The day the internet was turned on

[RizzoTheRat]

For those getting nostalgic about old computers, you could always build your own PDP8
http://obsolescence.wix.com/obsolescence#!pidp-8/c...

[Morningside]

Ynox said:

Morningside said:

First connected to the Internet with a company that gave a freephone connection from Friday until Monday and worked by advertising and gave an hour at a time and then you redialed. Cannot for the life of me think of the name.

XStream I think. It definitely had adverts and allowed an hour a time.

That's the one!

[Ginge R]

It was 1984 for me. I was at a U.S. air base, bored one night, and noticed the VDU going mad. I enjoyed a very enjoyable hour long 'chat' with a lady at a weather station in Alaska. My first PC was a 386, with modem.. it cost me c DM 2800 tax free in Germany in the early nineties with the 4 Mg of RAM upgrade. I still have lots of Internet protocol books from the time, one of the articles 'Should I use 'any key' when required and suggested, or should I always use the same one'.. very amusing.

[Moonhawk]

I can remember being on dialup - having to arrange for the landline to be out of order - and running an extension cable from the hall, all the way up the stairs to the study

[130R]

When my 14.4k modem downloaded that first pic of a topless women in just 45 minutes I knew it was the dawn of a new age

[maxdb]

For me it was about 1997 at school and 1998 at home. I did read about the internet once in an old Amiga magazine but it did not interest me very much. That would of been around 1995 time. I did have an Amiga 500 at the time but no modem and no money or desire to try and get one as they were very expensive at the time.

Our school was the 1st time we got internet access as they upgraded their naff Apple PC's and 486's to Pentium 2 PC's. Web browsing was ok but basic and download speeds were really slow at peak times - anything between 0.1kb sec to 3kb sec. After 1997 I used to download nes roms from school to take home and play.

Internet back then just seemed like a fad like 3D tv was or Twitter. No one expected for it to take off like it did today. I really wished we had wireless connections back then as I was forever told off for hogging the phone line and leaving cables everywhere..

ADSL came about around 2000 to our town centre so some internet cafe's popped up. Trips to down were made with blank cd-r's so you could download bigger stuff to take home. Back then it was N64 roms, music and movie clips as Napster was the rage back then and basically everyone was downloading what they could.

Floppy disks were still a big thing back then but they were a pain as corrupted easy. Was able to fit them in my school blazer and used for home work and downloading. We also had our own log ins at work with storage space so I used to compress a lot of files to fit to floppy. I even managed to get a few mp3's on there!