Your First Time On The Internet

[brahmburgers]

my first time was about 14 years ago - a lady mentioned Yahoo.com and I did a search for an old girlfriend - didn't find her.

In the 'days before mice' (DBM).

At that time, I was using an OS called Framework (by Ashton Tate) - which, incidentally, did nifty little things decades ago that Windows can't even do in its latest versions.

[cdnvic]

July 1987, a very long distance call to a California BBS (That's still in existence). Mostly a bunch of angry hippies flaming each other but some interesting conversations too. Too cheap to pay the fees (or pay the phone bill) so didn't take out a membership. For five or so years after that the cost was just too high (about $8.00hr) to get online more than sporadically but still made it to usenet and IRC once in a while.

Edited September 20, 2007 by cdnvic

[singa-traz]

It was 19 years ago, and it looked like this.

Except for WinXP, of course.

I was looking for image processing code, and needed to request my supervisor to access "internet".

[RueFang]

About 14 years ago, my brother showing me something very inappropriate!! Boys and their new toys!!

[LindsayBKK]

Must have been about 1999 (late Bloomer) and getting my first internet bill from the phone company I was using forgetting to set a plan & charged hourly rate. Bill was about $280 for that month. All my energy at the time was learning how to use a computer, not concerned with bills, especially when you have free pictures on your screen. I don't need to mention anything specific I was downloading everything I could find thinking it was going to go away or the internet would stop. Mycomputer crashed after running out of space it hit home Then you learn about memory & hard drives Oh later came Viruses.... when you don't store or back-up files and your computer crashes for the first time I wanted to die 55555 )))

My guys have goneeeeeeeeeeeeee

[phazey]

1990

SoapCity BBS

Compuserve homepage, and them some porn

[RKASA]

1990 9600baud dial up. using text mode only. Got vary bored with it and bought some gaming software to use. Was 1997 before I tried again, AOL made it easy and it worked well with other then text mode so I v been hooked after that. Now I want more speed ever more speed.

[torrenova]

Realistically it has to be at Uni around 1991 when we searched through Law databases held outside our facility. I am sorry to say I was in amazement at how the information could arrive in my hands but I did not see the potential. The union bar was all too inviting in those days.

Guess I should have been a billionaire as well.

[Guest Reimar]

1981 with acustic coupler and 1200 baud

The acustic coupler was an device which you used to put your phone handset on and used the telephone for to dialup! Worked very well at those times and I transmitted and received Data from the US in Germany, HKK, SG and Manila with it!

Edited September 20, 2007 by Reimar

[JimmyCA]

Around 93 - 94, saw an abundance of ladies in a far away land.

Called travel agent next day

[Prasert]

1990 - unix terminals at the Eindhoven university (NL). Webservers didn't exists, it was mail, telnet, ftp, usenet and irc.

After checking out the internet (which was tiny compared to the net these days), we gained access to a system in the US through an exploit in smtp. 2 days later we all got a phone call from the university - the US issued arrest warrants for hacking into a Pentagon system. Fortunately, hacking was not against the law in our country (although that changed within the year after). In the end nothing happened, except that the university closed telnet and ftp access to the internet during 1 year.

Few years later the TCP/IP protocol was available for MS-Windows - loads of crashes, very unstable. OS/2 did a much better job with that protocol years earlier!

[endure]

First connection to the Internet was in 1994 with Demon - 'the internet for a tenner a month'

First modem was a VTX5000 to connect to Micronet/Prestel - a peculiar British system - in 1983.

[xbusman]

I think it was 1979. Final year of college, way too many university parking tickets. Got on something called USENET I think and using rotary dial phone tapped into our university computer and removed the graduation block due to parking tickets. Was a major ordeal involving a lot of hours. No security of any sort if I remember correctly. Memory might be rusty on all this but I distinctly remember the modem, a large box that took a rotary phone handset laid onto the top.

[mac.wheeler]

1979 as a spotty teenager, hacking into the university of east sussex DEC mainframe via a dialup connection (accoustic coupler that I still have somewhere) across the JANET gateway to play MUD1. Had just as much fun playing with the system admins as playing MUD1

First commercial is was 1984 working for the Ministry of Defence.

[Firefoxx]

Yep, my first time looked a lot like singa-traz. Was at a unix terminal in my university. Chats were by "talk", mail was by "mail", and gopher was the web. The most interesting stuff at that time was usenet. People nowadays have it easy.

[OxfordWill]

1979 as a spotty teenager, hacking into the university of east sussex DEC mainframe via a dialup connection (accoustic coupler that I still have somewhere) across the JANET gateway to play MUD1. Had just as much fun playing with the system admins as playing MUD1

Haha... love it.

[Naam]

1981 with acustic coupler and 1200 baud

The acustic coupler was an device which you used to put your phone handset on and used the telephone for to dialup! Worked very well at those times and I transmitted and received Data from the US in Germany, HKK, SG and Manila with it!

reached 1983 with acoustic coupler 300 baud some bulletin boards. was fascinated! then 1991 booked a hotel in Cuba via "regular" internet. forgot the name of the provider which was taken over in 1993 or 1994 by AOL.

[lazeeboy]

1990/1991 brother showing me something about hitler ,he asked me what i wanted to see and that was the first thing that pop into my head .

[jberwick]

1983... 12 years old... Apple II+ clone that I ordered and built myself from Vietnam, called a Unitron. Green monochrome monitor. 300 baud modem to numerous BBS's... to download a pirated game would take 2-3 days (for a 500kb file!)... my dream was to eventually save up for a 1,200 baud modem... for xmas that year I hoped I would get a RAM upgrade from 48kb to 64kb. When someone first told me about a hard drive I didn't understand what it was.

Good times!!!

[cdnvic]

I loved the old Apple II's. They were my first intro to computers, if not the internet.

[Prakanong]

Working in IT at BSkyB - one of the network guys set it up at Christmas when we were all tipsy.

The Head of IT who became CTO at Boo.Com was with us and it was his first time too - a few years later he is at the heart of the dot.com crash!.

"Asian Babes" was searched for!

[NanLaew]

Around 1991 using a system called 'memo' that my employer used for corporate 'email'. Then signed up with AOL shortly after.

Set up an email account for my dad a few months later and remember his disappointment when he opened his first personal email... "Are you gay or just bi-curious?". Yup, his first email was spam!

[tjo o tjim]

1988 on my brand new Mac SE with a 400 baud modem. I still use LYNX for nostalgia some times, but in the early days it was just "talk" "phone" "gopher" and a few other things. I remember the first time I saw PINE, and thought how easy these young whipper snappers had it.

Using the internet in Thailand often takes me back to those days... at least in terms of bandwidth.