20 years on the web

[Capt Worley PE]

I just realized when making another post that around about this time twenty years ago, I signed up with my first ISP, the illustrious AOL, which was the only game in town. They had less than 10K users nationwide back then.

Back then, I had a 9600 baud rate connection (yea!), and they made you pay per minute online. Connection was so slow that newsgroups, chat rooms (they were called something else back then, but I swear I can't remember what it was---they were also a lot less insane than they were by 2000) and e-mail were about all I could look at for a while. A little later I could use Netscape and Mosaic (I honestly can't remember which replaced which now) to do limited surfing, but, man, it ate up the time.

Also, the computer was an IBM 486 with math co-processor and a 13" screen. Dual floppies, 5 1/4" and the mack daddy HD 3.5" drive. Woot! And all this for a cool 15 c-notes.

Come a long way...

 

[Flyer_PE]

I think I first signed up at about the same time. It was a choice between AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. I went with AOL simply because they weren't charging extra for stock quotes. I had a bleeding edge 14.4k modem at the time.

 

[OSUguy98]

I still have our old 486SX(without math co-processor) and 486DX(with math co-processor) and I think we also have our old P-133 somewhere too, of course my mom still uses her Apple IIe for grades/etc... I think we got our first account online around '92 or '93... Mountain.net... local ISP... my brother got it while he was in college, and my parents kept it until I convinced them in 2002 that cable was the way to go...

 

[Supe]

We also had something around that time frame. My father sold his Colt Python to help fund our first Packard Bell. We were Prodigy users.

 

[Flyer_PE]

AOL was a toll call for me back then too. My first cell phone came with call forwarding included in the package. I would forward that phone to an AOL number and then use the cell phone number (local call) for the AOL connection. Worked like a charm and saved me nearly as much as the cost of the cell phone plan.

 

[snickerd3]

We didn't get internet until like 1997-1998 right before I went away to college. But I remember having to choose which aol # to connect to...it varied on any given day based on the number of people already using it at that given point in time. My parents had it set up ONLY to display the numbers that were local calls...to avoid the the long distance telephone bill that could arise. Having 24/7 instant connection in college was AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!

I also got my first DVD to play on my new computer at college in 1998....sad to say the title of said DVD was Mission Impossible.

 

[engineergurl]

we had a Packard Bell back in the early to mid 90's but when we first started out, all we had was Juno for e-mail, no real internet. Eventually, maybe around 95 or 96 my parents signed up for AOL... I very distinctively remember them switching from a pay by min plan to a lump some plan as soon as school got out one summer and I started surfing the net ... to this day... my parents STILL have that AOL account for their e-mail, although I'm no sure how....

My brand new gateway pc that I got my jr year of college in 1999 had my first DVD player too... and my title is worse as it was the Blair Witch Project...

 

[Master slacker]

Compaq Presario rocked the hizzouse back in 1995.

486SX2/66, 40 MB HDD, 4 MB RAM, 14.4k modem, and 14-inch SVGA monitor. Got hooked up with the AOLs and played many, many hours of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Tie Fighter, and Myst on it. It was also the first time I had ready access to pr0n. It was a nice rig for a 16 year old.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

AOL was a toll call for me back then too.

In middle GA, there were two Macon numbers and that was it.

In retrospect, my computer wasn't actually an IBM, but a Packard-Bell. No idea how I forgot that.

Went Pack-Bell-->Softek--> HP (I will NEVER buy another HP or Semantec product thanks to this peice of dung and the anti-virus software that came with it)-->Toshiba.

 

[Kephart P.E.]

Ahhh, Earthlink I believe was my flavor!

I remember my buddy had Prodigy about 1992 or so on an Apple PC and he hated it because compared to the IBM compatibles of the time it was ridiculously slow/no memory and his parents paid thru the nose for it.

A couple years later he was super jealous when my parents got a PC with....wait for it - a 1 GB hard drive.

 

[RIP - VTEnviro]

I remember pre-internet days when my old man worked for a techie/IT sort of firm.

He took me when I was 5 or 6 into Manhattan, as he worked in the 46th Floor of the Chrysler Building at the time. We went on a weekend to avoid traffic and to be able to park. It was pouring. (He did take me to Chinatown for my efforts.) We took home this terminal with green characters. You took your old fashioned phone receiver and stuck it, ear part, mouth part, cord on and everything, into the back of this thing. Not a modem, not a cable line, the whole fucking phone.

It logged in to company HQ in Colorado and amazed the shit out of me.

Personal online came around 94 or 95 when I started HS with AOL, and I remember getting heat from the folks when I picked a long distance number for access.

 

[OSUguy98]

I still get frustrated when I get someone's PC to de-virus,fix or otherwise wipe out and reset to factory and I see 8 different versions of AOL software... I get the same response from all of them "But how do I get my email if I don't use their software??" ugh

 

[YMZ PE]

I was too young to remember what kind of machine we had, but I remember first connecting to the interwebz via AOL in 1996. I still see dollar signs in my head whenever I hear that old connection noise. Someone tried to cyber with me the first time I entered a chat room...I was 11.

 

[mudpuppy]

My first online experiences were around 1989 or so. Got a 300 baud modem from Radio Shack. It wouldn't automatically dial--you had to dail the number, wait for the carrier tone and then press a button to connect. A step up from the put-the-receiver-in-the-cups type that VTE mentioned. The world-wide-web didn't exist yet, so it was all Compuserve and local bulletin boards at the time. 300 baud is so slow you could read text as it was loaded. A couple years later I bought a used 2400 baud modem from a friend, which was a HUGE step up.

Almost all the BBSs were long distance and I racked up a lot of toll charges, made my parents pretty mad.

8088 processor, dual 5.25" drives and 512 kB of memory, with a black-and-white monitor. I loved going to my friends' and playing the same games on a color monitor, because it was almost like a whole new game. I eventually got a 286, then a 386 and jumped right over 486 to the Pentium I in 1996.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

^^ I learned hex programming on an 8088 chip in 1987!

 

[snickerd3]

I took fortran in college...the advisor i got during the visit to sign up for classes told me to take the requirement CS course back home at a local community college...it was a weed out course at the university that put all engineers even CS majors in the same class and was graded on a strict bell curve. I would have failed had I taken there.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

^They put us through PASCAL before we did FORTRAN.

 

[Master slacker]

Fortran 77. Ugh. :lamo:

 

[goodal]

Our first computer was a Commodor 64. We didn't get internet at the house until '98 or so. My first experience with the internet had to be around '91-'92. We were at a friends house, when we saw her older sister and dad "talking" to someone across town on their computer. It was some sort of instant messenger thing in DOS, but I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Dad taught me at age 8 or 9 several DOS commands that I still find surprisingly useful when crap hits the (computer) fan.

 

[Road Guy]

we were poor and used netzero for a while.....

I remember bringing home some version of a compaq presario computer, had no less than 3 return visits to best buy to get it working, this was probably 1994?

I was still finishing up college and remember how profoundly awesome we felt emailing assignments back and forth to each other for group projects and lab reports...

prior to that purchase the only other computer I had was a commodore 64 when I was a kid, didnt connect to the interent but I had a "floppy disk" of a pirated strip poker game we used to play before parents got home from work.. that had to be middle school years maybe??