When was the earliest you could use the Internet at home?

[KneadToKnow]

I put a modem in my PC and joined CompuServe in the fall of 1995, when I started grad school.

[picunurse]

I met my husband on AOL in 1995. That’s the internet, right?

We were the third household in Seattle to have cable internet installed. That was 1998 or early '99.

[Voyager]

The dates are pretty fuzzy, but around 1990 I got a surplus UNIX PC from workand brought it home. I could use it to log in to work and from there I had full access to the Internet, including Usenet. Back then there was one low traffic alt.sex group.

We signed up with a local ISP probably around 1992 or so, in Archie and Veronica days. We looked at the on-line card catalogs for several university libraries.
At work I used it well before domain addressing.

We also had AOL a bit, but back then that was not the Internet.

[Keeve]

If anyone wants to get technical, even email alone counts as the internet. But I think that for quite a while, its colloquial meaning refers specifically to surfing on the www.

[Ionizer]

I was sneakily allowed by a math professor I befriended at a Minor Emergency Center where I part-timed at to acces a college’s Net connection from home ‘puter in mid-90. Makes me nostalgic to remember using ARCHIE and other similar-themed protocols’ to ‘browse around’ as no practical ‘browsers’ were available (IIRC) other than third-party stuff like Compuserve or such. True Net, not a ‘gateway service’ so to speak.

And then came Mozilla! Thick books of domain addresses/sites with content description were for sale commonly since there was so little ‘search’ ability compared to nowadays. Seems so long ago…

[rbroome]

People were accessing other networks by the mid-80s and of course the Internet existed for researchers. It didn’t take much to access ARPAnet back in the day, but there were many other resources that existed outside of ARPAnet that attracted home attention. When I bought my first computer in 1984, only the store geek used a modem and DLed files and software. Within a year, certainly by the middle of 1985, I was doing the same. “Internet” was probably a bit grand for what we were doing. Fidonet was a popular relay system, but we certainly knew who to call and how to get around. Then came Gopher…
By 1991, the internet as we know it was available to me both at work and at home (at 2400 baud, but I was patient).

[wolfpup]

@engineer_comp_geek

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.

As an aside, it’s likely that it was still being called ARPAnet back then, even if it was widespread and no longer strictly an ARPA project. Not sure when the name gradually transitioned to “Internet”, but I didn’t start calling it that until probably the late 80s. If one associates the name change with the commercialization, the first commercial ISP (according to Wikipedia) launched in 1989.

@engineer_comp_geek

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…

I remember having a “directory” of WWW sites that was about the size of a paperback book, kind of like a miniature “Yellow Pages” phone book. From the fact that Alta Vista launched in December, 1995, I would guess that this would have been sometime in the early to mid-90s. After the launch of Alta Vista the whole search engine field just snowballed incredibly fast.

[Hari_Seldon]

I got my first computer in April, 1982 and also bought a 300 baud acoustic modem. You had to plug an old fashioned dial phone into it. I could call my university and have files there, but there was no general access beyond that and, in particular, no email. I had a coauthor in Cleveland that I wanted to exchange files with. With the help of the computer center, we arranged that he could call a network called Tymnet in the US that could connect with a Canadian network called Datapac and then sign on to my account and upload or download files. In those days, mail between Cleveland and Montreal took a minimum of two weeks, so this was enormous. And not much more expensive than mail. At the end of 1964, McGill got email, specifically bitnet. So I had a bitnet address and, by that time, a 1200 baud modem board. It still took up a phone line, but I didn’t need that acoustic modem. My coauthor was by then also on bitnet and we started exchanging files by appending them to email. So much easier and free! I don’t recall when we had full usenet access, but certainly before 1990, I was using ftp to get stuff. Then a McGill grad student wrote Archie, what we would now call a web crawler that indexed ftp sites and you could search the index. Then better ones came along; one was called Veronica. I used dialup (with, in the end, a 56 kilobaud modem) until 2000.

[Francis_Vaughan]

A lot of the answer will depend upon how you define “Internet”. Since the OP asks the question about “the Internet”, and not “an internet” we can be very pedantic, and define access as requiring an IP connection. Simply accessing another computer over a phone line/modem isn’t enough. You need to have an IP connection over your link, and that essentially means you are limited to after when SLIP was developed. That means sometime after 1984.

It was common for universities to provide modem pools to staff, and as the staff use became more sophisticated, things moved from taking a dumb terminal home to using a home PC of some form and running SLIP, and later PPP. Commercial provision of such services came soon after things settled down, and the modems became fast enough (no more acoustic couplers) and 56kb/s became common. That was very late 80’s to early 90’s.

Once you had an IP connection to your home machine you could use all the usual protocols - so SMTP got you email, NNTP got you news groups, FTP simple file transfers, telnet remote access and so on. However you still needed access to those servers - although things were very open back then, and it was surprising what you could get to, albeit sometimes rather slowly.

[psychonaut]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

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.

