C’mon, nobody else started with Prodigy?
I remember you were allowed 30 (?) emails a month; once you go over that, they charged 10 cents each.
And you were very limited as to how much text you could write; there were just four pages max available, and the pages were small and the font was huge.
I also dabbled in Genie, Delphi, and of course AOL and Compuserve.
ETA: Prodigy Login screen
mmm
I used Prodigy, but it didn’t connect to the web, so I didn’t mention it in this thread.
Yeah, but the OP isn’t picking nits – he’s too busy being captivated by all these great stories (and tempted to bow before his laptop, “I’m not worrrrthy…”). Congrats on being adventurers, and having all these experiences!
Web, would have been early versions of Mosaic at work. We had email and FTP and Usenet but the web just looked cool. There wasn’t that many websites but new ones were showing up every day. Aside from slient and vendor sites, I distinctly remember hitting up imdb and Yahoo in the early days.
The confusion in answers in this thread is also what led me to describe my various kinds of online experiences (though categorized properly; I do know the difference between WWW and gopher, f’r instance). And, IMO, it’s entertaining to see the various steps in a person’s history, to see how the experience grew over the years. I found it interesting to see your online history pre-WWW…
I can’t remember the specifics, it’s a bit of a blur. I had a friend who had a Bulletin Board (BBS) of his own and he did this for a couple of years before I was aware of the Internet. Somewhere along the line there was a slow transition into my seeing parts of it, this was about 1994 or 95 I think.
What confuses me about the specifics is that by 1997 I was full-time employed as a website designer, so I must have been online myself for at least a year to 18 months before that, and that would’ve been after a year of stealing scraps of internet time from the aforementioned friend, and my family.
I do remember seeing an animated gif for the first time, and discovering extremely graphic online porn of a kind I had never seen before. Sold!
Well, now you have.
So you’re as contemptible as I.
More so, even.
mmm
I found my way into a chat room. Heaven knows how- and then I didn’t know how to get out.
And became a host for MSN. There were some strange people hosting.
I also used AOL, CompuServe, the Well (anyone else remember the Well?), and a multitude of various BBS’s. I think I used Prodigy for all of a month. Couldn’t stand it.
But I’m still contemptible. 
I thought Prodigy was way cool, but then, it’s all I knew. I was amazed that I could instantly (well, sorta instantly) see the current weather conditions.
Of course, I coulda stuck my head out the door and gathered that info as well.
cmm
(contemptible mr. mustard) 
At home, I was on CompuServe. Anyone remember TapCIS?
I remember exactly what I searched for the first time I was in front of my brother’s computer, and I believe that was around 1996. He was showing me how you could look for anything in the world by going to a search engine and typing it in. I think it was Alta Vista? The first word that came to my mind was “cheese”. There were dozens of websites about cheese! DOZENS!
Now Google will give me 337 million hits for cheese.
TapCIS was awesome. A great way to minimize connect time!
Hrm…I remember BBSing no problem, but can’t recall the first web browser experience.
Huh.
Dogpile > Alta Vista 4 lyfe!
lol, hard to say what the first actual internet web browsing was, or rather when, I should say. From about 90 to 95, there was quite a number of hybrid experiences. The big three being AOL,C-Serve and Genie. Up here in Canada, you had to be careful with some of those access numbers for the boards, bell canada really was not all that sympathetic to a couple of thousand dollar phone bills.
I do remember the browser wars, microsoft getting all freaked out when talk was about netscape being the operating system.
What I am surprised at , given the amount of dopers, is so far no one has chimed in with being part of the WELL.
Declan
I had used Prodigy and fiddled around with BBSs via modem as a teen in the late 80s.
From 1989 at Cal Berkeley, I practically lived in the basement of the OCF (open computing facility) for the next 5 years.
I spent hours and hours on newsgroups and mailing lists. I ran a popular weekly trivia contact on rec.arts.trivia and also ran a daily MLB standings mailing list.
My first WWW encounter was in 1995 just before I came to Japan.
My first time on any net was about 1996 or so. I went over to a relative’s place and got to try it on their computer. I had read about these ‘search engines’ somewhere and searched ‘jokes’ in yahoo and altavista. I remember one of the first hits was a site with pictures of an ‘alien’ lifeform in the background of pictures from a mars expedition that was in the news at the time. (The ‘alien’ was an alsatian. I figured someone had done a Real life cut and paste and black and white photocopied it.)
I know, still wet behind the ears, huh?
Uh… well, I was in middle school and my parents weren’t home, I’d heard some talk at school about some of the wonders available online so I went down into my family’s dimly lit basement… and was blown to found out my Dad had already installed child-safe blocks on the intertubes. So upsetting.
I was one of the latecomers to the Well (“Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link,” for those not familiar with it) – I didn’t join until 1995 or so. I wrote about it in my Internet book in 1996. There’s nothing quite like the Well anymore. The Dope may be the closest thing.
