# How Did You Hear About the Internet? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 9, 2016, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457 "2016-09-09T19:57:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2016, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457/61 "2016-09-15T07:14:38Z")
Fifth grade. Got a free Unix shell account, and used it to go places. Wound up gravitating towards the Web, even back then. But I also used Telnet and Gopher. And I downloaded games using FTP and Xmodem. I’ve told this story before: I was well known as being very technical and loving computers. But I had no way to get online at home–until just before Christmas of my fifth grade year. My teachers made a big deal out of one kid getting a present from Santa. I had no doubt it would be for someone else. But no, it was actually for me. And it was a frankly huge 2400 baud modem. The adapter for it was literally about the volume of a brick. I hooked it up to the 286 I’d recently gotten from my uncle, who had moved on to a 486. And, yeah, thinking back, the modem was also probably a hand-me-down. But I was floored and a very, very happy kid. Well, until I got home and couldn’t get Telix to work right–I had to learn the commands to set the baud rate from my uncle. That’s be 1995, BTW. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2016, 7:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457/62 "2016-09-15T07:20:18Z")
> [@Doctor\_Jackson](#): > > Have you met my wife? Silly computerness was not allowed to have priority over the seriousness of land line phone. > > It may have been \*70, unless I remember wrong (again). Correct, if you include that comma so it’ll pause. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Pearse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/richard_pearse/32/13144_2.png) [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2016, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457/63 "2016-09-15T07:36:09Z")
I’m not sure when I first heard about it. In 1996 I worked for a company in New Zillund that had an email address and an internet connection obviously. Sometime between then and 2000 I designed a crappy little website for it (which still exists out there on the web, even though the company is long gone). Prior to 1996 I had no direct interaction with the internet but I may have been aware of it. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2016, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457/64 "2016-09-15T14:59:21Z")
I grew into it as a kid in the 80s because I had a modem for my Commodore and would contact BBS’s. I did much of the same stuff as today only on a much more limited scale: chatted on forums, used (local) email, played a MUD and downloaded games. Heck, my first computer porn was on those things between terrible ASCII images you had to poke yourself in the eye and squint at and that C-64 Samantha Fox strip poker game. My first bona fide internet experience was in college in 1991 when I gained access to Usenet and Mosaic but it wasn’t really a sea change moment for me but rather an expansion of what I already knew. Better porn, though. ---
**Author:** ![That\_Don\_Guy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/that_don_guy/32/538_2.png) [@That\_Don\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/That_Don_Guy)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2016, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457/65 "2016-09-15T19:15:18Z")
My first Internet access was in the early 1980s; my university had access to Usenet. After that, it wasn’t until around 1992, when my job had Telnet, and I got a free university UNIX account (first at North Carolina, then University of Denver) that included both E-mail and Usenet. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-you-hear-about-the-internet/765457.md?page=3)