Do you remember your first days on the internet?
Discussion
Does working with Prestel count?
In the '80's I had a business which involved creating Viewdata pages for other businesses on Prestel. There was also a primitive chatroom with a handful of regulars, and a thing called 'mailbox' which was the earliest form of email.
About 1984 from memory. Oh yeah, there was a form of online banking available as well.
In the '80's I had a business which involved creating Viewdata pages for other businesses on Prestel. There was also a primitive chatroom with a handful of regulars, and a thing called 'mailbox' which was the earliest form of email.
About 1984 from memory. Oh yeah, there was a form of online banking available as well.
Edited by drainbrain on Wednesday 22 March 23:13
Leaving your computer on for 87 days waiting for some Eminem track to download on napster.
Shouting at mum to get off the phone because she cut the Internet off ringing family members, and that 56k dialup tone still gives me nightmares.
250mb zip drives were the doggies nuts of removable discs, yet we now have 128gb (prob more now) on a tiny micro sd card.
Shouting at mum to get off the phone because she cut the Internet off ringing family members, and that 56k dialup tone still gives me nightmares.
250mb zip drives were the doggies nuts of removable discs, yet we now have 128gb (prob more now) on a tiny micro sd card.
Edited by dazwalsh on Wednesday 22 March 23:15
drainbrain said:
Does working with Prestel count?
In the '80's I had a business which involved creating Viewdata pages for other businesses on Prestel. There was also a primitive chatroom with a handful of regulars, and a thing called 'mailbox' which was the earliest form of email.
About 1984 from memory. Oh yeah, there was a form of online banking available as well.
Blimey, 'Pretzel' as it was known, my first 'online' experience too, firing up the Speccy using a portable tv as a monitor, spent hours chatting to a few bods who used to meet up in the evenings. only name I remember is Pling In the '80's I had a business which involved creating Viewdata pages for other businesses on Prestel. There was also a primitive chatroom with a handful of regulars, and a thing called 'mailbox' which was the earliest form of email.
About 1984 from memory. Oh yeah, there was a form of online banking available as well.
Edited by drainbrain on Wednesday 22 March 23:13
good times, Dad was not happy with the phone bill though 
First exposure to the 'net was on green screens and clicky keyboards in the early 90s.
Mainly IRC and Usenet. Lots of manually typed commands to remember! - but the network at University was pretty rapid. Out in halls, we had a portacabin with 5 or 6 green screen terminals in it, many an evening was spent in there with a takeaway pizza and 4 pack of cheap beer.
We also had a Mac lab and PC lab on main campus, the PC lab had 386 PCs with VGA colour screens and a very early browser installed. You could also download dirty pics onto floppies so you could view them on your Amiga back in halls!
So that's around 25 years of internet use now! I still recall upgrading from dial-up to ADSL, using a 'Stingray' USB modem back in the day.
Mainly IRC and Usenet. Lots of manually typed commands to remember! - but the network at University was pretty rapid. Out in halls, we had a portacabin with 5 or 6 green screen terminals in it, many an evening was spent in there with a takeaway pizza and 4 pack of cheap beer.
We also had a Mac lab and PC lab on main campus, the PC lab had 386 PCs with VGA colour screens and a very early browser installed. You could also download dirty pics onto floppies so you could view them on your Amiga back in halls!
So that's around 25 years of internet use now! I still recall upgrading from dial-up to ADSL, using a 'Stingray' USB modem back in the day.
I suppose I can remember three separate introductions to the internet. First would've been in primary school, when ones my age with computers at home would go to websites offering Flash games during lunch and break periods. At this point, I knew absolutely nothing about computers.
A year or two after that, we got the first computer in our house and some tasty dial-up internet. I can't remember the specs on the computer we had beyond it running Windows XP and having either 256MB or 512MB of RAM with an 80GB hard drive. Armed with an agonisingly slow connection around 2006/7, it became possible to look up cheat codes and walkthroughs on GameFAQs.
When I properly started onto the Internet, it was with a laptop bought as a gift shortly after we got broadband connection. GameFAQs all day, every day and as many forums as possible. Not a huge amount has changed in my Internet usage; fewer forums with a greater emphasis on cars and more Reddit, but fundamentally quite similar.
The laptop in question was a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li2735 which probably taught me more about computing than anything I've used since, going from "How do I copy and paste?" to managing to install Mac OS X on it for fun.
A year or two after that, we got the first computer in our house and some tasty dial-up internet. I can't remember the specs on the computer we had beyond it running Windows XP and having either 256MB or 512MB of RAM with an 80GB hard drive. Armed with an agonisingly slow connection around 2006/7, it became possible to look up cheat codes and walkthroughs on GameFAQs.
When I properly started onto the Internet, it was with a laptop bought as a gift shortly after we got broadband connection. GameFAQs all day, every day and as many forums as possible. Not a huge amount has changed in my Internet usage; fewer forums with a greater emphasis on cars and more Reddit, but fundamentally quite similar.
