Oh gosh, this brings back all kinds of old memories. Local BBS’s, Prodigy (which we thought was the coolest thing EVAR when we got it), Delphi, GEnie, Gopher, Juno email - and then Mosaic, the first WWW browser. Ancient history in computing terms …
I’ve been underwhelmed by the internet, and don’t remember when I first heard about it exactly.
Being french, I had been using a kind of network widespread and popular here called “minitel” since the early 80s (In this case I remember clearly the place and time, and “woah!” factor when we saw we could use a keynoard to chat with random and unknown people all over the country). So, when words began to come out re. the internet, I just thought “well…more of the same, just worldwide”. Actually, the internet was widely different, but I didn’t feel it was earth-shattering.
Re the minitel (which would be more significant to me) : there were several of us at a friend’s house. Her parents just had got this neat tool, we logged in immediatly and spent all the afternoon visiting random chatrooms. We had a lot of fun chatting with random people. I believe it was in 1982-83 or so. I got one too and became addicted in quick order. I mean : you just had to plug the thing in, and you could chat with other role-players at any time of the day or night. How wonderful is that??? Plus there were girls you could try to hit on!!! And anonymously to boot (major benefit for a shy teenager)!!! There were even games!!! Girls, role-players and games available at any moment, just by dialing a number!!! How could technology be put to a better use??? (of course, porn would have been a great addition, but the very low resolution used didn’t allow that).
I connected to the internet for the first time in 1998. I quite immediatly turned again to chat-rooms (that I found very inconvenient, who ever came up with the idea of a scrolling chat, instead of every chatter having his own dedicaced spot to type, as God intended???) and forgot about the minitel quickly because, since internet took a long time to catch up in France, the users were a more “select” crowd with on average much more interesting people than on the minitel. It was a relief to chat with generally young, educated, intelligent, polite people, not to have to deal with as much idiots and as much of the french equivalent of a/s/l and it hooked me (unfortunately, France did eventually catch up, and this didn’t last long, as you can guess).
It took me a time to realize how much stuff there was online (besides porn, that I had realized in quick order. Actually, that was the very first think I checked out), that you could find pretty much any kind of info in a matter of minutes and that there were internet or usenet forums dedicaced to pretty much anything you could think of (and some things you would never had thought of). Search engines and Google (that I heard about for the first time on the SD) was a revelation.
In 1993 I knew about the Internet, it had been around and available mostly on Campuses and at “Big Companies” like AT&T. I think your 1993 figure refers more to the World Wide Web. I didn’t go online at home or work until 1995. It was on the AT&T precursor offering to WorldNet at a gaudy 14,400 speed IRC.
…Amazing stuff, a land of College kids, Engineers, Computer Geeks and loads of Tolkien, Star Trek and Star Wars fans. (My kind of people. 
).
The early sports pages on line were already a big step up from the Newspaper and TV. Baseball especially seems to have a dedicated following of Stat-Head Nerds to have led the way. Well that and March Madness pools and breakdowns.
I love all the information available and I use to read a lot of scientific papers on GOPHER. (By a lot, I mean the few I could understand, most were too specific and detailed but some were written as if for Popular Science. )
Then Came Yahoo and the net exploded in size and what we could find. (Hyperbole, but how I saw it unfold).
Now the net is just a normal part of life, more important to me than TV, newspaper and Radio.
I think I am an information junkie. I love to learn and discuss new things with people.
Jim
It was 1998, I had a computer and had heard of the internet but didn’t really realize what it was I guess.
Then we went down to my sisters house and she told me they had recently signed up for it. The first thing I looked up was Arredale Terriers, because my husband and I had recently got one. The next thing I did was go into a search engine and type the word “sex”
:eek:
I immediately called an ISP when I got home and signed up. 
Not what your thinking though, I’m about as un-pervy as they get. I didn’t care that there were a gazillion sites about sex, just in awe that there was that much out there about anything.
Like a lot of others here, I don’t really remember how much I heard about the internet or when before I actually got online.
That would have been in early september of 1995, freshman orientation at university, being shown the college’s macintosh computer lab.
Browsed a university newsgroup and the official university website. Quickly got talked into contributing to a residence house e-zine.
never looked back.
My big brother (as in, Big Brothers of America) had been using Compuserve on his Mac since the late 80s, but I never understood how any of that worked. In 1992, we got a modem at home and I got signed on to Prodigy. At the same time, a friend in high school introduced me to BBSes, and I was hooked from there on out.
I can still remember what a difficult time I had getting the Winsock program to work under Windows 3.11 when the World Wide Web first came around. I’ve had my Yahoo email address since '97, and I conducted my first eBay transaction in '98.
I feel old. 
Oh, and seeing as how today is my 7th wedding anniversary with Jakeline, I should probably mention that she and I also first met on a BBS.
If I was the kind of guy to steal comic ideas, I’d steal that blind. Gawd that’s funny.
Ah, that brings back memories. I started in computers in 1981 with a Commodore VIC-20, then a 128 before building my first 286 PC. Somewhere in the mid-80s got online with a stealthy sneak into the SUNY mainframe, but soon after got to use Gopher, and several BBSs. All text, and menu after menu down deeper and deeper.
It was so totally adicting to access all that information, I stayed up into the wee hours of the mornings until my eyes glazed over.
Like a lot of folks, I started using the internet in 1993, when I was a sophomore in college. Mosaic, pine, and various things like that are stuff I just don’t miss. I hadn’t thought about what a long way we’ve come until I opened this thread.
Started using ArpaNet for email in 1976. I was also aware that file transfers and remote logins were possible but didn’t do those until later. Considered very cool stuff in the CS world back then.
Heh. I love this story.
