First Internet Experience Stories Anyone????

[allinktup]

that 10 or so years ago when Al Gore invented the internets (LOL J/K) that it would get to this point. I remember my first time on the internet. I was at Central Mich. Univ. chatting away on yahoo, probably for about 5 hours straight when I decided to try and figure out who I was talking to. So I stand up in the middle of the pc lab looking and looking trying to figure out who I was chatting with... of course it then dawned on me just what was going on and that the person wasn't in the same room. Just blew me away. And now I sit here some 11 years later and can't imagine life without the ability to just reach out and talk to people all over the world. Ain't life strainge... Who'd a thunk it?

[slj0101]

1. 1994: in college, on telnet, chatting on something called a MUD.

The other chatters were complete dicks, and I vowed never to use a chat room or bulletin board again.

[allinktup]

2. yeah...how's that working for you?

[slj0101]

7. A slight improvement, thank you.

[NMDemDist2]

15. 94 for me too

newly married, my hubby insisted we needed a new puter ("what's wrong with flipping floppys" says I. "My 286 works fine"....)

found a recovery chat room and role playing games and that was that...

hubby said we shoulda started some porn servers back then, we'd be retired by now. how right he was....

[Reverend_Smitty]

3. Probably AOL 1995/96

I was about 11 or 12 years old and I used the chat room features and ventured out onto the web for the first time over a friend's house. I was completely hooked from day on even though I didn't get my first home internet connection until 97. I personally feel that instant messenger is one of the greatest achievements of the late 20th century. In college my roommate and I would have entire conversations with each other on it while we were 5 feet away from each other...lol

[allinktup]

5. god i feel old now, thanx!

:puke:

[Reverend_Smitty]

6. lol

:)

[pokerfan]

14. You feel old?

I first used a computer in 1974 (university mainframe when I was still in HS).
Keypunching in 1977.
Used papertape storage in 1978 (microprocessor class).
Stored my computer class programs on 8 inch floppy discs in 1979.
My first home computer in 1979 (TRS-80).
First modem was 300/1200 baud.
Started cruising bulletin board systems in the 80's.
Got on Fidonet in the late 80s.
Got on the internets (SLIP/PPP connection) in 1991.
And it's been downhill ever since...

[WCGreen]

4. Prodigy in 1994...

And they censored me for attacking Rush Limbaugh....

I said fuck that and walked away for about two years until a friend told me about porn and the internet...

[Rhythm]

8. 1996... public library in Charlotte NC

i remember creating my first e-mail account on something called Charlotte's Web (server operated by the library system), and posting some blurbs on a support forum for neo-pagans.

geez... that has been lifetimes ago.

[Solon]

9. Let's see, it was 1990, I think, I was 12, just built a 386SX computer....

It ran first Compuserve, then AOL, I also logged into a few BBSes at the time, though they were already being supplemented by IRC. Good times.

I even bought DOOM and played it on this computer, it was a slideshow with a small viewable screen that was about a half-inch in size.

[philosophie_en_rose]

10. I was about twelve. My parents had signed up for AOL.

It was dial-up. We did not know that the connection was long-distance.

I looked at random things for about an hour.

It cost much more than it was worth.

My parents cancelled AOL.

[puerco-bellies]

11. New Mexico Tech 1993

I had to install a 1440baud modem in my 386kb Packard Bell with a whole 2mb of ram, and a huge 44meg hard drive!!! The modem was half the size of my motherboard. I thought I was the shit with that rig. The first thing I did was used telenet to download homework and up-load a long dead coding language to the on campus complier, it blew me away.

Surfing the web was way different, I think the browser I used was mozilla cameleon to surf primarily text web pages. In order to down load an image you would start the down load of binary coded images and go to sleep hoping that you did not lose the connection over night or your computer did not crash. The only way to see an image downloaded in a reasonable time frame was to go to the computer lab and watch it appear pixel line by pixel line. I would play a mud (multi user dungeon) game that was loosely based on the town of Soccorro New Mexico.. Good times.

[Nicole]

12. A/S/L

That's the first thing I saw when a friend showed me the yahoo chat room she was in. It went downhill from there. :rofl:

I had a computer at home but wasn't hooked up to the internet yet. I didn't think I needed it. I used my computer as a typewriter for about 2 years.

[ForrestGump]

13. Graduate school in 1992

It'd been a few years since my prior degree, and so the Internet was new to me. Got an e-mail address, got a Telnet account, and for a little outside input I'd use Newswatcher (Macintosh) to read the Usenet newsgroups -- they proliferated quickly -- and some time later I tried this freaky thing called Lynx that accessed this freakier thing called the Worldwide Web, that seemed to have something to do with some Swiss dude, maybe in a place called Cern. Mosaic followed and proved a revelation, with graphics, and then I discovered the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Internet in full.

