When did you first start using the internet?

[Twigsoffury]

1994 here, I remember on yahoo chat, you had to manually scroll the window and banner ads didn't exist. Not to mention unregulated fun.



www.altavista.com was the #1 search engine. (i see that worked out for them...:o)

[Kayin]

1994 as well, MUDs. Oh, what fun.

[Oneslowz28]

1993. I was 9 years old.

Speaking of yahoo chat. I was a booter back in the day. I would message bomb chatters and when they closed the message window their computer would BSOD. I did this for 3 years or so.

Then P2P became popular and I would spend hours browsing peoples documents folder. It always amazed me at how wide open people left things.

Then came my discovery of message boards with a local car club I helped start. We grew to 2k members in just a month and almost 20k by the 8 month mark. I must have had 40k post on that site.

I bounced around from one car forum to another, and eventually wound up here.

The one thing I do miss about the old internet is how much fun surfing was. You could find a good link exchange and spend hours and days visiting thousands of sites all related to that same topic. We have things like that now (stumbleupon) but nothing like it used to be.

[Twigsoffury]

1994 as well, MUDs. Oh, what fun.

hahahah remember AOL Vs Netscape?

[Kayin]

Yup. And CompuServe!

[slaveofconvention]

94? sheesh - I was sneaking into the local university computer labs and using IRC via a terminal prompt a couple years before that. Windows 3.1 on 386's if I remember correctly - it was scary but cool lol. I still remember all the excitement a couple years later when Netscape appeared lol

[Oneslowz28]

I also remember all the hype when AOL 5.0 came out.

[Spawn-Inc]

hmm, i think i was in grade 6 so that would make me 10 so 1997. when msn 3 or 4 came out i was hooked. i spent 3-4 hours a day on it.

[Oneslowz28]

I remember in 6th grade a group of us crowding around one of the computers. One of the 8th graders had cracked the password to the net filter and he had pulled up a bikini site. I think the password was something like 1234 or something.

[Kayin]

I enjoyed making the speech generation software in the library swear.

[chaksq]

I was a late bloomer I guess. I think the earliest I used the internet was '97/'98 and just in school. I know the first time I spent a considerable amount on the internet was probably in '99. I know it was around when Lego started releasing star wars sets (1999) because that was the first thing I looked up on the internet for my personal interest. I was about 10 at the time. I started to use it regularly around my second year of middle school which I think was 2001. Didn't start using the internet for any practical purpose until high school when I started using web forums.

[xRyokenx]

I didn't start using it until I was in 9th grade, so pretty much six years ago in 2004. We didn't have internet because my parents are cheapasses and if it weren't for my dad's current job (and addiction to Rage of Cornman) we probably wouldn't have it now.

[mittelmeier]

93 for me. I remember every other day you would get an aol disk in the mail but you didn't dare use it because the "local" numbers for the 500 free hours would cost an arm and a leg on the phone bill.

[Spawn-Inc]

I enjoyed making the speech generation software in the library swear.

lol, man those were good times in French class. we went through about 4-5 French teachers that year. our normal one was on maternity leave.

[x88x]

'98 was the earliest for me, that was when we finally got a computer with a modem. My use increased slowly over the next few years, but I never really went much past buying stuff and random surfing. Between dial-up and only having one phone line, I never really spent a lot of time online until I went to college in '05...at which point I suddenly realized what I had been missing, and I've spent ridiculous amounts of time online ever since :P

[d_stilgar]

1994. I was 8. My brother and I would surf a little on AOL, but the internet was so new that my parents had internet safety training with us. Some of that identity safety stuff was legit, but for the most part having an internet presence often means using your real name. I remember finally breaking out of AOL and realizing just how much more there was out there and how much better it was.

The best part about early internet though was waiting for a 10 second sound byte to download for like . . . 20 minutes. Homer Simpson would say something funny, and then you would download another. Also, flash movies. Animutations were the best, especially Lesko's Revenge.

