Well, if we’re talking e-mail, then my first exposure was earlier than I said. My girlfriend, the future Mrs. Siam Sam, tried to show me how e-mail worked when we were grad students at the U of Hawaii in the early 1990s. I couldn’t get the hang of it, and I remember telling her, “This is stupid. This will never catch on.” But as for the Internet Internet, 1995 or 1996.
dad used e-mail in the 80s becuase he was the go between his gm plant and the army (and was a anything that drove mechanic when he was in 68-76) and they liked to call on him to help fix the old stuff and order parts …
I did some stuff on c64 bbs type of thing
I used the web for the first time at a techno lab set up at the local fair… thanks to lockheeds ect relationship to Edwards air force base we get things like that rather faster than most
funny thing about that is time warner didn’t want to put in public cable internet ot they just hooked up all the important places and tried to say it wasn’t ready for here … they didn’t realize how small the av is people wise …
It’s a little late to be telling you now, but there was a telephone code you could enter before dialing that would disable incoming calls. Just remember that in case you are ever in an alternate universe and have to use dialup.
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).
I remember reading a little article somewhere on about the third page of the front section of the newspaper (Houston Chronicle, FWIW) somewhere in the middle of high school (about 1989-ish) about how people were using some kind of university/government network called Usenet to distribute porn to each other. I remember thinking that sounded a lot more interesting than the BBSes I was used to at that point.
Then, when I got to college (1991), they gave everyone a student email account in the normal “username@domain” format, and access to various systems, among them Gopher, Usenet and IRC.
If you’re meaning the Web… that was probably sometime in the spring of 1993, when I ran across a friend in a computer lab on campus playing around with a website using Mosaic. It didn’t really take off until late that semester, and during the following school year, we were all using Mosaic and then Netscape Navigator to browse the web.
I remember that part of setting up a modem was to put the ‘disable call waiting’ code into the connect string so it would happen automatically. I also remember being able to tell what the problem was with a connection by the modem sounds, it was like knowing part of an alien language.
In college, early 80’s, we had access to a variety of stuff. In 1985 at work I got an admin account on decvax and the world was my oyster.
Nobody has mentioned porn. Maybe I’m too young. I first heard about the internet by seeing a picture called “Big Toy”
I had ‘heard’ of things like email and such in college, but always assumed it was in-college only.
Later someone told me of the jokes told in alt.tasteless and explained that this was part of a computer system set up by the government.
Beyond that I knew that the Pay-Per-Hour (AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy) services had some inter-communication ability.
But in the early 90’s I went to a local science fiction convention and a startup internet company was demonstrating in a side room. It was neat and had no hourly charges. I signed up almost immediately.
Got into the BBS scene around 1993, and had email and newsgroups available via the good local BBS. By about 1994 the local telephone company (rural area, locally-owned telco) began offering dial-up internet access, and I got on board with that quickly. This took off pretty quickly, and in 1996 they hired a group of mostly high school kids to work tech support for the growing customer base – and in the Windows 3.11 days, tech support was a pretty handy thing to have.
We saw it grow in our area from nerds and tech-oriented people to all sorts of people in short order. In the big picture, we were far too late to be “in on the ground floor” of the whole thing, but in regards to when it became commonly available in our area and when the world wide web took off, it kind of felt that way.
I started grad school in 1989. By 1991 I was in a class that required us to email each other (collectively) and to receive our assignments via email — it was all within the same computer (an IBM mainframe with multiple accounts). That was the gateway drug: within a few months, a colleague asked me to chime in on a moderated email digest she was subscribed to, and the email digest was internet and bitnet based (you could subscribe with either type of address). Not too long after that, I discovered and subscribed to a similar email digest for Macintosh owners (the Info-Mac Digest) and it included a regular rundown of available freeware and shareware that you could download, and that’s how I discovered FTP which was also over internet. Some time in 1992, I saw Mosaic loaded onto a computer and that was my first experience with a web browser.
I think I had an email address in 1984 or 1985, but I don’t remember who would have given it to me. Maybe through UC Berkeley? I was taking classes there at the time. I do remember that you had to “tell” the system how to get to certain addresses by typing in some intermediate server(s) using the “%” symbol - anyone else remember that? I definitely got an email address when I started at MIT in 1987. I think I heard about the existence of the World Wide Web when I was in grad school, probably around 1996 or so.
I was an intern at a Fortune 500 corporation between my 1st and 2nd years of MBA school, in 1985. One of the financial analysts told me about some online thing she was doing, maybe Compuserve? I am embarrassed that I was indifferent to the whole thing until the advent of online shopping, which I guess was the early 90’s.
[QUOTE=ENugent;19627155… I do remember that you had to “tell” the system how to get to certain addresses by typing in some intermediate server(s) using the “%” symbol - anyone else remember that? …[/QUOTE]
That was an early Arpanet forwarding kludge.
Mixing Arpanet forwarding with UUCP forwarding was always an adventure.
In the mid 80’s had a job at a computer company which had “UUCP email” connections.
Then next switched to a job at a university which had “ARPAnet”, the precursor of the now public internet.
Oh, gosh, some time in the mid 90s I became aware of USENET and gopher. It was probably 96 or 97 when I got my first direct experience online. Until then I didn’t have the hardware necessary.
My first decade in IT was spent on mainframes. They don’t like to talk to each other.
Because when I started using the internet your porn choices were dirty JPGs that took 30 minutes to download and only worked on a SUN workstation or naked pictures drawn with ASCII characters 
I got my first computer in late 1997 and I was probably aware of the idea that the internet existed 2-3 years before that but didn’t really understand what it was. I remember hearing of big companies like Coke and Sony having these things called “websites” but thought they were just wall of text ads using the two tone text/background that I had seen on the few computer screens I had seen at that point.
The first person that I knew that had a home computer was in the early to mid eighties but I don’t recall ever hearing about the internet at that time.
Thinking more about it, I remember the first video I ever saw online. It was a year or so before I got online myself, so 1995-6 ish. The engineering dept. got internet first at the place I was working. I was passing through and they called me over. Hey, River Hippie, come here and check this out!
Holy crap! The term “eye bleach” was not in my vocabulary at the time, but was definitely what was called for in that situation! I remember thinking that if that was what the internet was all about…no rush getting online.