I was on a message board early on, one that dealt with one of my hobbies. Another poster asked a question that no one else had answered and I knew that I had a book with the exact info they needed. I posted the info and he thanked me and asked where I had gotten the book. I told him the name of the bookstore chain. He replied that he didn’t think they had those in South Africa.
:eek:
I guess it never occured to me that our internet in the US was connected to the internets in other countries!
Heh, I remember before that though, in the early 1990s, the future Mrs. Siam Sam tried showing me at the U of Hawaii how to use e-mail. I thought it was stupid and predicted it would never take off.
1999 or 2000. I was a teenager. My family is always at least several years behind in adopting new technology.
At my grandmother’s place, I used a hand-crank party line. She didn’t have phone, electricity, or indoor pluming until well after she married.
2000
I got online in 2000 at age 13 when we bought our first computer, a desk top Mac. I did not use it that much, it was only a few years later when I was an older teen that I started spending few hours a day on the internet.
Prior to this I did use the computer at school when required, but I don’t count that for this thread.
I remember the first time I saw a url on an ad on the side of a bus. I thought “there goes the neighborhood.”
I was right. 
1986 might have been my first experience with “electronic mail” at work. Personally, I got on a local BBS in 1987, I think.
Year 4 BM. (Before Millennium)
WOW!
What year did you become a Homo Interneticus? For me it was when I started arguing online in '98.
Triple WOW! What was Internet like then?
Fall of 1995, when I was a freshman in college. We were aware of the internet’s existence in high school but the only way to access it was by long distance call (closest “local” ISP was in Manchester) so I didn’t know anyone lucky enough to have access before then.
Depending on your definition, possibly as early as 1987 or 1988 on local BBSes with my father. Possibly Prodigy by 1991 or 1992. Definitely early in the initial growth of the Web, say 1996. There were fairly big gaps between the three.
I remember when advertisers gave an AOL keyword and watching football games with the announcers slowly and painfully reading the entire address, starting with http://.
Got our first computer in 1985 or 86. I had AOL on dial-up for several years, and I progressed gradually through all the tech advances since then, usually lagging behind some of my cutting-edge friends. I found the SDMB when it was on AOL, and I was among the early signups in the present format post-AOL.
I’ve had the asknott email from the start, through all the succeeding carriers.
1998, dial up connection at work. It took a few more years till I was online at home
Well before 1995. I was working on a team developing government electronic commerce systems, at a time when despite our advice we couldn’t use the internet directly and had to direct all traffic via a value-added network. I had one of the rare internet accounts with an actual email address that I had to treat as though it was top secret.
When Hotmail came into existence I was able to get for my own use firstnamelastname@hotmail.com then firstname.lastname@hotmail.com then firstname_lastname@hotmail.com as userids. Each expired because I didn’t know anyone to get emails from. I would forget to log on as there was nothing to read and the account would be gone.
I had email through my mainframe university account in 1987, as well as access to Usenet. I was also doing dian-in BBs’s around my hometown during that time. I didn’t get started doing the web until 1994 when I signed up for AOL.
Late 1995 or early 1996, after moving from West Virginia to New Hampshire. I had been wanting to get online several years earlier, but that was the first time I lived in a place where the dial-up ISP was a local call.