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What & When Was Your first Internet Experience?
Remember, the Internet is... The World Wide Web Usenet Newsgroups FTP (and probably other services that I'm forgetting at the moment) When did you first use any of these services? What did you think about it? I'll bet a nickel that no one was on the Internet earlier than I was (story later). Feb 24 06 05:06 pm Link Looknsee Photography wrote: al gore invented the internet. Feb 24 06 05:08 pm Link I'm thinking 1998-1999....setting up my yahoo profile and chatting. Such a simpler time back then lol Feb 24 06 05:10 pm Link I from a small country town near cypress bayou, louisiana. So my first taste of th internet was spring of 200 whe i became a student at LSU. P.S. this may I graduate with a B.S. in Computer engr. a B.S. in Electrical engr. and minors in Computer Science and mathematics. First in my family to go college and only three generations from a field hand, Cajun pride. Martin IV ww.martincoatesiv.com Feb 24 06 05:16 pm Link high school 1990... FIDOnet and local BBS hosts Feb 24 06 05:21 pm Link do you mean cybersex experience???  here's a bit of trivia... Al Gore may have invented the Internet and someone else invented the OMG, ASL, ROTF, LMAO... but I believe I was the first to use: OMGIJCSHIKMWPOTD (that would stand for "Oh My God! I Just Came So Hard I Knocked My Wife's Photo Off The Desk") Feb 24 06 05:25 pm Link Chartrooms and IM"s were first invented and used by the military so i have read Feb 24 06 05:27 pm Link Thanks Giving time of 96. Bought my first computer, set up sprynet internet services, Mirc, Prodigy chat and AOL. I thought it was cool, still do or I would not be here. Feb 24 06 05:28 pm Link Remember dial-up?? Yuk. Feb 24 06 05:29 pm Link I remember Compuserve, and receiving a text message, not an email, from a friend in Australia. It was a technological marvel! We're going back 30 years, I think... Feb 24 06 05:30 pm Link Bruce Muir wrote: still using it....im too poor to get cable/dsl... Feb 24 06 05:33 pm Link Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-- ARPA and DARPA net back in 1986. Way before early tools ( GOPHER, etc.) and browsers (1992-1993) or Al Gore. Al Gore couldn't even invent Al Gore to anyone's satisfaction. Feb 24 06 05:36 pm Link The Well, SF, 1988. Things sure have changed!  Feb 24 06 05:40 pm Link MartinCoatesIV wrote: I spent seven of the best years of my life in Lafayette. Feb 24 06 05:41 pm Link RED Photographic wrote: Compuserve text messages were not the Internet. They were processed by the Compuserve mainframe computers (Compuserve didn't use servers back then). Also, compuserve came into being in the mid-1980's, not 30 years ago. Feb 24 06 06:00 pm Link Okay, I win, so far -- my first experience was around 1979-1980. I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. It was a fun time -- we had a good number of computers, and they were just big expensive toys to us. Somewhere along the line, we picked up the very first Adventure Game, which was called Adventure, not Colossal Caves -- a text adventure game that was, in computer science terms, a large state diagram. Anyway, we wanted to share hints & guesses & solutions, so we created a little electronic bulletin board, eventually sharing our hints with other graduate students at N.C. State & Duke. That electronic bulletin board was the very first implementation of the Usenet Newsgroups. It was a toy to us, but eventually one of the grad students, Steve Bellovin, took the lead, and it evolved as if it had a life of its own. Look at me, I'm an Internet pioneer! And despite what the history books say, the Internet was created to share game cheats. Feb 24 06 06:24 pm Link Bulletin board computers were common in the late 70's and throughout the 80's and early 90's. The Internet started in the 70's as a means for the military to communicate via e-mail and was eventually expanded to include universities, then goverment and finally business. The WWW started in the late 80's as a way to post educational articles. The Usenet started in the mid 80's as well. If your question is who started using modems first, my experience goes back to 1972 when I started my computer career from which I have long since retired. Feb 24 06 06:31 pm Link I downloaded my first porn before our computer had a jpg viewer. I had to take it on a floppy (ugg on that pun) to a friend's house. It was ugly. I'm thinking 1993, maybe early 1994. Feb 24 06 07:46 pm Link Jon S Chen wrote: I'm too far from civilization to get high speed Feb 24 06 08:02 pm Link I got my first AOL account in 1998, the 6th grade. My screen name was SugarSmall. I was a huge dork...oh shit, I stil am. Feb 24 06 08:05 pm Link In the mid-eighties there were a mere 6,000 of us on AOL, The GUI was built for us Macheads, although the service actually started via the Commodore 64 as a bulletin board system. Although it wasn't Internet, it did have the look and feel beginning of what was to become. The competitor on Windows that even came close was introduced in the late 80's by Sears, called Prodigy (stupid and very clumsly...us Macheads laughed). It wasn't until '91-'92 that AOL had a Win platform and shortly thereafter, primarily via combining server content following a GUI model widely being accepted based on AOL and the exploding population of personal computers did the browser come in to play that enabled free standing server access (the web) beyond the AOL model. The actual first consumer level "personal" computer was the Apple IIc, driven by floppy disks (no hard drive). It was my first computer in '81. In '83 I bought a Epson with 20 mgb HD and 564 RAM and I thought I was king of the hill but DOS was cumbersome. In '87 I got a Mac and to this day Windows has not come close to emulating the elegance of the GUI. Looking back, as much as people (including myself) slam AOL for the giant-king nature of the on-line world, they played a (most) significant role in both the development and explosion of the Internet as we know it today. Working so closely with the Mac community, they were the forerunners of the friendly on-line experience. But the real wizard of Westwood title belongs to a former co-worker of mine at MCI, Vint Cerf, who developed TCP/IP while at UCLA, a technology later expanded upon at the University of Michigan for the Dept. of Defense and brought to the masses through UUNET the provider of the first backbone infrastructure. But who really cares. It's all just bits and bytes... Feb 24 06 08:21 pm Link First net experience... Back working at Caldor (now long since