Sometime around 1986 I got a 300 baud modem for my Commodore 64 – one of those modems that you had to pick up the phone, dial, remove the modular phone handset from the cord and plug the cord into the modem.
Pretty much I only traded games with other friends around the city. I can’t recall how long it took to transfer one disk of what - 168k? - but it was an awful long time. Ahhh… X-modem and Punter…
Somehow I found out about Quantum Link, messed around with that until the bills got too large. Around this time I got a used 1200 baud modem for $50 - wow. Had my first experience with online romance - a father I was chatting with introduced me to his daughter. We chatted, liked each other, met face to face, and she was WAY hotter than me. I got dumped. Now I wish I could send her copies of my W-2!
QLink got too expensive, so started doing the BBS thing. Ran a few lousy ones until 1993 or so – thank god 14.4k modems became affordable.
Found out about the internet around 1994, used local college dialups for a while. Various ISPs from around 1996 on, never any big ones - AOL, Compuserve, and so on just seemed like a waste of money after QLink. Got DSL about six months ago.
The neural network will be installed directly into my brain in about three years.
In 1991 (or there abouts) we bought our first modem, a 2400. As for the browser? I’m pretty sure it was Mosaic?
When the 14 400 came out, we bought that one and that for sure I know we used Netscape. Again, I’m terrible with dates but I was in high school so it’d have been 92-spring 96.
In fall '96 I went away to university and we had a broadband connection in our residence so needless to say, I used that.
In late 2000 I got DSL at about 1200kbps and I had that for a few years.
In fall 2003 I got Cable which averages around double that. I have more problems with outages though so when I move out of this place, I’m up to Ultra high speed DSL at about 3000kbps. An arguement with roommates which I lost caused us to get cable. The browser I use now is Netscape, although I have Explorer (which gives me nothing but shit), and Safari (with which I have too many problems with plugins - or lack there of).
I started out when my dad introduced me to The Source and Compuserve. We used a 300 baud acoustic modem that you had to whistle into in order to get the modem on the other side to respond. I mostly used Compuserve and when The Source closed there wasn’t really anywhere else to go.
After awhile I got into the BBS craze and used them exclusively for a long time. My first internet experience was in college (all text based) and I was hooked.
Used Prodigy for a little bit and eventually settled on Netcom since I could access them as a local call from home. I switchd ISPs several times before cable internet finally came to our house and I signed up for that.
Has a brief stint with DSL after we moved and cable wasn’t available but switched back to cable when they finally hooked it up and will probably stay with it.
I was itching to get onto the net from the mid 90s, although my ex-wife was unkeen and thought it a waste of money. I started using it in about '97 on my brother-in-law’s computer. I think even back then it was a 56K modem, but it was on his free university account, so I was restricted to half an hour of use per day, or some pathetic amount like that. The following year, I bought my own Pentium II machine, and when I used my brother-on-law’s computer to set up an account with an ISP (dial-up was still quite expensive then), I just ticked “unlimited account”, because I knew I’d be addicted. It was about A$40 per month then. I think you can get them for A$9 now. Later in the year, my ex and I separated, and when I moved into a small flat on my own, I really got into the internet.
I started off web surfing, then got into chat and ICQ. I had the obligatory long distance relationship, and then I discovered message boards. These days, 90% of my internet usage would be on only about six or seven web sites. Several of them are messageboards, and a couple of news outlets.
I’ve worked with IT-related professionals since late 1985, so had one of the first PCs in my agency back in 1988 or so. Our office had a LAN and we could email each other, but nothing outside of our LAN. When the agency opened a new building and folks started moving in, part of the new equipment was a computer network; that was in the fall of 1993. So my first forays into the Internet were through Mosaic and some of the newsgroups (rec.arts.tv - the soap ones, usually LOL). Then in the spring of 94 a friend at work introduced me to the world of online games–mushes and muses. I was quickly caught up in it, unfortunately, because my personal life began a downward spiral that took several years to put back together. I got my first personal internet account in the fall of 94, even though I didn’t have my own computer yet; a friend let me borrow her laptop. I did get my own 386 PC in Dec. 94, which served me until late 2000, believe it or not! That poor computer was burned out by the time I had to get rid of it; I had a shell account, and through that my only internet access was Lynx, but I did have internet access through Netscape and later IE at work. Oh yes, I ran Win 3.1 until late 2000 as well.
