AOL, Compuserve, etc have been available since the 80s, but they weren’t “True” ISP’s until 1994-ish when they started allowing links to Usenet and more importantly the Web.
From what I’ve read, Internet-based email was available on a commercial basis from 1988-89 onwards, and fuller Internet access was offered in a few places by 1989-90, but being that the Internet wasn’t fully opened to commercial traffic until 1995 I imagine they’re talking about business and research connections, not connections to home PCs right?
Alternet started selling connections in January 1990 but from what I gather due to the government still having a large grip on the Net they could only sell to highly qualified people who would use it (at least ostensibly) for research purposes.
However, Commercial Internet Exchange of the UK claims to have offered email and Usenet was back in 1988! Again though, not sure if an average Joe could have had their PC linked up that early.
I had Usenet, email and telnet access at home by 1990 or very early 1991. This was granted to me by the University of North Carolina, but I was not a student nor a resident of the state. They would give out access to anyone who filled out a form and mailed a copy of their driver’s license.
At about the same time I had a similar account via the Cleveland Free-net, but only ever bothered with that when my UNC access was down for some reason.
I had my first paid ISP account in mid-1993 and first used a graphical browser by late '93 or early '94.
ETA: all this was terminal-style dial up until I switched to a PPP account in that late '93 window.
Some time around 1993 or so I joined Genie. In spite of the illustration in the linked Wiki article, I remember it as a mostly greenscreen based utility. You could download graphic content from various sites–very slowly!–but I don’t remember being able to enter any URL with this.
Around the same time, I joined “EAASY SABRE”, a utility for booking and purchasing flights on American Airlines, and also a distant ancestor of Travelocity. In turn, EAASY SABRE was a subset of SABRE, which was the airline’s original in-house computer-based booking and ticketing system, going all the way back to the early 1960s.
I also got offsite access into the computer systems at work, around this time.
All of the above were greenscreen-based utilities based on dial-up access. I didn’t actually have to put a telephone handset into the pair of rubber cups on a modem, but the throughput speeds were almost that slow.
I don’t remember for sure when I got browser-based internet access; I’d already had it for a few years when I joined the SD in 1999, but I was never a big fan of AOL, which seemed to be the route most of my friends and colleagues took by way of getting started. I remember using the Netscape browser, before AOL took it over, but I don’t remember who my ISP was back then.
At least around where I lived at the time, being “online” before about 1994 generally meant that you dialed into a BBS or were using AOL, Prodigy, or one of the other GUI online providers, which did not include web browsing back then. Maaaaybe you had a proper email address, but totally possible that you didn’t, though you could exchange email with other users on your BBS. I think BBSes started getting popular in my area in the late 80s, and peaked around 93-94, before the WWW really took off in popularity. I remember at least one dinosaur of a BBS that claimed to have been operating in 1981.
There was a brief and weird hybrid phase where the BBSes themselves were acting as early internet providers. I remember buying an hourly package from the one I used at the time, I think it was something like 60 hours of use-as-you-go internet time for $30. Then the cheap dial-up internet providers started advertising and getting large numbers of customers. Didn’t hear much about the BBS guys after that, and within a year most were gone. I know that after I signed up with my first real ISP and had access to unlimited web browsing, I sure didn’t feel much need to dial in to the BBS anymore!
I think the first time I heard the term “internet” was probably around 1988? And the first time I saw a commercial on TV with the term “dot com” (as in, visit our webpage at xxx.dot.com!) was around 1994 or 1995.
It was sort of free. The accounts at UNC and at the Cleveland Free-net cost nothing, but to keep the call local, I needed a nearby dial-in for telnet access. I got that ‘free’ from my university, assuming you don’t count tuition as part of that.
As to whether you could have done that earlier, yeah, I suppose so. My uncle had a VT100-type terminal at home, but he was a systems admin at a university, so I don’t know if that really counts. I have no idea what degree of access he had beyond the campus network, as all I cared about was being able to play Adventure.
I had those things, too, in 1992, as a grad student at UCLA. I could dial in from home and use all of those, plus I remember connecting to things like The Well with it. To be honest, though, I don’t think I used the term “internet” at that time.
I only remember being able to use the internet for the first time in '97 or '98. I was still like 7 or 8 years old but the internet looked so bland that I only REALLY started to get into it during the early 2000’s.
But according to history, they had the earliest possible access to network access to computer sharing during the late 80’s. Maybe even the early 80’s when it first started to circle around as a rumor.
Do you mean the Internet or the World Wide Web? The movie Wargames from 1983 famously demonstrates Matthew Broderick connecting to computers remotely using an acoustic coupler. This site claims that remote time sharing systems were available in 1972 using acoustic couplers and claims his wife was one of the first people to get a home terminal. The University College in London joined ARPAnet in 1973 so, presumably, from relatively early in the development of ARPAnet, researchers would have been able to access it from a home terminal via acoustic couplers.
TCP/IP was first proposed in 1974, along with the first use of the word Internet and was deployed around 1978. The adoption of TCP/IP is considered the birth of the real Internet so from the very beginning, there would have been people using remote terminals to access the Internet at home.
I had a 486 computer in about 1989, the lady that set it up for me told me I could go online with it, she was online. I set mine up about 1992 I believe but never used it much.
I had Compuserve in 1984 and shortly thereafter I could somehow connect to my local library, which gave me access to lots of things. But it was very, very slow, and highly likely to crash, plus I had to do this silly thing with my phone and I only had one line (as did most people, I think, at the time).
In late 1981 I used that phone thing at work to get into some remote database. I don’t know if it was the internet or the world wide web or what it was. Occasionally one of the ad people would come in and use the coupler thing for something else. Again, it took forever, and had a pretty high failure rate. I do know the phone line could be used for other things (actual phone calls).
