Yeah me too. UI Champaign, but in '76. There was another similar network there as well but I can’t remember the name. But one of the two had a very early multiplayer game based loosely on Star Trek with phasers and torpedoes.
I was on dial-up BBSes in the very early 90s and even acted as a SysOp for one for a couple years. Blazing 2400 baud speed! If you count BBS e-mail, I think I might have sent one somewhere in 1992, but to say I used it would be a big stretch. I got my first real ‘internet’ access I think in the first half of 1993. I remember we had just signed up for CompuServe, which was almost entirely text-based at the time, and you could go to specific sections and do mail or shop from their stores (which was utterly horrid…felt like home shopping network quality). Sometime shortly thereafter, I remember getting my hands on a copy of the Mosaic browser to use while on CompuServe - there wasn’t a lot on the web at the time, but it was there and cool. This was probably late 1993, early 1994.
I remember winning a programming competition my senior year of high school (early 1996) and that was the first time pictures of me were on the web…I thought it was SO cool that I could get online and go see pictures of myself…ON THE WEB! WHOA!
1989 via The World in Boston. We had to call long distance from Kansas City to check our email. We were also involved in the Kate Bush mailing list Love-Hounds and the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.gaffa. Our phone bill was insane.
Not sure of the time frame but I was involved in the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology which was hopping with “apostates” who would post Super Secret things like the OT levels and damning depositions and other posts from former members who realized what a scam it was and finally had an easy way to tell others around the world. I was there when the higher up mucky mucks of $cienos discovered the group and tried to have the group removed from the Internet via a universal “rmgroup.” That caused a ruckus that brought tons of negative publicity. Good times! I was also involved in the satire site alt.suicide.holiday. Despite its name that was a fun place to hang out.
When we moved to Chicago in 1990 we were finally able to connect to the Internet via a local BBS.
I was important in the beginnings of a still-operating music mailing list that started in 1991, and its related web site, started in 1995. I built my first web site in 1996, that’s still up and constantly used by people all over the world.
Around '93, One of the local BBS’s in Great Falls, MT offered internet access for up to 1 hour per day, for a measly monthly fee. I used that for about 2-3 months while I got my feet wet, along with a handful of AOL “free” deals. Eventually, some legit ISPs popped up and I got real internet access.
Actually, If the BBS had internet access, they could allow you access as well. I recall that it took some simple settings in Win 3.11 to set it up, but I was running a web browser while connected to a local BBS to browse the web. It was slow as molasses, even on a 14.4 modem, but it worked.
“Before 1995”. Geez, kinda overly broad range there.
Email via Arpanet in 1976.
(Various dial-up stuff well before that, but that doesn’t count.)
The University of Wisconsin system operated a node out of UW-LaCrosse interconnecting several high schools, including mine. I was online in 1973. However, what newbies consider the internet these days I was using with the federal government about 1985.
OK, then – in that case I was first on the internet in 1973 at the age of 11 when I (with adult help) ran a BASIC program entered on punchcards on a University of Illinois time-shared mainframe; that computer was connected to what became the internet, so my usage counts as “being on the internet”.
I got online in 1995 when I started grad school. Upgraded my little 486SX to 4 MB of RAM and put in a modem and a sound card. Livin’ the dream, baby!
Ah, man. Just almost at the top. I got my first modem in fifth grade–given to me as a gift from “Santa,” which was really my schoolteachers. They knew I was good with computers and thought it was ridiculous that I didn’t have a way to get online. We’d already had a school field trip where we were given free Internet accounts, so I’d already used the Internet there. Otherwise, it wouldn’t count, as it took me until 1996 to understand how to get baud rates to work properly in the DOS program I used.
I’m sure that, if I’d entered public school a year earlier, I would have gotten online in 1994. And it was a ton of fun going from email and telnet to the web to SLIP and PPP so I could have graphics. I even remember getting a copy of Internet Explorer 1.0 to work on my Windows 3.1 using a 32bit shim.
You fail to understand. Merely being on a BBS would not mean you were on the Internet. However, if you used email to contact anyone who was not on your BBS, you were using the Internet. That’s all the Internet really is–the connection between one network and another.
Unless your BASIC program contacted another computer, I do not see any way you can say you were online then.
That would be PLATO - the game being called michelin first (from the lesson it got space from) and then I think empire. Overnight about half the cpu time on the Cybers running PLATO was devoted to it, as the fanatics (like me) tried to take advantage of people on other teams doing something silly like sleeping. I had this massive simulation run on our PDP 11/20 which I had to checkpoint every hour or so, so I stayed up all night playing it. I wrote the Start Trek Preview column on the Red Sweater News.
There was no internet in 1973 for one thing. Do you consider yourself to be on the web when playing solitaire on your PC? No? Same thing.
The net wasn’t useful until there was DOOM2…Exchange of .pak files, 95’ish.
Then there was win 95, Netscape and AOL.
Then it became grey goo from there after.
Which was entirely, emphatically my point. Just because you dialed into a BBS or (80’s) Compuserve, doesn’t mean you were “on the internet”. If you sent email, then yeah, probably you were. Otherwise: No, you were NOT on the “internet”.
$275 bucks for a freaking 4 gig HD at that time.
I think the ram was about a dollar a Byte. 
Me too. Before that using the internet would’ve been a long distance call because there were no local access internet providers where I lived while in high school, so my only internet experience prior to 1995 was in 1993-4 in one of my computer classes, but that doesn’t really count in my opinion.
Yes, there was. It just wasn’t called that, and nobody had heard of it.
- I recall an Aussie friend teaching me how to click on a link.
A friend mine had Web TV in 1998, and I remember watching him search stuff on the Internet. Though, I did not use it myself.
Otherwise, I did not really use the Internet until 2002, when I was a senior in high school.