In 1993 URLs hadn’t even been invented yet. (Or at least, not formally adopted as an Internet standard.)

[Kenm]

I was running Apple’s eWorld on System 7. eWorld existed from 1994 to 1996.

Before that, on a Mac LC, I used ZTerm, a Mac terminal emulator for the modem to get onto bulletin boards. It was released in ’92 and is still around. But I abandoned it when eWorld came about.

Then came Netscape and the world was saved from AOL.

[robby]

@Pork_Rind

I had Usenet, email and telnet access at home by 1990 or very early 1991.

I had the same access at the same time by dialing up to Rice University (where I was a student) via a 2400-baud modem using my Mac IIsi. The university kept my account active for a couple of years after I graduated. It was the only access to the internet that I had, so I kept using the account as long as it worked (until 1994 or so), but had to call long-distance once I moved away from Houston.

At that point, I signed up for Delphi, CompuServe, and AOL, in sequence.

[Joey_P]

I know I had it in the house I grew up in. We moved out of that one in 1994 and we had it for quite a while. We started with Prodigy and moved to AOL.
I couldn’t say when exctly we had the internet at home, but it was at some point in the early 90’s.

[race_to_the_bottom]

I got my first computer in 1997, Packard Bell. It had 8 MB of RAM an a 1.2 Gig HD, 60 mhz processor which I overclocked to 66 mhz, (don’t laugh!) a CD read only drive and no USB, of course. Dial up, 33 kbs. Windows 95. It cost about $800. It was wonderful! I still have it sitting in storage.I bought a used monitor and a used dot matrix printer.

[usedtobe]

My first BBS was DICE. Originally: only in SF, only for IS/IT/DB/MIS consultants.
1990.

[Honey]

I remember using NetZero as a (very slow) free dialup. I used Netscape Navigator as a browser. Around 1993-1994, I think. The very first things I ever searched for were X-Files related. I used to get pissed when my husband would pick up the (landline) phone and disconnect me. It seems like a million years ago.

[rbroome]

@Francis_Vaughan

A lot of the answer will depend upon how you define “Internet”. Since the OP asks the question about “the Internet”, and not “an internet” we can be very pedantic, and define access as requiring an IP connection. Simply accessing another computer over a phone line/modem isn’t enough. You need to have an IP connection over your link, and that essentially means you are limited to after when SLIP was developed. That means sometime after 1984.

It was common for universities to provide modem pools to staff, and as the staff use became more sophisticated, things moved from taking a dumb terminal home to using a home PC of some form and running SLIP, and later PPP. Commercial provision of such services came soon after things settled down, and the modems became fast enough (no more acoustic couplers) and 56kb/s became common. That was very late 80’s to early 90’s.

Once you had an IP connection to your home machine you could use all the usual protocols - so SMTP got you email, NNTP got you news groups, FTP simple file transfers, telnet remote access and so on. However you still needed access to those servers - although things were very open back then, and it was surprising what you could get to, albeit sometimes rather slowly.

Thanks!
You brought back some memories… I had completely forgotten about SLIP, though I used PPP a few years ago when I still had a need for a serial connection.

I agree with F. V., defining the “Internet” as requiring an IP address is, in retrospect, reasonable. Though at the time, it was just another protocol and I at least didn’t guess that it would define the future.

[Omar_Little]

1983. My college roommate had a Osborne portable computer with a modem and a tiny 5" monitor built into the device. We would dial in to local BBS’s and do a lot of stupid stuff.

[robert_columbia]

@Sarabellum1976

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…

Many BBS’s did offer “real” Internet email addresses by the late 1990’s (e.g. if you had the username KillerG on the Joe’s Dungeon and Hacker Lounge BBS, you could be killerg@joesdungeon.someisp.com), but real dial-up Internet (e.g. PPP or SLIP) was pretty rare. I only remember one that I think did it, and I think you did have to pay, or maybe the access was seriously limited.

I still played door games (mostly LORD and TradeWars) on one local BBS as late as 1997, but by that time it was pretty clear that the BBS was yesterday’s technology and was probably on the way out. Sort of like payphones in 2000 or 8-track tapes in 1980 - they were still around and pretty easy to find but the user demographic was getting older and younger people disdained them.

[robert_columbia]

@wolfpup

…
I remember having a “directory” of WWW sites that was about the size of a paperback book, kind of like a miniature “Yellow Pages” phone book. From the fact that Alta Vista launched in December, 1995, I would guess that this would have been sometime in the early to mid-90s. After the launch of Alta Vista the whole search engine field just snowballed incredibly fast.

These were pretty common in the 1990’s and there were a few different publishers that put their own out. There were essentially like an Internet phone book that you had to replace every year or so. For example, if you were interested in My Little Pony, you could look in the “M” section to find the appropriate entry, and see printed links to Sue’s My Little Pony Princess Paradise as this url and the Two Sisters MLP Comprehensive Fan Compendium at that url. Needless to say, these got obsolete pretty quickly, even in those days.