I *was *late, just as I suspected. First puberty, and then Internet. Damn. Ok, thanks.
- I still have the emails in my email program and I had a pretty busy correspondence in '91 and '92. Also downloaded rafts of freeware and shareware via FTP.
No web-browsing to speak of until about '94 or '95 though. You did say “internet” and not “web” though.
Well, I started using GEnie regularly in 1989 – not really the Internet, but it had e-mail and discussion boards.
It was around 1996 that I got on the full Internet.
When I was seven.
If using ARCHIE at the library counts, about 1991. I didn’t use the internet on a regular basis until 1993 when I got to the University. Got my first dial up account in 1994 so I could get online while at home during holiday breaks and summer vacation. it was with a local ISP, I remember paying $9 per month.
The first file that I got with the help of the Internet must have been around 1993. I used BBSes, and had read about the Internet in Mondo 2000 magazine, so I asked my college-student brother to search for a new version of the tagline manager that I used with my mail reader. (I had seen evidence of it in other people’s posts, but none of the local BBSes had it for download.) He was able to find it using Archie or something, and gave it to me the next day.
By 1996, I was using the Internet myself, both at home and at work. I used dial-up in both places. At work, I was maintaining my company’s e-commerce website, which was hosted by the same one-man company that designed it. I still maintain the site, but it’s designed and hosted internally now.
I was using a UNIX shell account to send email and read/write USENET postings starting around Jan of 1990 while I was in college. I also used UNIX “talk” to have a live, text-based chat with friends of mine at other universities (a long precursor to AOL IM Chats).
Within a year I also began using telnet to connect to MUD games, mostly AberMUD games. In fact my standard online nickname, “robardin”, comes from the name I made up for my online player on those games back then, since my RL name (especially the first initial/last name combo) is apparently pretty common and is generally already taken.
In many ways the SDMB represents a moderated, and thus spam-proof forum similar to what USENET used to offer me. Minus the binaries newsgroups, anyway.
Somewhat earlier than that, I used Prodigy, an early on-line service, to send email and look up the news/weather.
I had already been familiar with the concept of “email” from learning to program on a VAX like computer system over the summer of 1986.
1994, when flat-rate dial-up plans became available in New Zealand.
I started original back around 1992-3, when the web was just getting started. I logged in through a Unix shell account, so I had no graphical access; Lynx for web browsing, Pine for mail. Initially I used it for Usenet, E-Mail and IRC. The web was incidental, but not really a selling point at that time. Although I got involved in the web a bit more as it progressed and became much more useful, I didn’t even see it in a graphical browser (Netscape under Unix X-Windows) until around 1995 in the computer lab during my college years.
It’s all a blur. I had a flatmate who ran a bulletin board, so I was aware of the internet a long time before I started using it. I used to visit my Mother and use her internet connection I convinced her to get even though I was the one using it all the time. And then I got my own computer and internet connection sometime around '96.
Soon after that I became a “website designer” for a tiny, startup, doomed-to-fail company, and it’s been central to my life ever since.
Hmm.
VAX email from 1984 at Uni
Uni access to Usenet, FTP from 1988 - Waikato Uni was NZs 64k link to the world at the time
BBS, Compuserve and PACNET at work from 1990
Archie, Veronica, Gopher and Mosaic from 1993 when we got a 1Mb link to the NZ uni backbone
In 95 I got my own dial-up, and I’ve been connected since then - up to 8Mb now.
Si
I’m not sure, but it was long enough ago that my first email address was [myfirstname]@aol.com. And I don’t have a terribly unusual first name.
By the time I set up my second email address, all the single words I could think of were taken, so it was [something]97@aol.com, so I suspect, using all my logic circuits, that it was 1997; that was when I started spending time in chat and message boards, and using the internet as a tool instead of a novelty.
Wow. That’s only 10 years ago. Seems like it’s always been a part of my life!
Me too. We had CompuServe, and I remember my pop threatenin’ to whoop me because the phone bills were so damn high. He didn’t mind the modest fee, but after so many minutes the rates went through the roof.
That was back in '94, when I was a junior in high school–I was doing papers and stuff with info I could pull from Compuserve. There was also a “mail BBS” I tried to dial into, but it rarely worked.
Tripler
Remember WordStar? That’s what that BBS was like.
Wordstar! Clunk, rattle, bang, ka-chug ka-chug, print…
I went to Shelbyville to get my first modem (kerosene powered, 1K per hour upload. I wore an onion in my belt, which was the fashion in those days…
It happened quickly for me. I wanted to go online from about 1995, but my ex-wife kept stalling and saying we couldn’t afford it/didn’t need it/etc. Finally got on through her brother’s university account in 1996. "
Wow, oo yes SHINY!"
Divorced, and just signed up to a dial-up plan that was unlimited usage, because I just knew I’d use it a lot - and I did.
If you’re asking when the novelty wore off, that’s hard to say. Maybe it still hasn’t - but then I am amazed by AM radio. On the other hand, I stopped blindly “surfing the net” for fun very early on, and for the last ten years, I have been a creature of habit online.
I had a WebTV
What did Word Star have to do with the Internet? It was a really basic word processor.
I want to say '94, almost immediately after I moved into this house. No, wait. summer '95. I drove up to Boston to get two used but really good 'puters from my brother and SIL, they’d just upgraded - one for my dad. He got AOL and I got Compuserve. And even though he was just downstairs in the apartment, he emailed me instead of calling up the stairwell. I am almost certain I didn’t have a modem in my previous residence.
96 Bauds
128
Glorioski, Sandy! A 56K Modem! Oh, Joy!
1997 for me. I’d used friends computers or connections before that, 94 or 95, but I didn’t get my own PC and connection until 1997.
(Not counting the TI-99 in 1982 or 83.)