First internet experience?
Discussion
As it says really - what was your first experience of the internet?
Mine was when my parents got a new PC with a modem, as my dad needed remote access to work - remember being really excited by winding people up on some crappy chat program, and some quiz site that I got a bit obsessed with. Never thought it would catch on though...
Mine was when my parents got a new PC with a modem, as my dad needed remote access to work - remember being really excited by winding people up on some crappy chat program, and some quiz site that I got a bit obsessed with. Never thought it would catch on though...
Aside from playing around with PADS in the early 80s, using the original MUD at Essex at 3 a.m. and wasting hours on Usenet instead of my PhD write-up, my first really exciting Internet experience was doing the original WWW site for Morgan.
Edited by marshalla on Saturday 7th February 22:57
Does Prestel count? If so 1982 using a Tantel adaptor.
BBS service back in 1985 ish on an Apple2 connecting at 300/300.
Later using a service called Xstream - This nice company gave a free weekend 0800 number and was paid via advertising and everyone found that if you redialed 5 mins before the deadline you could get another hour
BBS service back in 1985 ish on an Apple2 connecting at 300/300.
Later using a service called Xstream - This nice company gave a free weekend 0800 number and was paid via advertising and everyone found that if you redialed 5 mins before the deadline you could get another hour
Morningside said:
Does Prestel count? If so 1982 using a Tantel adaptor.
BBS service back in 1985 ish on an Apple2 connecting at 300/300.
Later using a service called Xstream - This nice company gave a free weekend 0800 number and was paid via advertising and everyone found that if you redialed 5 mins before the deadline you could get another hour
Woah, that is well old school! When did it first become a "consumer" product? I think it was 1998(ish) when I started using it?BBS service back in 1985 ish on an Apple2 connecting at 300/300.
Later using a service called Xstream - This nice company gave a free weekend 0800 number and was paid via advertising and everyone found that if you redialed 5 mins before the deadline you could get another hour
Bob Fossil said:
Morningside said:
Does Prestel count? If so 1982 using a Tantel adaptor.
BBS service back in 1985 ish on an Apple2 connecting at 300/300.
Later using a service called Xstream - This nice company gave a free weekend 0800 number and was paid via advertising and everyone found that if you redialed 5 mins before the deadline you could get another hour
Woah, that is well old school! When did it first become a "consumer" product? I think it was 1998(ish) when I started using it?BBS service back in 1985 ish on an Apple2 connecting at 300/300.
Later using a service called Xstream - This nice company gave a free weekend 0800 number and was paid via advertising and everyone found that if you redialed 5 mins before the deadline you could get another hour
Very expensive as most pages cost money and it even had a pence counter in the top corner..Scary stuff. I have an advert for it somewhere.
Early 1990s when I was a postgrad student. Even at Leeds uni, undergrads didn't get Internet access of any sort then. I actually had to ask my course tutor for a favour in order to get access!
This was just before NCSA Mosaic came in, so I was limited to FTP (that pretty much meant NASA JPL), email and Usenet. Of course, it was all over a purely text interface! The very first time I used it, I posted a question on a Usenet group, and an email answer arrived within 2 minutes. Thankfully this was waaaay before spam.
I was more or less limited to about 30 mins 2 or 3 days a week, so used to spool the Usenet subscribed groups text file to floppy and read it at home.
This was just before NCSA Mosaic came in, so I was limited to FTP (that pretty much meant NASA JPL), email and Usenet. Of course, it was all over a purely text interface! The very first time I used it, I posted a question on a Usenet group, and an email answer arrived within 2 minutes. Thankfully this was waaaay before spam.
I was more or less limited to about 30 mins 2 or 3 days a week, so used to spool the Usenet subscribed groups text file to floppy and read it at home.
In 1993, before the spread of wide-spread dial-up internet I poked around around the only BBS within local area dial-up range. Being only about 13 years old I didn't want to start racking up national-rate phone charges! It was the CSC BBS in Ipswich if memory serves, I got quite into playing some inter-bbs text-based strategy game. It was played out in real-time with attacks taking days to plan and missiles taking days to reach the enemy BBS. All I can remember was that the big evil nuke things were called Gooey Kablooeys or something of the like. This was all using a Hayes 2400 baud external modem!
Moving on from it was a world of vossnet and compuserve trials using a 14.4 modem that I scrounged. It was an internal modem that had all the jumpers missing from the board. As a result, I had to blindly resolve IRQ conflict Hell as in its initial state it would only operate whilst I continually wiggled the mouse. Those were the days! Got it all working, but it was horrific for web-browsing due to all the f**kers that had discovered huge animated gifs. I used to hate the bloke at school with the US Robotics 28k modem!
Once I got a 56k job we were in a world of proper pay as you go dial-up, with things like Wireplay and the MS gaming zone
After that in 1999 I went from a 56k connection to 10mb via a lan socket in my room at uni! Used to pwn all the n00bs on unreal tournament, them with their dial-up pings and me with my hugely fast connection
After my first year at uni I moved into a house with some friends, all being geeks we installed an ISDN line! The trouble was the free-phone ISP we were using only supported one channel at a time, so we had two PCs with two ISDN cards connected 24/7. Downloading constantly. I also used to download large files overnight by using free dialup on my mobile phone, which I could us as a modem. Because I was on a contract - the ISP paid for the calls. It must have cost them hundreds of £! As a result I think I made the ISP RedHotAnt go bust.
The next year we became early adopters for 0.5mb ASDL (£400 to install!). That little sperm shaped modem brought to much joy (and porn) to the student house!
Moving on from it was a world of vossnet and compuserve trials using a 14.4 modem that I scrounged. It was an internal modem that had all the jumpers missing from the board. As a result, I had to blindly resolve IRQ conflict Hell as in its initial state it would only operate whilst I continually wiggled the mouse. Those were the days! Got it all working, but it was horrific for web-browsing due to all the f**kers that had discovered huge animated gifs. I used to hate the bloke at school with the US Robotics 28k modem!
Once I got a 56k job we were in a world of proper pay as you go dial-up, with things like Wireplay and the MS gaming zone
After that in 1999 I went from a 56k connection to 10mb via a lan socket in my room at uni! Used to pwn all the n00bs on unreal tournament, them with their dial-up pings and me with my hugely fast connection
After my first year at uni I moved into a house with some friends, all being geeks we installed an ISDN line! The trouble was the free-phone ISP we were using only supported one channel at a time, so we had two PCs with two ISDN cards connected 24/7. Downloading constantly. I also used to download large files overnight by using free dialup on my mobile phone, which I could us as a modem. Because I was on a contract - the ISP paid for the calls. It must have cost them hundreds of £! As a result I think I made the ISP RedHotAnt go bust.
The next year we became early adopters for 0.5mb ASDL (£400 to install!). That little sperm shaped modem brought to much joy (and porn) to the student house!
Edited by kjmac on Saturday 7th February 23:15
My computing experiences started with IBM 360s, then EE KDF9 and Elliots. I remember using Prestel on BBC micros. I remember accessing Usenet News and using Telnet and FTP to communicate with other computers across the network using a DEC terminal on a VAX. Then doing all the same using a Mac. Things got interesting with Gopher and WAIS and then Mosaic and WWW came along and the rest, as they say, is history...
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