I did finally get my own new PC in Feb. 2001, although it’s currently out of commission (needs a new power supply - at least I hope that’s -all- it needs!). I’m currently using my late mother’s PC, which isn’t as powerful as mine,unfortunately for me. The current plan is to upgrade again, as soon as I get my income tax refund (knock on wood twill be here soon!), this time to WIN XP, with enough power to play all my little computer games.
My original account was with Netcom, which was bought by Mindspring, which in turn was taken over by Earthlink. I’m fairly happy with Earthlink dialup, but am considering going to DSL. Gotta see if it’s really worth the extra money every month though.
My first encounter with anything resembling “on-line” was with Bitnet (or something related) in '83. My access was related to a class I was taking, though, and ended when the class did.
After that, I occasionally used dial-up BBS’s from around '84 to '87 or so before I got tired of them.
After that, I wasn’t on-line in any real sense, other than the company I worked for did have an e-mail system set up company wide (even to offices around the world), which seemed neat at the time. Later, they connected with the internet, so I could use that for e-mail elsewhere, although I can’t recall exactly when this took place.
At some point, I became interested in Usenet. I want to say it was in around '88 or '89, but the earliest post of mine I can fine archived is in '92, so it’s in that range.
Oddly enough, we didn’t have an internet provider for our home until around '96. Before that, I would only access local BBS’s with the modem, or the net through work, which I could dial-in to. I’ve been connected on the web as long as I’ve had a web browser and something to point it at, but I can’t put my finger on when that happened. Certainly, later than '92, earlier than '97.
I’d found out about misc.straightdope on Usenet, and later followed that to SDMB, although I’ve only been registered here a few years.
This is all (mostly) from memory, so I hope I don’t embarrass myself by getting the dates wrong, but I think it’s pretty accurate.
I first went online in 1989 with GEnie and the late lamented SFRT (the best discussion board ever for science fiction). I actually joined before I had a modem; I bought one a few months later. That’s when I discovered BBSs, too. I spent time on local ones, especially on FIDOnet.
GEnie was a bit slow to add Internet access, and their pricing structure made it expensive (I could be on the SFRT for free, but had to pay by the minute for Internet). They’re only browser was lynx, not graphical.
In 1996, GE sold GEnie to Yoville Rennaissance Corporation, an ad hoc company set up by a scummy little corporation, who basically killed the service. I switched over to CompuServe and started going on the Internet more. I was also accessing things at work. As time passed, I went to other ISPs – Earthlink, and now MSN. It may be time to switch, if I can get a good deal (luckily, my e-mail address isn’t connected with any ISP, so I can switch easily).
I found the SDMB online, probably because I liked the books, and the rest is history.
I’d never known anybody who owned a PC until 1996, when my sister bought a Compaq. I only used it a handful of times. I guess everybody else I knew was not affuent enough to afford one, or not sufficiently tech-savvy to care. Now that I think about it, none of the folks to whom I was referring have a computer yet.
In mid-1996 I met the woman I would marry, and she had e-mail from her university. She urged me to get a Yahoo! account, which I did, from the public library computers, which were a very new concept at the time. (I still have the Yahoo! mail account, with 6 MB of storage, while everybody gets about half that now - and I get approximately 200 pieces of spam daily).
We were married in 1998 and got a computer in 1999 - Sony VAIO, P1, 266 MHz, 4 GB HD. $1500. We started dialup with Mindspring, which was eaten by Earthlink, both of which sucked beyond description. At the university library, they had upgraded to broadband, which was all kinds of better. When we found out that Comcast was bringing cable internet to town, I called the company and asked, “The day it’s ready, please call me. I’ll buy it.” They eventually did call me, and we switched over to @home, which was later absorbed by just Comcast.
