Do you remember your first days on the internet?

[Pebbles167]

Whilst I vaguely remember dial up, (I'm 27) I only ever saw it used to check the occasional thing, and it all seemed rather pointless. Once broadband arrived though, that was a game changer. I left my mums and went to live with my dad because I thought it was cool. I spent every night until the early hours playing quake, half life and command and conquer online, occasionally skipping school the next day. By the time i was a teenager I'd managed to get friendly with a lot of the girls from school, and managed to get a few of them stripping off on webcam, while my friends sat giggling out of sight in the corner. Hilarious stuff!

[BigBen]

SystemParanoia said:

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

No need because I probably watched every episode when it was first shown on Saturday evenings.

Ben

[Sheets Tabuer]

TooMany2cvs said:

Sheets Tabuer said:

If the first commercial ISPs didn't even emerge until 1990 how can having a modem in 1975 qualify as being on the internet?

Because the internet is/was more than just commercial ISPs.

Indeed but as there was no connection to any of that from pipex in 1990 how can anyone say they were on the internet.

Unless of course they had a connection to the local university.

[Shakermaker]

S11Steve said:

I'm old enough to still have my unedited and not uncommon name as a Yahoo and Hotmail email address.

Same with Hotmail here as well, my name, no spaces, underscores, dots or numbers, just [e-mail]

Had to go a bit worse and have [e-mail] when I signed up with them!

[Morningside]

V8A*ndy said:

1994-5 a mate of mine was a geek in a local computer shop.

I was using packet radio (amateur radio still have the modem) with an Amiga and I got talking to him about the internet as a local ISP had started up.

So he built me a computer and we hooked up to the phone line. After a couple of hours I exclaimed....

"Feck me! this could be the end of Amateur radio" I repeated this statement many times until the phone bill arrived

I think the truth is it WAS the end of amateur radio as people concentrated​ more on the computer than radio side. Tried hooking up various stuff but the RFI caused more trouble than it was worth.

[Morningside]

I honestly thought I was going to get a knock on the door when I downloaded my first pirate film from some obscure site.

Then after downloading finding that this blockbuster was really a porn video worried me even more!

[SystemParanoia]

Morningside said:

I honestly thought I was going to get a knock on the door when I downloaded my first pirate film from some obscure site.

Then after downloading finding that this blockbuster was really a porn video worried me even more!

Kazaa was really bad for the whole renaming stuff into other stuff just to trick people.

No idea what the person/s wasting their own upload bandwidth got out of it

[JakeT]

ukaskew said:

After a few years my folks let me have a separate line installed in my bedroom, happy days, no getting off the internet when Mum was expecting a call from an Aunt or something!

The multiple lines thing definitely takes me back. To the fact that my parents house still has four lines installed! Business phone, fax, and internet. Home phone too. We didn't get broadband until 2004...

Edited by JakeT on Thursday 23 March 11:30

[fido]

I remember getting a £50 phone bill from my dad and getting out of it by saying I was doing programming stuff when in fact I was downloading pr0n ..

[Planet Claire]

Hoofy said:

Planet Claire said:

Piersman2 said:

alt.binaries.pictures...

Not necessarily those, but I remember the various newsgroups from when I went to uni in 1991, and getting my first email address.

The web-browser of choice back then was Netscape.

Web browser... 1991?

It was all telnet and newsgroups. Started uni in 1990 and discovered the internet then.

I should have clarified that it was later on whilst I was doing my masters in 95/96 that I remember using Netscape. Before that it was just newsgroups, bulletin boards (and I remember getting onto some online role-playing type games) on VAX/VMS and Unix systems, all DCL, non of the new-fangled Windows stuff!

Although having a computing module within my maths degree I spent far too much time dossing about with the computing kids.

[Hoofy]

Planet Claire said:

Hoofy said:

Planet Claire said:

Piersman2 said:

alt.binaries.pictures...

Not necessarily those, but I remember the various newsgroups from when I went to uni in 1991, and getting my first email address.

The web-browser of choice back then was Netscape.

Web browser... 1991?

It was all telnet and newsgroups. Started uni in 1990 and discovered the internet then.

I should have clarified that it was later on whilst I was doing my masters in 95/96 that I remember using Netscape. Before that it was just newsgroups, bulletin boards (and I remember getting onto some online role-playing type games) on VAX/VMS and Unix systems, all DCL, non of the new-fangled Windows stuff!

Although having a computing module within my maths degree I spent far too much time dossing about with the computing kids.

Ah, it's possible that our paths crossed. By paths, I mean in the sense that we were probably both standing in a clearing, I entered from the east and headed west while you entered from the south and headed north. :

[Trabi601]

Planet Claire said:

I should have clarified that it was later on whilst I was doing my masters in 95/96 that I remember using Netscape. Before that it was just newsgroups, bulletin boards (and I remember getting onto some online role-playing type games) on VAX/VMS and Unix systems, all DCL, non of the new-fangled Windows stuff!

Although having a computing module within my maths degree I spent far too much time dossing about with the computing kids.

I cut my teeth on VAX and Pyramid.

[talksthetorque]

First experience 1992 - was on the Uni Vax/VMS system, there was mail, and also chatting to other students who you could list who was online - known only by their usernames ( and the fact we were all in the laserquest society)
We had to ask permission to email students in other universities, but seeing as none of my friends had email, there wasn't much point.

Leaving uni and going to work in a tech company I had access to 386s and 486s, and when I'd saved up got a pentium 2 for my new house. then about a year on - having got thoroughly bored of solitaire I thought I'd sign up for this new company called Tiscali who offered FREE DIAL UP! in the evenings, as long as you used them for the phone line.
SIx months and it cost me nothing.
BT were found to have not been releasing the call data to the ISP/Phone companies, in the hope that they would go pop and they'd have the market.
The ISPs weren't very happy at this ( something minor like having no income) and got lawyers involved, and I got a bill for £135.
Ouch.

I was using it mainly for uk.rec.cars.mods and uk.rec.cars.misc. amongst other usenet groups with the letters alt.bin at the beginning

Edited by talksthetorque on Thursday 23 March 22:37

[speedyman]

First dialup modem i used was 300 baud, then upgraded to 1200, then 9600, finally 14.4 but still very slow before moving over to broadband. Used to use Alta Visa, Mosaic and Netscape browsers in the 1990s. I was working for digital (dec) though, so had a head start being at a tech. company using vaxes and vms.

[Jonesy23]

Scary to think back...

Did BBS stuff in the late 80s.

Got Demon in 1992 or so, painful to setup Winsock from what I remember and all was so slow!

Took years for sites to get away from being simple and grey. Plus not much in the way of search, mostly just links.

IRC was fun, good typing practice too.

Got into MP3 in 1996. Ripping was non-trivial, playback took a lot of grunt too. Trading via FTP. There were some guys running a hotel booking thing who were behind a lot of it, they had the naming on their machines set up with things like 'lysergic-acid-diethylamide.site.co.uk' and it would break a lot of DNS and things.

Was quite capable of saturating a (for the time) quite serious multi mbps link with the amount of stuff I was running.

The entertainment of running some of the early DoS attacks like teardrop and watching people drop offline if they annoyed you - it was all so simple back then!

All downhill from there. Things moved on so very quickly...