[blueonblack]

1995 - Like many I started with AOL, and was on the pay-by-the-minute plan. Thankfully, after we got our second sky-high bill they switched everyone over to unlimited access. Probably saved my credit right there.

[x88x]

I remember finally breaking out of AOL and realizing just how much more there was out there and how much better it was.

Haha, yeah; I remember when I realized that there were other internet browsers (besides the AOL/Juno/[insert ISP here] browsers), and they would actually work with any provider :D

[SXRguyinMA]

LOL

I dont remember the year, but I remember being all excited that my parents got a brand new computer with the original Pentium in it. And AOL, and the 8 million free CDs, and realizing that I could bypass the AOL parental controls by simply minimizing it and using IE instead lol.

Also a friend gave me a copy of Rouge Spear and I would be on the MSN gaming zone almost every night playing, and how cool it was that I was playing with people from around the world. Also Combat Flight Sim on the Zone as well. Good times!

[Bopher]

Had to of been '94 or '95, same as a lot of people here AOL. Before that it was local BBSs. Mainly email and school research. Used to play a few text adventure game online. We had AOL for probably about 6 months and removed it after my sister and her friend burned up the free hours in 3 days of chatting. Moved onto Wyoming.com when that was offered for unlimited time.

[SgtM]

1995 for me. Back when AOhelL was the shiz.

[NightrainSrt4]

Don't remember the year, but seems to be the same as a lot of you guys, back in the early AOL days. God that dialup sound still makes me cringe.

In the early years (for me) I remember using gamefaqs quite often. And then my cousin got everquest in 99', and I remember the day after oh so many that I could just sit and watch that he set me up with my own character to play.

Ahh, those days were seriously fun.

[Twigsoffury]

93 for me. I remember every other day you would get an aol disk in the mail but you didn't dare use it because the "local" numbers for the 500 free hours would cost an arm and a leg on the phone bill.

hahahahhahhahahahahahahhahahahhahahahahhahahahahha ha.

I know exactly what your talking about.

FYI, My voicemail is the sound of a Phone modem,

So if people call that i dont know, They think they've gotten a fax machine or something.

My voicemail box stays rather empty.

[artoodeeto]

FYI, My voicemail is the sound of a Phone modem,
So if people call that i dont know, They think they've gotten a fax machine or something.
My voicemail box stays rather empty.

That's AWESOME. I should try it on my work email...

For me, I started on the internet in 1994 I think, when I was 16. I don't remember exactly when my family switched from our first PC, a Tandy 486 50MHz with no modem, to a Packard Bell 486DX2 with a modem. I know that by 1995 I was using the Tandy as my own computer (Windows 95 took up nearly all of the 120MB hard drive LOL), and I took that computer to college in 1996. But since there was no modem, I rarely went online that year; I could only do it from campus computer labs.
The next year I got a Pentium with a modem, and remember using Netscape and trying to dial in to campus modem banks...it was tough, with 22,000 other students trying to do the same thing. Lots of busy signals...ugh. I don't think I went from dialup to cable til late 2001.

Incidentally, my handle on this forum (and elsewhere on the web) is my original email address from AOL all those years ago. It's obviously a spelling out of R2D2 (that and all other star wars related addresses I could think of were taken at the time) and "artoodeetoo" was one character too long, which is why it's missing the last "o".

And lastly, while I'm waxing nostalgic, the first computer we got, prior to that Tandy, was an Apple IIGS. No hard drive, dot matrix printer, 2 floppy drives (the second of which cost a whopping $300! back in 1988 or 1989). It's sound quality kicked some serious PC butt at the time, but Apple eventually dropped the machine and companies stopped making software for it, so in 1990 we got the Tandy and I could play games again. :)

[simon275]

I first remember using it in 94. We had a dial up account to the net. A page was good if it had good gif anmiations. Before that we hooked up to a few BBS's.

[Twigsoffury]

my first real computer was a 75mhz Packard bell, cant really remember the specs, but back then it was like

WOW you have "A" computer.


we had 2 before that, i remember the first one had a monochromatic green screen and took those 5.25" floppy disks to do anything at all, i dont think it had a HDD at all.

i remember getting a CD-rom for christmas one year, man that must of been the equivalent price of a playstation 3.

