In 1991, I had a university email account, but I don’t recall using it to send messages to anyone outside the university system. Back then, calling BBSes was still my main source of computer fun. I actually started using FTP and Usenet and the like in late 1992, all through the university VAX, so it was all text-based. Sometime around 1993 or so, I was introduced to NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 and 1.1.
I still have copies of an early internet fiction magazine with editorials complaining that the practice of corporations putting up web pages is ruining the internet.
Back then, about all I was interested in was alt.folklore.urban…I remember the very first time someone typoed “cow orker” and the whole community just loved the expression and made it the norm. hehehe
I think my first exposure to the Internet was in…maybe '93/94. I was visiting a friend of mine, who had a Mac and a Compuserve account. She was able to communicate with all these other people, via this computer! It was AMAZING!!!
I was able to see and tinker with other friends’ computers for a few years, until I finally got one of those “smart typewriters” that could get email. (It was a Brother Word Processor - I still have it.) That was in November of '97. I got an account with Genie (no longer around, I hear) because it was the only ISP that worked with the Brother Word Processors. This word processor was a trip - had a small, green screen. No mouse. had to use the arrow buttons to get around Brother’s built-in OS.
Genie had its own “proprietary content” too, chatrooms, etc. (I liked the chatrooms.) No real direct access to the Internet (but the word processor couldn’t get it anyway.) It was pretty a primitive set-up over at Genie, but a friendly bunch. But, it was expensive so I got a used PC and got a different (and cheaper) ISP shortly after. And the rest is history.
Im curious here, on a slight aside: when did the Internet first become realized as what it is today? Meaning, at what point did people say “Hey, this thing really is worldwide…this is THE net!”?
Many say they had college internet mail accounts; as well there were the several networks (can’t think of names…someone mentioned bitnet…i think there was ESFNet or something like that…)…there were the online services (I was a Prodigy user back in the DOS days of the mid-to-late 80s)…etc.
The first time I actually used the internet as such was 94 or early 95, I think. We got a Netcom account, which was almost like an online service in that it was an all-inclusive software package (ie, rather than setting up a DUN connection or what-have-you, you just popped open the Netcom “Netcruiser” prog, which dialed in and then gave you a web-browser, email, even an irc client). When I saw my first web page, my thought was “Hey, this looks like a windows help-file” (you know, hyperlinks and whatnot). Oh well, thats my story.
Oh yeah, feel free to answer the question I posed before my rambling reply.
In 1989 I visited a friend at Dartmouth and was amazed that there was an all-campus network with access in each dorm room. They had chat, email, MUDs, but I can’t remember if they were connected to the net at large. You couldn’t have pried me away from the computer that weekend with a crowbar.
By 1991, I had net access at work. Four emails a day was a lot of email for our office then. If someone in the office got an email, we would all gather 'round their computer to ooh and aah at their in-box (hey, you’ve got to get your kicks when you can at work).
I’m still amazed that I didn’t go blind using Mosaic on one of those tiny Mac screens. It is my impression that a full 25% of the things one would find on the WWW in those days was Star Trek drinking games.
I think around 1995. Internet was perhaps open to the public from 1988, but it was mostly computernerds and students/scientists who was online before 95.
A friend of mine had an interesting experience her first time on the Internet a few years ago. She’d gone back to college at age 31 and was a total newbie; I’d been tutoring her on how to use the computer she’d bought for school, but we hadn’t gotten to “How to use the Internet” just yet. So one day she was in the college computer lab with her (home-schooled) 11-year-old daughter, trying to find information about the ancient Greeks. She didn’t know about search engines, so she just typed “Greeks” into the address bar of Netscape. Up popped the autosearch, which returned http://www.greeks.com, which was, at that time, a fledgling site about the, er, joys of homosexual anal love. :eek: (Now it’s a frat/sorority directory based out of Indiana University.) Fortunately, (1) there were no pictures, just some goofy illustrations, and (2) her daughter is actually rather mature and therefore not terribly shocked, but rather just as amused/embarrassed as her mother.