My family had had a computer for years, one of those gigantic, orange-screen things that I used mainly for playing Dig Dug and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I also did some writing, mostly poetry. I started submitting my poems to a local zine, and the gentleman who ran it called me and wanted more. He asked if I could “E-mail” it to him.
“Eeeee…mail?” I said.
“Yeah. Do you have Windows?” I was standing in our living room, staring out the window at the dentist’s office next door, thinking, what the hell is he talking about? First time I’d ever heard of such a thing.
“Um, yeah…we have windows…”
I think the first time I heard of the internet was sometime in the fall of 96. Until then I’d only ever used a computer to make cards (on one of those orange and black screened ones) and we had a computer but my father never let me play with it except to play Conquest of the Longbow, Crib, Treasure Mountain and Nibbles.
In 96 I moved to the big city and was amazed when we were shown Encarta and then the internet for research. By 97 I was chatting all the time in the library after school and by 98 I’d convinced Mom to buy a computer. I still have it, still works pretty good though it’s slow now.
To get online I used free dial-up (3Web, NetZero, Juno) and I did that up until 2002 when I finally got DSL.
I just thought it was great that I could talk to people all over the place.
In the fall of '82 I became the proud owner of a TRS-80 Model III with twin 5.25 floppy drives. In about a year I saved up enough money to buy an acoustic modem with 100 free hours of Compuserve. I had to dial long distance to make the nearest connection…And I was disappointed as HELL.
In 1998 I bought my second computer and signed onto the Internet. It was awe inspiring.
Looking back, I heard hints of the existence of the Internet in the early 1990s, but they never sank in. I even read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs in 1994 without picking up on what the Internet was. I sort of understood email at the time, but I didn’t use it, and I wasn’t aware there was a difference between email and the Internet.
I moved to France in September 1994 and came back to America in August 1995. I knew people who were using email, and they enjoyed it, but I wasn’t tempted. In October 1995 I started to discover the Internet, playing around on it a lot. I eventually landed in a chat room, maybe three weeks after I first went on line, and was hooked. I fell in love with a woman there who eventually broke my heart, but that’s what started me with the net.
I left the net in late 1996 and came back on May 1, 1998, discovered message boards, and have been hopelessly addicted since. I found a new girlfriend, too, and that’s working out fine.
I love the net. It changed my life. I’m getting more writing done than I probably would have otherwise, and I’m also able to follow all the Senate and gubernatorial races in any given year, which is heaven! I love having a blog, too.
Let’s see… my first computer was a C-64 however I had no modem, so I was limited to using it to play games mostly. My second computer however was a 486 PC clone with windows 3.1 and a 14.4 modem, we also got dialup internet access from what I believe was Nashville’s first ISP and off I went. This would have been in late 1994 sometime, actually probably christmas ;>. Really, the web didn’t interest me at first… there was alot out there but it was hard to find exactly what you were looking for and well designed websites with good content were somewhat infrequent too. However, endearingly… almost everybody online at that time was a geek type or in school which is why my first real net addiction was IRC. I met my wife on IRC, efnet #wicca in fact. Without the internet my life would have turned out very very differently.
My first exposure to what would become the Internet was when I was a senior, in 1973, when one of my professors said that the purpose of the ArpaNet was for people at MIT to send “foo” to people at Stanford, and for them to send “bar” back.
When I was in grad school, in 1974 or so, we hopped on the net to play with Parry, a simulation of a paranoid person done at Stanford as an AI project. From '74 to '77 I was a PLATO user, which, while running on a few Cyber mainframes, connected people all around the country, and had most of the stuff the net has today, including multiplayer games, IM (called term-talk) email, bulletin boards, and an on-line newspaper, for which I wrote a column.
I worked at Bell Labs, so we had email before domain addressing - with the bang (!) notation. I was sd!erc3ba, and you got to me through ihnp4. You needed to know the paths from your machine to the machine of the person you were sending mail to. Business cards typically had regular expressions, giving a few choices of backbone machines. Advantage of this system - no spam.
In about 1985 someone we hired from the U of I brought a tape with netnews software, which I mounted on our machine for local discussions. I never quite got around to setting us up as a news server. We had Mosaic very early.
We had an account with a local ISP which we used with our 286 machine, and used Archie and Veronica to browse university libraries. Being an AT&T employee, I signed up for AT&T Worldnet so early that our account name is our actual (common) last name with no numbers or anything.
So, for me, being in the business, the net was no shock, though the first urls I saw for consumer businesses looked very odd.
I was about 15 when we first got the internet. A dialup hub was added to our town. It was a small, rural town and I think it was 1995 or 1996 before that hub was established and I went online. I’d heard of the internet before that, but I don’t think my experience of it as a subject went back farther than 1994 or so.
Maybe I’m the only late bloomer, but it was years after I knew of the WWW before I had real internet access. I think my first logon was at a friend’s house in about 94-95, but I didn’t get a computer or an email address until 1999.
I used library computers in between, but only sporadically. And that was mainly for exploration purposes. I would go to yahoo.com and just start clicking links to see what was out there. I think I also looked up colleges.
My mom was on MacBBS and on MUGs (Mac User Groups) way back in the early 90s. I still remember sitting up in that little office with a view of snow-covered evergreen trees out the window in the winter and playing KARTH OF THE JUNGLE.
I went on the old ARPAnet back in 1979 or 1980. There were about 4 computer linkups serving all of Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in the basement of the library. From there, I posted to a Tolkien forum, played “Bugs and Drugs”, and once, on a Saturday, played fighter plane and got shot down by some guy from Tokyo.
I left it behind in 1983, and used what passed for the net only sporadically after that until about 1989, when I got on Compuserve’s system. Once they linked to the net a few years later I was back.