[Airbozo]

'87-'88 at work. Used to have to start some data transfers before going home and hoping they would be done before coming back to work in the morning. All 1mb or so... ~'89 for personal use. I used to have my 300 baud acoustical modem as proof... It's now sitting in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I always laugh when some young 'en claims his generation invented the texting language. Due to the fact that you were charged for EVERY character in your email, we got pretty creative.

I was still using a text browser when the www protocol was approved.

And get this: I have NEVER EVER had an AOL or Compuserve account... To top it off, the only time I ever put one of those AOL coasters in my computer was when they sent a free game on the disk (can't recall now what it was).

Spam was pretty nonexistant and when someone did send spam, they were bombarded with hate email to the point of crashing their email server. One of the companies I worked for had a script setup that all you had to do was forward the bad email to a certain account and it would DOS the offending server.

It took days to download and reassemble several files just for one pron mpeg... (lol)


EDIT: BTW: I have had my primary domain (airbozo.com) since 1995...

[Luke122]

Airbozo Wins!

:D

I was 93 or 94.. I had a good old 1200 baud dial up modem, and I would frequent the local BBS. Once we upgraded to the 14.4 modem ($79,99!!! ouch!), we were into Netscape and graphical browsing through Telus. I was big in IRC at the time, since it was the cheapest and fastest way to communicate around the world at the time.

ICQ came next, but was so security faulty, that I didnt stick with it for long.

Webcrawler was the search of choice for us

[x88x]

The first computer we had was an ancient Leading Edge Model D2...that I swear I cannot find a single Intel chip on...but I think it was of the 386 era. It had a 10MB HDD and one 5.25" floppy, and ran some custom DOS 4.1 shell. Only reason we had it was because my grandfather left it to my mom when he died, and since neither of my parents were technical at all, we never had a modem for it. We used that from whenever we got it (I really have no clue when that was) until the HDD died around '95-96-ish.
Then we actually didn't even have a computer till we got a Compaq mini-tower in '98 with a 166MHz Pentium, 32MB of RAM, a 1.9GB HDD, 16x CD-ROM, 3.5" floppy, and a 56k modem, and running Windows 95. Started off with Juno for dial-up before bouncing around to a variety of different providers including AOL, Qwest, and Net Zero. Like I said before though, I never really did much with the internet until college. I learned a whole lot about computer hardware by tinkering with stuff and volunteering at a couple places, but my one regret is that I never did anything with any networking (including internet) at all until college. I really feel like I missed out on the early(er) years of the internet, but tbh I didn't even know what I was missing.

Maybe because I missed out on it, whether for lack of knowledge or being born too late, but I have a fascination with old computer tech and related stuff. For anyone who's interested, whether for nostalgic or historical reasons, Jason Scott made a great documentary on the BBS. Here's the home page (http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/), but it was actually published under a Creative Commons license, so if it's ok with our mods, I can post a torrent link for it.

[Collinstheclown]

To top it off, the only time I ever put one of those AOL coasters in my computer was when they sent a free game on the disk (can't recall now what it was).

Chex Quest? Haha

I used to collect AOL CDs, dunno why. I started internet'n with AOL 4.0, whatever year that was. I've had a totaly of 3 online names, 2 of which are still in use. :)




-CollinstheClown

[Oneslowz28]

I still have my AOL name.... Southerncomphort. I don't remember when I made it but I know I had it in 7th grade .

[Twigsoffury]

I still have my AOL name.... Southerncomphort. I don't remember when I made it but I know I had it in 7th grade .

whew i've used this name for awhile.

I know my original name was Coo1.

Damn..hahaha made me think back to a time before you needed 19327 after your name just to get it

[cellsite60]

I started using the commercial Internet around '94 but been on the phonelines via modem earlier. (BBS)
The speed was not there but man it was soft, no comercials and stuff =)