The Web was small then, and it seemed to double in size every week. A search term you input back then that might yield a couple or no hits (I switched among search engines, but for a long time used Lycos) would today yield hundreds, at minimum.

[seaglass]

16. It was on AOL back in the early 90s and I went into one of

the chat rooms. Within about 5 minutes some guy sent me a personal message (not IM but something like it) wanting to know what I looked like and if we could meet. I totally freaked out, thought he could find me so I shut down the computer.

[ScreamingMeemie]

17. 1999...Yes, I'm lame.

My first screen name was momminj99 because, like I said, I'm lame. :hi:

[Courtesy Flush]

18. I had AOL and Compuserve at the same time

They each offered different stuff, and besides, you only were alloted so many hours per month before the per-minute rate kicked in, so it paid to have two services.

It wasn't really the internet, though. It was AOL and Compuserve. They did'nt offer access to anything outside of their service. When they added internet, it was so unresponsive that you could barely use it... and there wasn't much to see anyway.


God, I had almost forgotten that damned blue bar! Please wait while we load graphics. It was awful.

[Left Is Write]

19. 1995. IRC.

My first real internet friend was in California; I was in Minnesota.

[fla nocount]

20. Hazy memory.

It had someting to do with running 95 on a 186 and AOL. It suxed, that much I do remember

[montanto]

21. computers and the internets were invented for

porn! 1994

[Spirochete]

22. I first got on the Internet

in 1995. via AOL. I remember getting a Mustek hand scanner, and putting Barbara Bush's head on a centerfold, and uploading it as my first online prank.

[jpgray]

23. Prodigy... waaaaay back in the day.

[dropkickpa]

24. We got Prodigy in 1991, after being gouged by Compu$erve

I was 13-14 when we got Compu$erve. Started using it primarily to do research and to bullcrap about books. We always had computers in the house. In the 80s I remember when _____?____ magazine (can't remember) would come out and we'd painstakingly transcribe the program for games. Man that sucked, it never worked right.

[Broken_Hero]

25. I first got on in January of 96

our library at my college had access. The big craz was the chat rooms/forums...and the first one I went to was alamak.com, and it was great IMO, to talk to many different people, across the world. That semester, I was so involved with chatting, that I shrugged off a lot of my homework/studies, to be online...there would be some days, where my circle of friends, and I would be at the library at 8am, and not leave until 11pm that night.....

on edit:spelling

[Tikki]

26. First week, I went to one of those....

game sites...well, Pogo to be specific and I was
posting to some one on the chat function.
I answered a question in what I thought was a clever way.
And they posted LOL and I thought it was a command to Log Off Line....so I did.

Then I tried to figure out what I said wrong.




Tikki

[NewJeffCT]

27. I think I got onto AOL & Prodigy back in 1993 or so

I still have my original AOL ID - it's only 4 letters long, which is not even allowed by AOL anymore.

I can tell you that not too long after that, I met my first internet woman.

She told me she was 5'6" 125 with really big breasts. (Yes, we had chatted on the phone extensively as well...)

Needless to say, she did not look quite like that in real life. And, she was married - though, she claimed she was separated, though still lived with her soon-to-be-ex husband.

[Little Wing]

28. Downloading Sandra Bullock pictures from Compuserve

[idgiehkt]

29. 2003

I used to have a life before then.

[bikebloke]

30. Mid-90's, I guess

At the Seattle Central Library during lunch. Text only. I mostly looked for foreign news sites to supplement the Guardian Weekly, which I bought every two or three weeks due to expense.

[Lyric]

31. 1998, Prodigy was my ISP

I finally got a PC and spent the next two days chatting at Beseen.com (no longer exists) in a room called "Joe's All Night Diner". Man, those were the days.

I met ThinkBlue1966 there a few months after I first logged on, and here we are, almost 8 years later. :loveya:

[distantearlywarning]

32. 1992.

I was 17 years old, and one of my best friends was a computer geek. We spent all summer after my high school graduation chatting on a BBS called Quartz, out of Rutgers University. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

Everytime I see a thread like this, I always wonder if I might run into someone I knew from those long-ago days on Quartz.

[bif]

33. I predicted it was a fad that would never catch on

I remember when the net was in its infancy. Someone told me how eventualy you'd be able to shop over the net, download music and movies and communicate on the new "Inforrmation Highway." I laughed and said it'll never catch on. It would last a couple years, then go away. What an idiot. Warning, NEVER take any stotck market tips from me.

[mikeytherat]

34. Early to mid-80s, BBSing and some university online info searching and

some rudimentary online gaming. In 1988, a roomie got a 1200-baud modem, and it was the sh*t! Well, at the time it was.

mikey_the_rat