Also I remember something called Netscape Navigator, which I could load up starting in the early 90s–maybe '93?–that took forever to load. By which I mean I would start it, go upstairs, load the dishwasher, sweep and mop the kitchen, go back downstairs–almost done! Once on there I could select a search engine and…find stuff. Some stuff. Sometimes.
I really think the golden age of this was about 1995. At that point, if you were writing a story and needed some info, you might be able to go online and find it, and if you did, it would be pretty reliable. Then more stuff appeared, and less and less of it was reliable.
In 1988, we used the first commercial ISP, The World in Cambridge, MA, dialing in from Kansas City. One huge long distance bill later, we got a Telnet session going, connecting via an Amiga 1000 VT100 emulator to an AIX computer to our Unix account in Cambridge to get email and Usenet.
I was logging into Vax systems from home (300 baud modem, whee! I could type faster than that thing could send data) back in 1984, and from those I was able to get onto this brand new thing that they were calling the Internet. It was still very much in the primitive stages, and there were other networks as well. West Virginia had WVNet, for example, and you could get to the Internet through WVNet, but it wasn’t all anywhere near as easy as it is today. It was also something that your Average Joe home user didn’t have a prayer of using. It required too much computer knowledge. I had an e-mail account through college and I could access usenet in 1984, so it was possible.
Things started getting easier in the late 80s, but most folks on the net were accessing it by logging into unix or vax machines, most of which were run by universities. FTP sites started replacing BBS services, but finding things wasn’t easy. High tech companies put their technical data information on FTP sites, which meant that us engineers could get to the data right away instead of sending away for data books. Of course, downloading tech data on a 2400 baud modem (much faster than the old 300 baud!) was still a rather painful experience.
There weren’t many Average Joes on the internet back in 1988. Commercial Internet Service Providers were a new, up and coming thing then, and most of the folks using them were fairly tech savvy. The modern Internet as we know it didn’t come about until a few years later. I remember the day that they announced that WWW traffic had finally surpassed FTP traffic on the Internet. This was probably sometime around 1990 or 1991. After that came the flood of Windows users, who were very much ridiculed because they weren’t very tech savvy. 1991 or so is when the Average Joe would have really started on the Internet. There were a few oddballs before then, but they were a very small percentage of the overall Internet population.
I still remember printing out a directory of every WWW page on the Internet. It was a 2 page list, which had grown quite a bit from the first I had seen it, when it was about half a page in length…
Like others, CompuServe and BBSs starting in 1983 or so. I clearly remember having an acoustic-coupler type modem for my Vic-20, and used it to call CompuServe, which, at the time, was a long-distant call from where I lived and thus I had to beg and plead with my parents to foot the bill for an hour or so. The BBSs were local, and thus, free.
Later on, I moved, and CompuServe was cheap, so I had that up into the early/mid-90s. I may have had some other dial-up form of internet by around 95/96. I remember lying in bed with my laptop around that time period with a big long phone cable stretching across the room, all so I could check my email.
In 1997, the first ISPs showed up in my neighborhood, and I got a real, non-dial-up connection (finally!). And it’s been that way every since.
Let’s see… in college (1991), we could dial in from home and get at telnet, gopher, elm, usenet etc…
A year or two later, that weird hybrid phase that **Sarabellum1976 ** mentions was in full swing- I could log into a BBS and send/receive real internet email and browse usenet.
The next year (1993), we were just starting to fiddle around with the WWW via Mosaic, and we could do that from home, but it wasn’t really very handy yet. By the time I graduated (1996), we could easily do dial-up and all sorts of WWW browsing, as well as the text-based stuff mentioned earlier. ISPs were fairly commonplace in Houston at that point, and supported 56k modems.
When I started as a grad student in 1988, the IBM 3090 minicomputer upstairs was online. We could log onto a VM session and send email, fetch shareware apps via FTP, and so on. From home, I could connect to it using a 2400 baud model + MacKermit, a terminal emulation program with dialup. For a few years I wrote my emails in a plain text editor, used a weird arcane type of software called an FKey to modify the clipboard so that hard returns were replaced with linefeeds, then pasted into the terminal app. File attachments had to be encoded (BinHex or UUEncode) then appended to the email.
I remember dialing into my AOL account, and then Juno, in the early to mid 90s, when they had a pretty simple email, but no real Web access. I found a book titled something like "Access the Internet via Email! ". In the pre-Google days, this allowed me to send an email to Archie, which would do a search for me, and email me back a list of hits, wirh directions how to get an email of each of those articles. It really worked, but was so tedious that I did it only a few times. Surfing is so much easier!
While an undergraduate, I had dial-in access to my college’s computers, and thereby the ARPANET, from off campus starting in late 1979 or early 1980. Possibly I could have gotten access earlier, but that’s when I got my first home computer. The college was MIT; I don’t know how many others were offering it to students at that point. I’ve had access to the 'net through one means or another since.
My story is the same. I started with a 300baud acoustic modem in 84. Dialing into a Honeywell mainframe to do classwork. I got Compuserve in 85. There were several local BBS that I visited. I upgraded to 1200 baud around 87 or 88.
The university got a Vax 11/780 cluster for students in 85. Much easier to use than the Honeywell. The first Internet connections were for Faculty research only. I can’t recall what it was called. It wired together Universities around the country. Very restricted access. I doubt we had more than 20 to 30 Faculty accounts that accessed it.
Internet for students and staff became available in 92 or 93? Quite slow but it was available. Mostly FTP sites we found with Gopher and we had Usenet.
