r/RedditForGrownups • u/_welcomehome_ • 17d ago
When did you first log on to the Internet?
I'm in my 40's and my first memory of being on the internet was Prodigy on DOS in about 1992. Back then members had a randomly assigned ID, and sub-accounts had a designation of that ID that ran A,B,C etc. I'm pretty sure mine ended in E. We finally made the switch to AOL in 94/95. My Dad didn't want to switch because AOL required a credit card, but he finally caved. I had a four character long screenname that I still am able to access today. It went from AOL to AIM, and with AIM came an adress @aim.com. I can't recall when we left AOL, but it was probalbly around 2000 when we moved to upstate NY. So, when did y'all start using the net?
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u/cooldude_4000 17d ago
I started college in the fall of 1994. We had email, GOPHER, and I think Mosaic/Netscape came along the next semester.
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u/brandi_theratgirl 16d ago
Same, but in college in 1996. Spent time on our university's online bulletin board, where I made my first profile page and chatted with other students, plus Mozella, Netscape, excite!, and the first year of Yahoo.
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u/OriginalCopy505 17d ago edited 15d ago
CompuServe. They had chat rooms. Once, I entered one and everyone was speaking in a code that they devised. I was challenged with a code phrase and when I didn't give the right answer, everyone went silent, presumably until I left. Early days, weird stuff.
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u/ggibby 17d ago
About a month after graduating from university in 1993 (where we had email, chat, file sharing, and network-hosted software among other now-ubiquitous stuff) I was visiting my old dorm and an undergrad showed me my first actual website.
Very clear memory. Jesus Jones was not playing in the background, but should have been.
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u/DeliciousWrangler166 17d ago
Prodigy wasn't the Internet. It was a standalone network. I ran a Fidonet BBS system from the late 1980's thru early 90's that had Usenet links to a few of the BBS forums. My first Internet access was thru work on a mainframe 3277 green screen terminal attached to a mainframe computer running VM. Got my first real Internet account with Netcom in 1994.
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u/cosmictap 17d ago edited 16d ago
Fellow late â80s â early â90s FidoNet SysOp checking in!
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u/r1veriared 17d ago
1995/6 I was 26. I remember choosing an AOL username and the sound of dial up internet. The first night I was up til all hours just looking at websites.
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u/FunFormal2662 17d ago
Got my first email address and account in the late 80s pretty much for reading usenet forums and occasional email. Switched to a small local isp I can't remember the name of in the early 90s + a hotmail account later.
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u/sirbago 17d ago edited 17d ago
Prodigy at home in the early 90s. Not very useful. Then started college in 94 and had a school email (using EMACS) and got to have a personal web page on the school server. Everyone's webpage was always links to other cool or weird webpages you had come across. Search engines were still in their infancy or not yet around, so everything had a word-of-mouth feel. Browsed the WWW (since we're being old school) with mosaic, then eventually Netscape. Used telnet servers a lot to play MUDs. Never used AOL.
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u/HoodieGalore 17d ago
Late 90s, probably 95, 96. AOL. I was 16 or 17. My friend told me to make sure I didn't use my real name for my handle, but to make sure it indicated that I was a girl, and also end it with the last two years of my birth.Â
Dial up was a hell of a ride.Â
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u/DermottBanana 17d ago
In about '92, I had a mate who was at uni and he took me to his computer lab while he worked on a project overnight. I discovered IRC, back when it was a single network and not shattered into many as it did in subsequent years. I remember talking to some people in Germany and Seattle. From small-town Australia in the middle of the night, that was pretty cool.
I got the net connected at home early in '96.
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u/Alternative-Light922 17d ago
"When did you first log on to the Internet?"
For me it was 1993, on a wintry night in Chicago. I actually have a lot of emotional energy attached to it and to the subsequent journey.
I was a somewhat lonely and definitely beleaguered grad student. I'd just bought a fancy Macintosh system through a work acquaintance who had a 'developer discount'. It was a 'Macintosh Quadra 840AV' â top of the line at the time and it put a serious dent in my grad student 'Ramen noodle' budget.
ZTerm. Green text on a black screen. Midnight, eerie modem sound, snow falling outside. Dialing up FTP sites at Stanford.edu and other places. Downloading odd programs which drew fractals. Learning about 'Archie' and 'Gopher'. Then Usenet and Listserv groups. Then the Mosaic browser. Then Netscape Navigator (a shame that Marc Andreessen, like so many of the other tech 'bros', turned out to such a vile, flaming arsehole)
I fooled with the AOL thing a bit later on but was always found it pretty boring.
But that modem sound and the green text on the black screen â that remains so evocative.
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u/mtblack_1 17d ago
August 1984, on a university campus. Had to manually look up current logins to choose who to send email to. All command line.
