Think back into the grey mists of time…How old were you? What year was it? How slow was your first modem? What ISP did you use?
I kind of feel like an Online Oldtimer. My first experience was back in 1994 when I was 25. My friends invited me over to show off their new computer. They had a 14.4 baud modem (If that fast) and we signed on via AOL. It couldn’t have been any newer than version 1.5; I know it wasn’t version 2.0. These were the old days when AOL would shut down at night! At least I remember constantly being kicked off during after-midnight sessions.
I promptly looked up a Forever Knight forum and got hooked. Some ten years later I’m still in contact with people from that group.
I never knew anyone who owned a computer until I got my own in 1999. It was a Sony VAIO minitower, Pentium 1 with 32 MB of RAM. It had a 56K modem and we used Infinet as our first ISP. The first CD writer I bought for it (4x) cost $300!
Grade 7, when we first had computers at school that had internet access. Also the first time I ever personally used Windows 95, though I’d seen my cousins use it before then (They were using the internet for about as long as I can remember). So, I would have been online since…about 1997.
I was 17, in 1995 when I first surfed the web. (I’d had AOL previous to that, but had never been on the web previous to that.) I remember being utterly baffled by it. How were you supposed to find anything you wanted to see? I remember going to newsweek.com to see if I could at least read magazines and their website wasn’t up yet! Not long after that I heard the Yahoo! guys on the radio explaining how their web search worked. I was absolutely thrilled with the idea. A way to actually find what you were looking for!
Oh my god, that was ten years ago. Where’re my cane and bifocals?
I first surfed the web in 1995… or I tried to. I was at Semicon Southwest, and the convention directory was on a local web. I was working as a tech in a fab that ran entirely on VAX, and I had never seen a browser before. After about thirty seconds I decided to give up before the guys waiting behind me started to complain.
I was about 13 in 1993. The computer was an Acer desktop with Windows 3.11. My dad bought our first CDROM, A Sony 1x CD reader kit, at $400! To be fair, it did come with a SoundBlaster card, and speakers. Still have this machine, and still works like new. I first started of with BBS’s, then online gaming over a 14.4 modem. 28.8 was quite exciting when we got ours! At the time, my buddy and I were wanna be hackers. So I spent most my time screwing with other BBS’s, and trying to get as much pirated software as we could (You have to understand, we were stupid kids, and the shit was really exciting). We never knew how big it could get. You were the coolest kid if you could break a BBS and get a copy of Afterdark and Doom for free from a 28.8 BBS with ZMODEM. And we did this all the time (with other proggies of course). In 1995, I started working for a company that had a really fast internet connection. The PC’s still used Windows 3.11, and of course the Internet wasn’t that big of a deal that the company would monitor Internet usage. So naturally, my escapades continued there. But now with HTML webpages. This was a whole new world for me! They even allowed me to fix the computers when they would break. This gave me my hardware and software education. This then led to getting AOL, and using other varius ISP’s at home. And I can’t fucking believe it. I’m still here to this day, abusing their Internet priviledges. But not in bad taste anymore. My bad habbits have reversed themselves with regards to computers and the Internet. Weird.
1996, when I was 30. Good old 28.8 modem, through a local ISP. I’d never done anything online before that, so I got to jump straight to the WWW without needing to first be dumbed down by AOL.
Anybody else remember that horrible sense of panic when you first discovered that your browser had a “History” that kept track of every site you’d visited?
From 28.8, I moved up to 128k ISDN, and then to 768k DSL. When I moved in with a friend last summer, I discovered that he had a 56k dialup connection. Well, that wouldn’t do at all, so we upgraded. Now I’ve got a nice little 3Gb fiber-optic connection I’m kind of jealous of my roommate - he got to experience the rush of going directly from “painfully slow” to “blindingly fast”, while I had to take incremental steps.
I first used the Web in, I dunno, 1993 or 1994. I wanted to check out HTML because I was still pretty good at GML back then, but HTML was so basic at the time that I became really frustrated and gave up on it. But there were a number of people at the time (various corporate and academic webmasters–the only one I remember was the lady from Sun) who asked to see my Web pages because I was doing stuff that was apparently cutting-edge.
So yeah, I coulda been retired five years ago if I’d stuck with it, but nooooo, I had to go study virtual reality instead. :smack:
GENIE, TymNet, telenet, Gopher, 1200 and 2400 bps modems, text only BBS’s, later to be replaced by astonishing ASCII art (and ASCII online games), an 8088 replacing an Apple II, which itself replaced a Vic 20. (Incidentally, anyone remember the original ATARI console, or Coleco-vision?)
When I was a freshman in college - that would have been 1991. Every student at my college got a unix-based e-mail account. Shortly thereafter I was using BBS and gophers waste time.
My junior year, I got a computer for Christmas, a Mac Performa. I signed up with AOL. After I left school, I didn’t have internet access for a couple of years, but then I got online again (and wow, had things really changed in a couple of years).
I think 1996 or 1997—probably the latter. It was at my university. The first thing website i looked up was a left-wing magazine called Z Magazine and its associated webite, ZNet. After that, i discovered the joys of The Onion and got some funny looks in the library for all my sniggering and guffaws.
I didn’t have my own web connection at home until the end of 2000, when i bought a new computer after moving to the US. I stuck with dial-up for about 18 months, then switched to DSL.
Some of you are cheating. He said the web and not the internet in general or any proprietary services. I first surfed the web in early 1994 in a lab that I worked in. It was on a university LAN and Netscape 1.0 beta was the browser. There wasn’t all that much on there. We actually had a (not very thick) printed directory of all the major websites. I tried to find some porn of course along with a graduate student. If you tried really hard, you could find one quality, unique picture an hour. There wasn’t too much in the way of search engines back then.
Net: 1987. Compugeek friend of mine showed me how to “%flip” (riffle the gateways for busy connections and talk to someone at random). I traded some pretty hot chat with a (girl) friend of my friend in NY state and thought, "Damn, this internet thing has possibilities. That same year I learned that my actual girlfriend had an email address but never used it. So I never did, either.
Web: 1995. An AOL bisk arrives in the mail and I innocently load it into my Mac. Through the proprietary WebCrawler software, I first find my way onto the windswept expanse of the Information Superhighway. I am dumfounded, both by the sheer plethora of “Webalicious sites” already in existence and by the interminable time it takes most of them to display. After an indeterminate time…two hours? three? five?..I numbly sign off, mentally and spiritually overwhelmed. I do not touch the Web again for six months. After that, I disappear headfirst into it. Nine years later, I have yet to resurface…
1993/1994. Used to surf the web using Mac Classic II machines (I think) at the uni computer lab in Edinburgh (the PC lab was always too busy and I needed a lot of time to write essays). Vaguely remember spending most of the time using some version of Netscape Navigator and wasting hours at the Lambda MOO Telnet chat thing.
I’m kind of jealous of my roommate - he got to experience the rush of going directly from “painfully slow” to “blindingly fast”, while I had to take incremental steps.