Challenge Race, which is a race for completely autonomous vehicles. No drivers needed!
 
Corndog5595 said:
How old were you and what was your reaction to the internet?
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I was 13 at the time, it's not like I had never seen or heard of the internet before. I only used it to email some cousins overseas for a a half a year or so and than we got highspeed so I began spending a lot more time on the web. I've gone from zero hours of web in 2007 to at least 4 or 5 hours nowadays, a big leap!
 
Roric said:
I think it was about Feb 1994 on AOL. We had just bought a Packard Bell 25Mhz machine with a whopping 2MB of memory and 20MB hard drive! I had to add the 2400baud modem.
After a couple months I switched to delphi, then a couple years later, a local ISP popped up.

I also spent a ton of time on BBSs. Daily doses of LOtRD, and some wargame thingy.

Spent some time in the MUD world about 98-03. Almost flunked out of school too. 😛
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I loved the game.
 

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I might've done it when I was 6 or 7 on our old Windows 98 computer that my Dad got from a friend, although I can't really remember. I used to like the old Windows logo you got when you first booted up.
 
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