'Bout 1995.
Huh. Twenty years.
I think my skeleton just rusted up. Oil can…
Started using ARPANet email in 1977. Used computers well before that, including slooow dialup modems on teletypes to connect to mainframes.
I think it was 1987 or 1988. I remember having CompuServe and AOL at one point or another.
I was so amazed that I could talk to someone in another country. I’m still pretty amazed by the internet, truth be told.
Freshman year of college: Fall 1993.
1991, though our family had used an earlier computer to connect via modem to send files. That would have been around 1984. But me personally, it was late 1991, on a 386sx that I convinced my mom to buy.
Emails on Prodigy were 25 cents each after you used up your 30 free ones per month. AOL was still billing hourly back then, while *P was what, $30 per month for unlimited? They used to have some lame online games you could play in groups, one of them was a sort of business sim, where you would try to budget a new car manufacturer or the suchlike. Eventually they added an online poker room, which proved so popular that they started trying to charge an additional monthly fee for it. Everyone promptly quit playing.
Around that time the first local multi-line chat BBS in my area opened up - six phone lines, an unheard of amount at the time. It ran MajorBBS software, which was popular for a few years before fading away as the actual Web was catching on among the average Joe onliners.
At one time I was actually buying my web access from the BBS itself. That would have been around 1993, before the early ISPs started catering to regular people with low yearly rates and unlimited access.
My old 386sx was not really capable of such things as WWW surfing (it could be done, but it was glacial slow and ugly and frustrating) I upgraded to a Pentium 100 with a whole GIGABYTE of hard drive and a blistering 14.4k modem, and then the WWW was lots of fun. I bought that setup from Midwest Micro. It came with all sorts of unnecessary crap like Microsoft BOB.
IIRC the first time I actually used a web browser was '94 when I started college. It was Lynx (a text-mode browser) on terminals connected to a VAX cluster running VMS. Then the Windows 3.11 PCs which had Mosaic, but it was a half-assed X11 port so you had to launch the eXcursion X Server first.
“I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.”
- some Redditor
I think ftg was earliest so far. I was probably second, depending on what you mean by “online”. In 1981 I was using a teletype machine to communicate with my university’s mainframe and my collaborator in Cleveland was using an Apple II (vintage 1979) for the same purpose. Mail between Montreal and Cleveland took 2 weeks (special delivery, one week) and this made a major change in our collaboration. In 1982, I got an IBM PC (with unnumbered DOS, although it acquired a retronym of 1.0 when 1.05 came) and an acoustic 300 baud modem (you plugged a telephone handset into it). It late 1984 we finally got bitnet email and I got an electronic modem, probably 1200 baud. Dialup of course. Finally got a DSL connection in 2000.
Unless you want to count a brief bout of internal email usage when I worked for IBM in 1989, it would be 1994, when the library at Computer Science Corp gained access to the World Wide Web via Mozilla… which pretty much altered my entire career direction and the rest of my life.
I think my first email to someone who was not attending the same university (and hence requiring connectivity to a computer other than the one from which the email originated) was in 1991. That was a “subscribe me” email sent to a LISTSERV so that I’d start receiving daily emailings on the list’s topic from all around the world. That really started the ball rolling. Soon I was subscribed to other such lists and using FTP to snag freeware and shareware listed in Info-Mac Digest and emailing other people on WMST-L Digest and learning how to send file attachments* and so on.
- back then, that meant compressing them (Mac: Stuffit or Compact Pro / PC: Zip) , then converting the compressed file to plain text (Mac: BinHex / PC: UUEncode) and finally appending the plain text version of the compressed file to the body of your email.
The day after Thanksgiving 1989 I bought a used 300 baud modem. It was listed in an ad in the Bulletin Board, a classified magazine in Montgomery, AL. My dad drove me over to the guy’s apartment (I was 14 at the time) and I paid $20 for it.
I brought it home and plugged it into the back of my Commodore 64. I dialed up the local bbs’s and I’ve been online ever since.
- I’d used the internet a bit before then, and in fact I used a very primitive dial-up connection at a job in about 1987 (library cataloguing), but 1995 is when I got my own computer and internet account.
My first access was through school. After I got my first modem at home, I recall trying all the services that were advertising, but the only ones I recall are AOL and eWorld. EWorld!
I had been hearing about the “Information Superhighway” or the “Infobahn” since the early '90s and couldn’t really conceive of what it meant.
The first time I was shown how to use a Web browser (Webcrawler search!) I was blown away by the idea of a static Web instead of having to individually connect to each web page on each person’s computer.
Seconded. I was big on dial-up BBS systems. When I discovered Compuserve, it was like going through the back of the wardrobe.
Hmm, technically, I suppose I had email in the early 80s, but I didn’t really use it. I know that I used it extensively in the early 90s, and also browsed the shiny new world wide web using Lynx. I may have had access in the 80s, but successfully resisted the temptation to get onto usenet.
1987 or so. The company I was working for had Compuserve or Prodigy, I don’t remember which. I used that to access D&B for financial information. Hard to imagine doing that now with zero encryption.
2000 and I used webtv/msntv to browse and post on USENET (afca was a fav forum). Webtv was basically a modem, a keyboard and a browser. Later models did include a small hard drive for photo storage. We had our own firewalled forums where html sigs were the rage. USENET raged at us for failing to shut them off when posting outside the firewalled forums.
When webtv was bought by MSN we had the option of creating a second/third etc profile using a hotmail address which was nice because then you could check your email anywhere vs the firewalled addresses accessed only by the webtv box.
Then Mistermage’s BFF gave us an old pc and for a while we ran both. Right until my ISP realized someone local was using the ISP as the means for all the local webtv users to get online w/o paying the ISP for more than just his/her connection.
I still have and use that hotmail account.
Ditto. 1991-92. Gopher, Usenet, email
Very similar experience – had limited accesses (mostly just e-mail or specific data directories) via school/job terminals through the 80s but it was early 95 that I properly went on CServe/Usenet.
I remember getting a Rocketmail address, which was then purchased by and assimilated into Yahoo. I still use that account.
- My first year of college; at least one course sent assignments and updates vial email. I forget whether the email was intra or internet (used on campus computers), but I always browsed Netscape while in the computer lab.