Now we have a wired home network, with my wife still on the VAIO and me on a custom-built rig - P4, 1.7 GHz, 2 HD - 8g & 40g. I only go to about two dozen websites regularly, I’m a regular in a few Usenet groups, but I’ve never seen a chat room or played a video game. I use my computer mainly for remastering music, and the graphics and printing programs. Oh, and for reading the SDMB, which I discovered last year in a Google search for information. I’d never heard of Cecil Adams or The Straight Dope. Now, I’m here every day, most of the day.
When I was a junior in college in March of 1991, one of my high school friends called me up and told me that I could get a VAX/VMS account at my school which would enable me to write email back and forth to him, and one of our other friends. Being a computer science major he knew all about the internet, but I didn’t even know it existed at that point, but being interested in sending back and forth quick, easy messages, I went and obtained a free VAX/VMS account. I used this for the remaining year and a half of school.
When I started grad school in 1992, I continued using email on a UNIX platform, gradually gaining more email contacts. In 1994 I moved on to a different grad school where the computers had Netscape installed, and started surfing the web and joining some BBS groups. I left school and was offline from 1995-97, until I bought my own computer and dialup 14.4 kb modem. My ISP gave me an install packet which included Netscape and mIRC, and it was in mid 1997 that I started using IRC, which I’ve been hooked on ever since.
In January of 2001 I got a new computer and DSL service. Not much more to tell since then.
Mid 80s for me with bulletin boards - Mission Impossible, Abacus Vortex et al. Started on the Internet in the early 90s via Donor/2 - news and messaging only.
I consider mine unique also because of the fact I’m a Machead. The first “real computer” (as compared to a word processor which ONLY did WP) I ever used was a Macintosh Plus in 1986 courtesy of the job I had at the time. That turned me into such a Machead – I fell in LOVE – that when all my friends in the mid-late 80s were getting themselves Commodore 64s, Amigas, Tandys, and playing around on BBS’s I held out on buying a computer for home because Macs were out of my budget and I wouldn’t compromise. I’d settle for occasionally playing on their computers/exploring the BBS world when I was in THEIR homes.
In the spring of 1995 I could finally afford a Mac of my own. It was a Performa 475 and had AOL installed on it – can’t remember which version now, but that was my first experience with going online. I ended up leaving AOL because this was the time they’d only give you five free hours a month, after which the prices were exorbitant if you liked to be online as much as I did. Someone recommmended to me an ISP called Intac, which I tried, but had to abandon VERY quickly because their Unix-base was way too user-unfriendly for me. Luckily I found Cybernex in short order and signed up with them (approx Jan 1996 by this point), dropped AOL like a hot potato and I’ve had them ever since, although a company called NuNet, Inc. bought them a couple of years ago. But I still have my original cybernex.net email address and would recommend NuNet as an ISP to anyone who asked. SO, here it is, almost March 2004, and nearly nine years since I bought my first computer/started going online, and presently:
I’m telling you all this on a Macintosh 7200/120, OS 8.1 with the following:
56K dialup modem, Cybernex (NNI) as my ISP. My web browsers are Netscape and iCAB, I use ClarisEmailer to send and receive email, I have AOL Instant Messenger to IM with, and IRCle for chatting on IRC. To do my plain old word processing (I write alternate universe Star Trek fiction) I use ClarisWorks 4.0. AND, I don’t have to be stuck in the house to use a computer if I don’t want to be, because of –
My Macintosh Powerbook 190 (OS 7.5.2 until I finally get around to doing the upgrade to 8.1), which is set up slightly differently from the 7200 I use at home. Though I’m running the identical WP application and AOL IM on the 190 as I do on the 7200, the online setup is a little different: the ClarisEmailer is lower version, and the only usable modem I’ve so far been able to find for it is a 14.4K X-jack card modem. Browser is iCAB only, and the IRC client is Snak, not IRCle. So it’s a little slower with the 14.4K modem, but still, in addition to being able to go outside to write on a nice day, at least I CAN pick up/reply to my email or chat from someone else’s house; “Have Powerbook Will Travel.”