The laptop in question was a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li2735 which probably taught me more about computing than anything I've used since, going from "How do I copy and paste?" to managing to install Mac OS X on it for fun.
Trabi601 said:
First exposure to the 'net was on green screens and clicky keyboards in the early 90s.
Check the house if you've still got one of those early '90s clicky keyboards! Oftentimes they were mechanical, and there's a collector's market out there. IBM Model M and Model F keyboards are some of the most well-known examples but others existed as well. To an extent I imagine nostalgia drives their appeal but I do have a mechanical keyboard myself and it is satisfying to use.
About 1999/2000 I think; also on a Time machine (as advertised by Leonard Nemoy). 600mHz AMD processor, 128mb RAM, 13GB HD space and a 4mb on-board graphics chip and an external 56k modem. Connecting via AOL and Tiscali I believe and later the local ISP.
Most of my time at least initially was spent chatting to friends by ICQ, FB . But I remember the agonising wait for the download to complete for my first Flight Sim aircraft download. The Red Barons Fokker Triplane for Flight Unlimited 2. Six whole mb at something like 6kb/s took forever. Now aircraft downloads for FS/X-Plane 10 are around 300mb+ compared to my current connection of 250mb/s (downloads stuff so fast that unless it’s a couple of GB in size you rarely see what the DL rate actually is on “smaller” files.
And of course the early days of internet filth, most of it softcore in those days unless you went off the beaten track that is, now proper filth is just a Google search away :P
I remember the blue screen of death on windows 98 regularly and helpful error messages such as “An unknown error has occurred in unknown” and “No keyboard detected press F1 to continue”, XP a being a breath of fresh air when that came out.
Most of my time at least initially was spent chatting to friends by ICQ, FB . But I remember the agonising wait for the download to complete for my first Flight Sim aircraft download. The Red Barons Fokker Triplane for Flight Unlimited 2. Six whole mb at something like 6kb/s took forever. Now aircraft downloads for FS/X-Plane 10 are around 300mb+ compared to my current connection of 250mb/s (downloads stuff so fast that unless it’s a couple of GB in size you rarely see what the DL rate actually is on “smaller” files.
And of course the early days of internet filth, most of it softcore in those days unless you went off the beaten track that is, now proper filth is just a Google search away :P
I remember the blue screen of death on windows 98 regularly and helpful error messages such as “An unknown error has occurred in unknown” and “No keyboard detected press F1 to continue”, XP a being a breath of fresh air when that came out.
SystemParanoia said:
<reads summary>Sounds awful.
I assume we've all seen...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/
TooMany2cvs said:
SystemParanoia said:
<reads summary>Sounds awful.
I assume we've all seen...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/
Not yet!
I challenge you to at least sit through half an episode of this gem
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085110/?ref_=fn_al_tt...
Edited by SystemParanoia on Thursday 23 March 08:25
I had a group of virtual friends on quite a few BBS systems. Nottinghamshire was home to some of the best due to Diamond Cables free call policy. Diamond Wreck was my favorite, playing the text adventure Lord.
http://stevenfranks.info/wrecked/greetings.html
Great times!
http://stevenfranks.info/wrecked/greetings.html
Great times!
I remember playing some sort of word/adventure game in the 80's on my friends Amiga. he had persuaded his parents to get a modem.
when stuck you could try and dial up for answers or even ring (I guess a premium line) and talk to a real person for answers.
then the phone bill arrived. about £500 for a qtr !!! In the 80's !!!!!
when stuck you could try and dial up for answers or even ring (I guess a premium line) and talk to a real person for answers.
then the phone bill arrived. about £500 for a qtr !!! In the 80's !!!!!
tokyo_mb said:
St Andrews or somewhere else? I recall arriving in St Andrews in 1990 when the Sun Sparcstations had first been installed replacing an old Vax + terminals. Quite a change.
Nope, I'm not clever enough to have gone there, Wolves Uni for me. For the time they were very impressive, it blew my mind that you could run a program remote on another machine, so we used it for the most sensible thing ever, playing audio files at full volume on other people's machines to get them in trouble. Had a mate in about 1990 who had a 14.4k modem that he used to use to access various usenet and BBS groups. I could never see the point of it, but it seemed to keep him happy.
A few years later and I toddled off to University where we were issued with email accounts and 24 hour access to computer labs..... never looked back
It's pretty remarkable that my dad (born in 1936) didn't have a home phone but his son now has a device that can live stream full HD video and has the entirety of human knowledge in his pocket.
A few years later and I toddled off to University where we were issued with email accounts and 24 hour access to computer labs..... never looked back
It's pretty remarkable that my dad (born in 1936) didn't have a home phone but his son now has a device that can live stream full HD video and has the entirety of human knowledge in his pocket.
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