bankrupt)... I had gotten WEBTV... And their horribly priced dialup connection... But that's what kick started my interest in web/graphic design...Not to mention I emailed almost constantly with alot of hot looking models that I still admire highly to this day and email with occassionally still. Feb 24 06 09:29 pm Link In 92 a younger friend showed me how he could hack his school districts computer system, all ASCI graphics. My friends and I had an INTRAnet back around 1987 using some commodore 64's and modems that you had to strap to an analog phone headset. (Does anyone remember analog phones?) Feb 24 06 09:50 pm Link I used to do work at 120 baud over an accoustic coupler modem on a rotary phone with project delta with the university of delaware in 1975. I was a sophomore in high school at the time. We worked on a teletype (no monitor screen), hit send and waited for a response to teletype back to us from the machine (I hesitate to call it a server) at the university. We had to write our own code (basic, pascal, cobal, and fortran) to do what we wanted. No programs were given to us. We were charged by the minute for the work we did on the university's machine. We figured out the passwords for several other high schools in the area and did our code building on their time then sent a copy of our program to our teletype and left a "paper bomb" set for their teletype. When they turned on their teletype, it would start feeding the wide carriage, butterfly fold paper through the teletype until they pulled the power cord out of the wall. We were hacking and we didn't even call it that. The day we went to 300 baud, we thought we were flying. Feb 24 06 11:23 pm Link First BB experience: 1985 at a friend's house. Watched him use his Com 64 to dial into a local BB in Calgary. I can't remember what the BB was for. First WWW experience: 1993 at the University of Calgary library, where a librarian showed me (then a young theology student) how to go to a web page belonging to the Library of Congress to view an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I just could not understand what it was we were doing. The Net made no sense to me then. Feb 24 06 11:25 pm Link Hmmm.... it would have to be the "Greetings Professor Faulken" message I got way back when Feb 24 06 11:26 pm Link Keyronn wrote: "Like to play a game?" Feb 24 06 11:33 pm Link Ron B Blake wrote: Actually the internet was initially developed (conceived) by DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Agency) as a secondary form of communication between various high level military organizations in the event of nuclear war. Feb 25 06 12:33 am Link Ron B Blake wrote: Actually the internet was initially developed (conceived) by DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Agency) as a secondary form of communication between various high level military organizations in the event of nuclear war. Feb 25 06 12:33 am Link Alan from Aavian Prod wrote: My memory isn't what it used to be, and neither is my grammar. I don't remember how the text messages were handled, but I do remember sending and receiving them, possibly through the University mainframe. I also remember Compuserve (should've been a separate sentence), which was then (whenever it was) the nearest thing to the internet. And it was a technological marvel, for its time. Feb 25 06 08:36 am Link RED Photographic wrote: Actually, your comments were quite worthwhile, they reminded us that there was life before the Internet. The net has been around a while, but it wasn't available to the public until later in its life. Feb 25 06 08:40 am Link Alan from Aavian Prod wrote: Good grief! I'd forgotten about those. I wonder what happened to my pictures???? Feb 25 06 08:43 am Link In high school, I used a teletype (all caps, paper-only, print-only typewriter-like device) at 110 baud to connect to the university mainframe (CDC Cyber). As Rick noted earlier, we paid--or the school was billed--by the minute for our use. No human-to-human communication, though, and not on the net by any reasonable definition. My first internet use was in school, 1977-79, via UUCP dialup from our timeshared HP to a "real" node (UCLA? Don't remember--the local machine did the routing). It wasn't a real-time connection. That was pretty much email only, and fairly limited at that, as nobody I knew in real life off-campus had email, and it was easier to catch the locals in real-time. Mostly useful for contacting a couple of students/professors/TAs at Berkeley. FTP was there, but the machines we had weren't unix based, and it wouldn't have done much good. I don't recall if USENET was available; I didn't use it After I graduated, access was only via secondary links: CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, and various BBS systems that connected to the 'net. (I ran a BBS from '84 until 91 or so, which would dial-up to neighboring nodes and send/pickup traffic.) I was on AppleLink briefly on a tech account, and was a member of AOL from 88-90(?), when there was virtually nothing there. (Now there's a lot of nothing; then it was no nothing (that's before Kai Krause had his AOL chats) ) I beta tested Prodigy (ick!), but never joined. (I'm not sure it that counted as internet, though, even by the standards of the day.) I stopped using USENET in 91-92, when the noise got to 10-20 times the content. Even with (good!) killfiles, it got to the point where reading one newsgroup took longer than it had taken to read 20+ the previous year. Just Not Worth It.  My first WEB experience was around that same time, using a text-based SunOS "browser". (The name is long forgotten--it was pretty clunky even for a unix v1 product.) Shortly after that Mosaic became available, and I used that on Macs, and Lynx--another no graphics browser--on SunOS and Solaris. When Netscape released their browser, I cheerfully switched. Feb 25 06 03:55 pm Link 1984/5 while in the Army, testing some of the first in-the-field computer systems. I didn't really have any idea what I was doing at the time. I was just the grunt they used to test out the system and see if it was grunt-proof. 1988, vax terminals in college using fido, gopher, and IRC, and various BBC boards. I think 1992 or 3 in grad school was the first time I used Mosaic (not Mozilla - what was I thinking!) and actually "browsed the web." Subscribed to various list serves and began using e-mail nearly every day then too. What might be a notable statistic is that 1993 is the first time I met a model and set up a shoot via the internet. Bet not many people here can top that. Feb 25 06 08:56 pm Link |
