# When was the earliest you could use the Internet at home? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 2, 2015, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750 "2015-01-02T05:50:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2015, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750/41 "2015-01-09T14:31:53Z")
It just depends on how much patience you have. In the 80s I could connect with a 9600 baud modem, which probably had an effective rate about half of that. I did connect in the late 80s just to see what it was about, and at that time it wasn’t about much. Just 2 or 3 years later I was connecting with an 18Kb modem, getting that rate, and it was working pretty well. ---
**Author:** ![obbn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/d6d6ee/32.png) [@obbn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/obbn)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2015, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750/42 "2015-01-09T15:08:29Z")
The earliest I can remember accessing the Internet was via AOL in 1996. I can clearly remember being absolutely amazed that you could view porn for free. I had a 486 computer and a 9.6k modem. A simple .jpg image would take 4 or 5 minutes to download and you would get the top of the picture and it would slowly fill in. Of course there was no thumbnails so it was a crapshoot as to what you might see. But Wow! There were boobies out there on that Internet thing! Thinking back, life was good and God I was a little pervert back then. I re ever the day I upgraded to a 14.4k modem. That same day I upgraded to 8mb of ram. The 4mb of ram cost me $85! ---
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2015, 7:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750/43 "2015-01-10T07:44:21Z")
We got (dial-up) modem interenet access probably around 1994-1995. I would have been 13 or so, but I remember being the one pushing it at least at first. We had had Prodigy probably a year or two earlier, but this was basically a BBS service with a very early-90s looking front-end. I do remember trying to sell my parents on why we needed a proper internet provider. ("But _what_ do you _do_ on the internet?) Thankfully, my dad’s firm decided they all needed to get email addresses to be current. Truth be told, at the time, I wanted an internet connection to see blocky, pixellated naked ladies. …though I guess this whole internet thing did end up doing other useful things. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![MichaelEmouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/michaelemouse/32/101_2.png) [@MichaelEmouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelEmouse)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2015, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750/44 "2015-01-10T08:11:40Z")
May I tack on a related question? When was the first time you looked at porn online? I’m curious to know how that developed. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2015, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750/45 "2015-01-10T08:28:42Z")
Early 90s with alt.binaries.pictures.blahblahblah… What was that called? We’ve come a long way, baby. And you had to run a conversion program of some sort. The downloaded information was in ASCII and it needed to be decrypted before the picture was revealed. ---
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2015, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750/46 "2015-01-30T05:54:55Z")
> [@MichaelEmouse](#): > > May I tack on a related question? > > When was the first time you looked at porn online? > > I’m curious to know how that developed. Oh man, We had a legendary floppy disk that got passed around all our friends. It had probably 20-30 pixellated, terrible jpegs of porn images downloaded from some seedy BBS. That would have been 1994 or so, though I suspect said BBS images went back to the late 80s. By 1995, once I had proper internet - well, I was an adolescent boy, so fill in the blanks. There were plenty of lousy jpegs floating about on the internet and usenet by then, and I was thrilled to have them. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-was-the-earliest-you-could-use-the-internet-at-home/708750.md?page=2)