I guess my first online experience was in the mid or late 70s when I was visiting my brother, who was a software trouble-shooter and had a dialup with acoustic modem to a computer in NY (he lived in Princeton) where he was playing an eraly text version of Adventure using a teletype (hard copy) terminal.
My next experience was in the fall of '81. I was writing a joint book with someone in Cleveland and we worked out a way of exchanging files using the data carriers Tymnet in the US and Datapac in Canada. I gave my coauthor my account name and password (our computer centre knew I did this, although it would be frowned on today) and we exchanged files. He had a computer (Apple II); I had only a borrowed teletype terminal and acoustic modem (300 baud). Then I had to return the terminal and bought a computer, an early IBM PC, in the spring of '82 and we still communicated in the same way. Then in the fall of '84 my son went off the Princeton U. and, on the basis of having played with my computer, got a job as a consultant with the computer center there. They used Bitnet, which I had never heard of. It turned out that our computer centre had bitnet, but the rest of us didn’t. Well, every night he sent an email to the head of our CC asking when they were going to set up Bitnet for all. Around Nov. of '84, they did. I have no idea if my son was responsible for speeding up the process, probably not.
So then I had email and, eventually ftp. Then Archie came along (it was actually an MSc project at my univeristy), followed by Veronica and relatives, all leading up to the Internet. Of course Bitnet was obsolete, but we adapted.
I got a 1200 baud modem in Dec. 84 and then upgraded to 2400, to 9600, to 28,000 and then 56,000. Meantime my wife was complaining that my internet usage was interfering with her business usage and I decided, 3+ years ago that a DSL line didn’t cost all that much more than a second phone line, and I have never looked back.
Sometime in 1990, I got a 2400 baud modem, and started frequenting local BBSes, mostly for cracked games and nudie pictures (I was 17, after all). Got involved with FIDOnet newsgroups at some point- that’s what got me hooked.
The situation stayed much the same until 1991, when I went off to college. Learned about usenet newsgroups, gopher, email and chat.
Things stayed more or less static from my perspective until 1993 or so, when the WWW really started to take off- websites were suddenly the coolest thing going.
At home during the summers, it was kind of odd- I had a local BBS with internet mailboxes that charged something like $5 a month for an account. No real internet access though.
Once out of school in 1996, I hooked up with a local ISP, and since then, it’s been dialup, DSL and cable modem ever since.
1975 – Run into an introvert that worked for Digital Corporation. We’d go into his office at night or on the weekends, sit down at the terminal, tie into the computer systems up in Massachusetts (we were in Virginia), and play Trek, watching the paper roll outta the typewriter. No screens, just 14.5 x 11 greenbar paper. Did this until '77 when I moved away from town.
1983 – Picked up a Commodore 64 with two 720k floppy drives and two 1.2 megabyte floppy drives. Began to bbs a lot. Joined Sprint so I could use their modem pool to connect locally to cities across the country. Just enter a code and you’d be connected to a modem bank in say, San Diego or Detroit. Use the old atd commands to dial and away you went at 300 baud. Sometimes I could even push it to 450 baud. I was rocking then!
I also set up The Inn Of The Last Home, a bulletin board that I would run for the next ten years in one form or another. Ran on the above-mentioned system for about 18 months. During that time my users threw a party for the board and raised enough money to purchase a 10 meg hard drive for it. You have any idea how much those things cost then??
1985 – Upgrade to the PC world. Begin running the bbs on WWIV software. Became part of WWIVNet. Had the honor of being the first board outside of California to connect reliably with them (I was in Virginia). WWIVNet had several hundred boards interconnecting in a during their heyday.
1991 – Meet my future wife, though I didn’t know it then, at a bbs holiday party sponsored by Fire Chat BBS.
1993 – Marry aforementioned wife. By this time the internet is beginning to be popular with the masses; calls to the bbs are way down. Decide to shut the Inn’s doors.
Now I’m doing networking for a living and marveling at all the changes that have taken place since I’ve started.
