When did you get on the internet?

[IglooDame]

Sometime in the mid-eighties I got a 300 BAUD modem. AOL at that time had a competitor called Prodigy and I briefly got a membership but I was in a podunk nowhere town and the nearest access was a long distance call. Those "on-line services" in retrospect probably don't really count as "the internet." There was a local "computer club" running a bulletin board service on a top end machine in someone's basement where the club paid for a second phone line, but it wasn't connected to any sort of grand internet. It was basically a forum where if someone else is posting you get a busy signal and your modem redials. Everyone typed up whatever they wanted to post in advance so they could upload it and get off the line.

Very similar start, here, in 1987. My friend was running a BBS and I was helping him. Then I went to USNA and spent four years trying (and mostly failing) to get dial-up access to interesting places in the Brigade shared computer areas where we all had access to USNA-only BBS-like resources.

Fast forward to 1992, stationed on a ship in Pearl Harbor, and got my own (off-base) one-bedroom apartment. I bought a new computer with "Promenade" (a proto-AOL) preloaded (my old academy one which had Civ 1 loaded stayed on the ship), and started into chatrooms and other stuff. Eventually Promenade got absorbed into AOL, and I got absorbed into trivia rooms. AOL was $6/hr, plus $12/hr for Hawaii/Alaska access. My bill one month was about $800, but I was (and am) not an inherently social guy and wasn't spending my paycheck on much of anything else. I met my (first) wife in one of the trivia chatrooms in late '92.

 

[r16]

have it elsewhere on the forum that ı got my older brother to check the dates of an aviation fair in 2001 . Sorry to hear the sad stories and the stuff but ı would agree it would be real expensive and things back then . Anyhow am not exactly sure but older brother had to do it twice , possibly home phone connection might have failed but ı remember him sitting in a web cafe and me refusing to enter because at about 30 years of age ı was already a waste and never been in cafes to sit and ı would not ... Heretical , you know .

connections improved and ı started working at the museum so it is probably 2005 that ı end upstairs and my nephew supervises me , type in that box , press enter ... Kids do grow . My first websearch ? F4U ... Nice plane . Love the possibility of cheap knowledge , books and magazines need money and there is no guarantee that you will find them anyhow ... On Mondays ı start going to a webcafe . That's when the museum is closed , and a Monday is when ı discover there is no privacy as the youth sitting behind the counter with central computer is truly enjoying himself with cutting me off at will and banning searches by me . My patience is truly legendary but don't ask why . So , this won't do and ı take 30 minutes of my lunch break and am 6 days online a week . Becomes the crisis , the two floppies ı take to the cafe and fill , them of a mighty capacity of 1.44 megabytes each ! With Luft46 , a subject no one will ever accuse me for . Told to be online inside the building , free as well . Doesn't register with them that ı won't , 'cause you know ı will not squnder the money of the country on private business , like because Municipality pays the bills , with taxpayer money and stuff ... Does that make me popular ? Of course , they deduce ı am going to sabotage the museum's chances in the Europe wide competition ! And because am a fool , they deduce ı think ı would get away with doing it , unknown , like 50 meters away from the museum . So naturally the webcafe owner daily rushes to report , ı think before they connected them all anyhow .

yeah , everybody thinks there is something behind everything ı do . What's behind this post ? Trolling the Stuntwoman , but won't tell how ...

 

[tjs282]

The real geeks at my 6th-form were already familiar with the Internet -- or at least bulletin-boards -- in 1991, though they/we didn't use them for much other than DL-ing pirated games (Populous, SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, F117 Stealth Fighter, Prince of Persia, Scorched Earth are the ones I remember them messing around with — come to think of it, that's probably quite a few sales that Sid Meier lost...), but at that point I only had access to my mum's 386 PC, which wasn't online.

So I never experienced the wonders of Internet Explorer/ Netscape for myself until I got to college, in 1993. Set up an account in a chatroom called Surfers during my first term, and hung out there for far too many hours over the next 2 years or so (never did get my degree, ah well...). Toyed with the idea of getting my own PC at the time, but the budget never stretched that far (so I played Syndicate and X-Wing on my flatmate's computer instead).

While I was off gallivanting between 1998 and 2005, I used Hotmail ( ) in Internet cafes, to keep in sporadic touch with folks back home. I bought a secondhand Win98 Pentium lapbrick in early 2002, but the places I was living in weren't connected — and even if they had been, the brick was already too slow to connect. So I'd use a 3.5" disk as a flash-drive equivalent: go to a local internet cafe, copy any new mails onto the disk to take home (if the owner let me!), write my replies at home, and then copy that text back into Hotmail on my next visit.

Got my first proper home-internet connection in 2006, along with the flat we'd rented at the time; unfortunately we couldn't continue to use that ISP once we'd moved into our own house 2 years later (and 12 years later on, Kabel Deutschland's service still sucks...)

 

[Morty]

Set up an account in a chatroom called Surfers during my first term

Now there's a blast from the past! Used/discovered telnet chatrooms such as Surfers (amongst others) back during my University day - 1993 to 1996....I'm guessing the back end of that era.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I didn't start using the internet until college (1995) when I got assigned my very first email address and had to get a computer (an Apple Performa 640(?)CD, IIRC) with internet access for my dorm room. Prior to that my Dad had an ancient Tandy 3000 that he used to run Lotus 123 for his business and I could type/print papers for school on a dot-matrix printer... yes with the screeching sound and the special paper with the tear-off hole-strips to feed it through the printer ... but that computer didn't have internet. My High School had just acquired internet my Junior Year... as in there was one single computer in the school that had internet access, and the school had one email address for the entire school. It was more of a novelty back then, they treated it as a special prize that only a few kids got to use to send and receive one email (I never got picked). By the time I came back from college my parents had dial up, which coming from college and being accustomed to a T1 connection, dial up was so slow it was basically unusable.