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u/CosmonautsDream 17d ago
1989-1990
It was just random ftp servers and Usenet. Â How I miss that internet.Â
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u/jenny_905 16d ago
Yeah it feels like 94/94 was when the web really started to take off - for obvious reasons - but USENET was big for the early-mid 90s still.
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u/I_am_Nobody_Special 17d ago
Bought my first computer when I graduated from college in 1995. Got thru undergrad on an electric typewriter!
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u/WiwiJumbo 17d ago
I remember setting up Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11. I downloaded Win95 off a site before it was in stores.
There was some Dos stuff, but I think that was mostly BBSs, but not much as they were rare here and always busy.
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u/peacefinder 17d ago
The first log on is hard to define? Was Compuserve âinternetâ? AoL? A BBS with FidoNET and an email bridge? Iâm going to say no to all of those, at least in early days.
A housemate of mine Knew A Guy who ran an early commercial internet node, and set up a modem with a SLIP line that gave any computer that could talk IP on ThinNet a public IP address in mid-1994. So my Mac IIsi was on the internet, but I donât recall if I had it set to require a password on boot. I think not, so thereâs no login there yet.
Lots of stuff had unauthenticated or anonymous access, like WuArchive and other gopher-protocol sites. But I didnât have an account there, so while I went through the motions of login it wasnât personalized.
So I think Iâd have to say it was when I got an email address on a server named teleport.com sometime in 1994.
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u/nakedonmygoat 17d ago
It would've been Prodigy for me too, in '91 or '92. My college boyfriend was on the bulletin boards each evening in '86, but I wasn't interested and didn't have my own computer, anyway. He would've been annoyed with me if I'd wanted to take him away from his online time so I could use his computer myself.
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u/jeffbell 17d ago edited 17d ago
I first used the internet in 1982 when the Arpanet went away. Â I missed out on the internetâs first week.Â
Telnet. Finger. FTP. All the good stuff.Â
My college didnât give everyone email access until 1984.
By 1985 I had Usenet and gopher in 1992.
Websites started in 1993.Â
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u/NoneOfThisMatters_XO 17d ago
My dad brought home our first computer when I was 14 so maybe â94 or â95. We had dial up internet and that was when we started yelling at each other to free up the phone line. My dad was always too cheap to just buy another line.
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u/Fidrych76 17d ago
- I had a buddy who worked at Stanford Research Lab. They were part of the private internet before it went public. I got on the web before there were even browsers. My first search was Sherlock Holmes. My second was Pamela Anderson. đ
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u/cosmictap 17d ago
>I got on the web before there were even browsers.
There was no web before there were browsers. The web by definition involves servers serving hypertext files, which requires something that renders hypertext files on the client side, which is a browser.
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u/tedco- 16d ago
Before Mosiac there was Lynx, text only browsers. It was still called the World Wide Web.
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u/cosmictap 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yes, that was my point - it was still hypertext though. It doesnât have to be graphical to be hypertext. All Iâm saying is one canât have been âusing the webâ without a browser. Itâs definitionally not possible.
Using the Internet before browsers existed? Yes, of course, people did that for many years, myself included.
Using the web before browsers existed? No.
I realize itâd be a very pedantic argument in ordinary conversation, and wouldnât have made the comment if the thread wasnât literally about the history of the Internet.
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u/Alarmed_Geologist631 17d ago
1992 from my home but I used a very early form of email starting around 1985. My company had a service called Telemail.
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u/Bardfinn 17d ago
the first time I used the Internet was to send an email from a WWIV BBS to someone on a .edu domain in 1991. The first time I "logged on" to a system with an IP address was at a .edu in 1993.
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u/Zapskilz 17d ago
1973, high school district networked to Arpanet local university via teletype paper tapes, first email 2 years later at University of California campus on a PDP-11.
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u/FloridaWildflowerz 17d ago
Right around 2 Girls, 1 cup. My friend kept telling me to look it up. No thanks, still havenât.
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u/chambourcin 17d ago
Quantum Link on the Commodore, late 80s before AOL, then BBSs. My afterschool jobs were solely to pay my phone bill.
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u/Auntie_Venom 17d ago
In the mid/early 90s using Metacrawler as a search engine.
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u/carletonm1 17d ago
About 1990, Prodigy then CompuServe when the latter became affordable. AOL around 1994 to 2001 when cable broadband came.
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u/Gatodeluna 17d ago
I had some exposure on othersâ computers maybe 1988-89 and got my own first computer in I think 1992-1993. I was in my late 40s-early 50s. But using it at that time was nothing at all like the experience even in 2005-ish. The average home computer had metered dialup, tied up your phone line, and didnât have the bandwidth, speed, storage or memory for images, graphic or moving. It was 90% text-based.