The next Friday night lesson was “All About Search Engines.”
My parents first got our family a computer in 1990 when I was 5 years old. It was a 386, with a 9600 (or so) baud modem. I had heard that it could connect two computers using a phone line, and that I would be able to play multiplayer games on our flight simulator using this thingamajig, but that’s all I really knew about modems, and it didn’t interest me very much.
My first actual experience with the internet was in 1995. We had 10 free hours of AOL…nowadays, the disks give you 100 hours or something, but back then, before I even really knew what the internet was, 10 hours was amazing. I could talk to people around the world! I don’t remember exactly what I said when I was in the chat room, except for one part when I was talking to some guy, and he asked me how old I was. I said I was 10, and he said something like “Umm, I gotta go.”
I suppose it was around 1996 when we actually got signed up for a real ISP. IIRC, we were using Teleport for our internet access, which I think is local to Portland. I saw the Netscape icon on my desktop, and I knew what it did, but for some reason I wasn’t really interested in looking at web pages at first. But after a few times trying it just to see what it did I was hooked.
I discovered IRC some time around 1997, and that’s when I got the name “KinkaJoy” (“KJ”) which I have been using for the last 4 years. Kind of a funny story behind the name, but I won’t say it here, because I’ve already written a lot.
I discovered The Straight Dope in Feb. 1999 (actually, I didn’t remember that until just a few seconds ago, when I performed a search, because I specifically remember the article that was there when I first came to the site.) And I’ve been registered at the SDMB since…I don’t know, look to the left, it should say next to my name.
I think I was about thirteen, which would be…hmm…1989 or 90. I remember when I would have sold my SOUL for a 2400 baud modem…
My mother’s husband worked on the proto-Internet waaaaaay back. Recently they had to count up how long he’s been online, and the answer was 27 years. Wow. That’s longer than I’ve been alive.
1994 or 1995. This was back in the AOL vs. Prodigy vs. Compuserve days. I had AOL and my friend down the street had Prodigy. If I sent him an email, he wouldn’t receive it for at least 10 minutes. Eventually AOL went unlimited access and got faster, making me glad I stuck with it. My family has become dependent on AOL, though, refusing to switch to Road Runner.
I first heard of the Internet and e-mail in the summer of 1994; I first used in the fall of 1996. I was standing in my high school’s library with my then-boyfriend, and we did a search of Metallica websites on Yahoo. I even remember that it was with Netscape.
I went to live overseas in 1994, just as the Web was starting to take off. All I could do was read about it in American newsmagazines for 2 years. As soon as I got back in the summer of 1996, I got an AOL account; I had a 486 with a whopping 8 mg of RAM. Every time I tried to connect to a web page, it crashed. It wasn’t until I got a Pentium with 32 mg RAM that I actually connected to the Internet and soon forsook the AOL browser for Netscape.
I remember when I first got on AOL, hanging out in the chat rooms (that was when they were fun!) and people saying “hey we’re on the internet”, and I answered “This is not the internet, this is only AOL. The internet is an ocean, and AOL is a wading pool at the seashore.”
My earlier post (see above) was about Dartmouth. The network you describe was in place in 1987 (maybe earlier.) When I started out there, I would telephone my friends at other colleges and ask “What’s your e-mail address?” The most common reply: “What’s e-mail?” To answer your question, yes, we were connected to the 'net at large.
This is going to sound like a fable, but maybe it says something about virtual reality against whatever we call ‘normal’ reality.
The first time I used the internet was in 1995, at university, when my SO took me through how to get an account there. The first thing I did was look up my favourite band of the time, the Birthday Party.
Ironically, the same hour I spent taking in the wonders of the net, Rowland Howard, the guitarist of that same band, was playing at the uni, in front of about 10 people.
Dunno if you would call this the “net” per se. Our high school computer lab had an old phone modem that you actually placed the handset in and manually dialed.We played games over in back in 1981.The games printed out on a printer versus displaying on a monitor…it was UNGODLY slow.No clue what the Baud rate was.