I only got an Apple because most of the computers that I used in High School and Middle School/Junior High had been Macs. Most importantly, the computers in my High School that had Civ 1 and Sim City 2000 were all Macs... so I was hopelessly hooked on Apple... (although the computers in my school that ran Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were Windows).

Incidentally, choosing a Mac for my computer in college was how I discovered... the hard way... that Mac and PC were not compatible, and that also, everything got released on PC first, so if you had a Mac there were some games that you simply could not play ... It was so infuriating/frustration that was my last Apple product... seriously, I don't even get Iphones, I was so traumatized by that experience

 

[hobbsyoyo]

yes with the screeching sound and the special paper with the tear-off hole-strips to feed it through the printer

oh my god I can hear this in my head

Our first few printers were like this. Then when we got a normal one but still had reams of the dot-matrix paper and we used it for to-do lists and such for years after that.

 

[Grisu]

Sometime in the early 90s my father got "Videotext" with a blazing fast 19.2k modem. Shortly afterwards it was upgraded from Videotext to Compuserv, so I guess it was around '94 or so.

 

[amadeus]

oh my god I can hear this in my head

Our first few printers were like this. Then when we got a normal one but still had reams of the dot-matrix paper and we used it for to-do lists and such for years after that.

No idea on whether that's good for the printer or not though!

 

[Sommerswerd]

No idea on whether that's good for the printer or not though!

Awesome!

There's no way the printer actually made those noises... but still very cool

 

[Farm Boy]

Old stuff's over engineered by today's standards

Spoiler :

 

[civvver]

It was 95 or 96. That was age 11 and 12 for me and we had ameritech dial up on a separate phone line and I opened my first email account on juno. It was netscape and search engine I think was called hotbot. I didn't use it for much though until high school I got aol instant messenger and hotmail. I talked to friends a lot on it then.

 

[Tee Kay]

Three answers to this question

First experience with the internet (like, first time going on a website): probably 1999

First start using the internet on a regular basis (more than once a week): 2001

First time using the internet socially:

August 2005, apparently

 

[CKS]

I had friends in undergrad who used the internet, but I didn't use it myself until grad school, in 1989, through my UNIX account at school. Somehow I missed the bulletin board/chatroom stuff. I was all about newsgroups and, later, mailing lists. My folks were excited about email, since at that time we lived on different continents, but I'm no better at email correspondence than snail mail, so that turned out to be disappointing to them.

 

[Ajidica]

I've had access to the internet as far back as I can remember, so like 4 or 5 (1997/1998). My dad worked in IT, so the old computers work didn't need he would take home and give to me and my sister.* I remember using Netscape Navigator to look at pictures of trains way back in the day.

I started going on the internet 'seriously' in probably 2002 or so with Neopets, then 2005 I was introduced to Runescape - and that basically brought me full-time onto the internet and taught me the noble art of procrastinating on schoolwork. I would also get up at like 5am on weekends to sneak down to my computer to play Runescape because my parents had a strict off the computer by 9pm rule.

*He justified it to work by saying he could set up a simulation of the network at work so he could test things at home.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

My dad worked in IT, so the old computers work didn't need he would take home and give to me and my sister.* I remember using Netscape Navigator to look at pictures of trains way back in the day.

When I was dating my wife, her dad gave her a hand-me-down PC from his work (he's in IT too) and I spent a ton of time setting it up and configuring it. A couple days later they changed the policy and he had to take it back and then redo it for the one she ended up buying.

 

[r16]

old time printers ? Older brother still has one , as in it is somewhere in the house unused for decades . Paper still useful for killing time drawing pointless pictures , but somehow am inclined to think the sounds it made are no different to my printer , bought two or so years ago .

 

[AmazonQueen]

old time printers ? Older brother still has one , as in it is somewhere in the house unused for decades . Paper still useful for killing time drawing pointless pictures , but somehow am inclined to think the sounds it made are no different to my printer , bought two or so years ago .

That was my 1st experience of computers other than in tv/film.
Back in the 70s my dad gave us kids a picture of Snoopy his techie underlings (in typical UK civil service fashion they'd put a generalist manager who knew nothing about computers in charge of a computer centre) had done on a dot matrix printer.

 

[Snerk]

IIRC we got ADSL at home at 2000 or thereabouts.

 

[amadeus]

IIRC we got ADSL at home at 2000 or thereabouts.

What kind of download speeds did you get? When I had dialup I remember thinking 4k/sec. was fast when downloading, usually hovering around 3k.

Big downloads would have to be left on overnight, and half of the time the phone would have cut out sometime during that time and I’d wake up to disappointment.

 

[Snerk]

What kind of download speeds did you get? When I had dialup I remember thinking 4k/sec. was fast when downloading, usually hovering around 3k.

Big downloads would have to be left on overnight, and half of the time the phone would have cut out sometime during that time and I’d wake up to disappointment.

Hmm I don't remember. But I think it was alright for the time. We never had dial-up I think, by the time we got online it was early broadband.

Napstering a song could take hours. Larger stuff like videos was overnight stuff yeah. Not an easy time being a bloke those days.