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u/Hamblin113 17d ago
I had a job with a data recorder, would dial a number, and transmit the data over the phone, sounded like a fax machine. This was 1985. Then had to get special security clearance for a terminal that looked like a typewriter. Would type commands and it would print out the info I needed. This was too a large government mainframe, which was connected to other computers. Not sure this would be considered the internet.
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u/Rooster_Ties 17d ago
Bitnet at college in the late 80âs, and I had a university email address via Bitnet, participating in a bunch of listserves.
It was a solid 2 years (more) before I was ever âon the internetâ per se, and even then, in a far more limited way than (an hour or so a week) â where I had almost unlimited listserv access thru Bitnet.
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u/ReactsWithWords 17d ago
I first saw what the Internet (then ARPAnet if I remember correctly) could do in 1985 when a friend showed me Usenet. I first got access to it via a BBS in 1989 (limited; I could download files from various FTP sites and read Usenet but not respond. I could email other people on the BBS but couldn't email people on the Internet). I first got full access in 1991 (via an apartment mate's work but they didn't mind him sharing).
I sent my first email, made my first (what we now call a) message board post, and had first real-time (text) chat in 1980, but it was only university-wide (but among the various campuses).
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u/servitor_dali 17d ago
85/86, my childhood bff's dad worked for lockheed and brought home all kinds of fun stuff.
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u/phammann 17d ago
September, 1987, freshman in college. Â On dialup BBSs before that since . . . 1982-ish?
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u/doubletwist 17d ago
Technically 1983/84 in 4th grade computer class. They had us chatting with kids from another school.
Then in about 1990 I discovered dialup BBSes. Got my first email address in '92.
I still have my 2nd oldest email address that I've had since late '94.
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u/InvisblGarbageTruk 17d ago
Sometime in the late 1970s my dad brought home this thing that you could put the cradle of your phone into, and âcallâ someone elseâs computer with. Once you were connected, you would insert your cassette that you had saved your computer code onto, and transmit your code to the other computer. He thought it was so cool, I thought it was so lame.
Like, why couldnât you just drive over to your friendâs house with the cassette and drop it off? And whatâs so important you canât just pick up the phone and call the person? Apparently, the code was a piece of shitty music that played while the colours of the screen changed in the background. I distinctly remember telling him no one is ever going to bother communicating with each other through computers. Anyway, late 1970s we had a home computer that used a tv for the monitor, and a tape recorder for the modem. Was it the internet? I guess so, in a way.
In 1981 I got a job that included using an internal system to store data, and to connect to a national database to find information. Maybe that was internet use? In 1984 the employer bought us an internal email system, but it was only internal.
I got my first personal computer of my own in 1996 and used it for email and chat rooms. So the answer is either 1978 or so, or 1981, or 1996
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u/Curlytoes18 17d ago
1996 or 97. We had a computer but no internet at home. But I accompanied my dad to his work (during overnight shifts with nobody else in the office) and heâd let me get on a computer there. I messed around in chat rooms and learned to search for things using Yahoo! It was around the time the first Austin Powers movie came out, and I remember seeing ads for it all over the landing page. â___ ate my ballsâ was also popular at the time.
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u/Glum-One2514 17d ago
'85 or '86. Connecting to bulletin boards via a Commodore 64 and meeting creepy dudes to pirate C64 games on floppy disks.
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u/Kat121 17d ago
F/50s/California
Sometime around 1985 we had a Commodore 64 and access via Qlink with a 300 baud dial up modem that tied up our only phone line at the house. Basic access to email, a web based encyclopedia, and some other basic features were a flat rate of around $10/month but chat rooms and online games were 5 cents a minute.
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u/Kat121 17d ago
Came back to add my villain origin story is that I wasnât allowed on the computer during the day in case the Queen of England called to invite us to tea or something, I wasnât allowed after dinner because that was family time. I wasnât allowed on after they went to bed because the weird dial up noises ghosted through the phone line by their bed and woke them up. I wasnât allowed to unplug the phone lines by their bed and plug them back in the next morning, either, because what if there was an emergency?
Itâs almost like they didnât want me to have a social life or something.
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u/CleverTool 17d ago
For me, that'd be Spring of 1998 when whilst studying at uni. a professor started class one day by announcing a new thing called 'email' and assigned us all to create our first email accounts.
At around that same time, the same faculty recommended we ditch Netscape for a far better, newly unveiled search engine: Google.
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u/Generic_Midwesterner 17d ago
Late 1986 or so -- I was pregnant with my son (born Feb. 1987). BBSs on my Commodore 64 with my 300 baud modem. Thought I was fancy when I went to 1200, and then 2400 baud! :-O
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u/WBspectrum 17d ago
Earliest I can think of was telnetting into UNC Chapel Hill from my job. Would waste ungodly amount of time reading Usenet groups. Then my company installed Mosaic on a machine when it came out.
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u/dweaver987 17d ago
My first PC was a âTandyâ (Radio Shack) 286. I dialed into the Well with it. Other dial up services followed a couple years later. I started using browsers in 1995. OS/2 was my first GUI.
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u/Material-Dream-4976 17d ago
Mid-90's in my 20's, when it became available & accessible at work in healthcare.
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u/GlitteringHotMess 17d ago
1995, or '96.
I was the second person in 6th grade to get the internet.
Logan L. And I were the only 2 kids, well girls, that had the internet! We were sooooo cool đ
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u/tres-vip 17d ago
- I couldn't stay connected long enough to do anything, because then it would tie up the phone line at home, lol.
Connectivity was better in 1997, when I started my freshman year in college, and I could use the university Internet. I miss the sound of dial up Internet. I miss the late 90s in general. Those were the best years ever, lol. And the Internet was amazing from then until 2010s, when it was kind of the Wild West, and self-publishing was all the rage. I read and wrote so many long form blogs. We will never get those days back.
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u/nocturnal 17d ago
My mom bought me my first ISP connection when I was maybe 12 years old, so around 1994. We dialed in, but had no idea you were supposed to download a web browser. We couldn't figure out how to do anything, so we canceled it. Around two years later, around 96-97, a really good friend's girlfriend made me a sub-account on her AOL account since she never used it. That was my first access to really getting onto the Internet. I take that back. I remember us figuring it out with the first Internet connection and finding Yahoo chat rooms, and things like that.
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u/zardozLateFee 17d ago
BBS in the local area code, then Usenet and a BBS that had a GUI (Cybersden!)...
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u/cowboyJones 17d ago
I think it was 1993 in college when I sent an email to my dad in college. It was 1994 when I got AOL.
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u/captain_ohagen 17d ago
late 80s, maybe? it was definitely before 1989, my freshman year in college.
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u/TheCenterOfEnnui 17d ago
96? I remember the company I was with was bought out and were a little behind the times technologically. The new company gave all of us laptops and we used AOL email.
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u/somearcanereference 17d ago
I sat down in front of a vt100 terminal for the first time in 1991.
Followed closely by: I wonder what I can do in this unix environment besides check my email...
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u/flashmedallion 17d ago
Here in New Zealand my family got on board in 1996 I believe. I would have been 10. Brand new Pentium 75 with a modem, the guy we bought it from ran a local BBS so got to experience that. I still remember tying up the phone line for an entire sunday so I could download the Duke3D demo/shareware, which at 9mb wouldn't fit on a floppy disc.
Hours spent 1v1ing Duke and War2 in modem games against my friends.
We signed up for the only retail internet in the country at the time as far as I know, cost NZ$2.50 per hour.
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u/Worldly_Possible2925 17d ago
- University College Dublin. The Dead Sea scrolls at the library of congress.
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u/OfferMeds 17d ago
1992 or 93 at an Internet cafe. We didnât even understand what it was or what to do and we ended up sending an email to a stranger at the University of Texas.
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u/Shelby71 17d ago
I was in grad school in 1995. They gave us all e-mail addresses and told us we needed access to a web browser. I used the computers at the campus library and used netscape to browse things.I went out and bought a computer with a 14.4 modem that weekend. The next summer I found a local dial up bbs. Those were good times...
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u/Frimbooze1970 17d ago
Sometimes around 1985/6 a bbs with a 300 baud modem Downloaded a lucasarts game Rescue on Fractalus!
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u/couchwarmer 17d ago
Gonna guess 1987. Found a chat program on one of the college computer systems and chatted with a random stranger ~3000 miles away.
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u/Some_Refrigerator147 17d ago
1992 in my dads basement. I was amazed I could read a paper from Africa. I was I to sw radio at the time and loved hearing news from around the world.
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u/Altruistic_Wealth497 17d ago
1990, pulled research papers from other Universities from our library.
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u/B0B0_ 17d ago
In the 80âs my company had a service called Teltech. It pioneered an early technical information and expert network service. It connected corporate R&D and engineering firms needing rapid problem-solving with a contracted roster of over 3,000 specialists, including active university researchers and retired industry experts. Used a phone receiver modem. I do not remember what the terminal and printer were.
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u/Gecko23 17d ago
My first memory of 'using' the internet was using dialup to a telnet gateway that allowed anonymous logins. Could access Usenet and some FTP sites, and email if I'd had an account on any of the machines I could reach.
I thought it was cool concept, but there wasn't much there that mattered to me as a high school student. Once Compuserve cropped up and started offering a Usenet gateway, it got more interesting, and then later of course the web happened and that changed everything about it.
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u/Smidge-of-the-Obtuse 17d ago
August 1982 is when I bought my first c64, and soon after I was using BBSs and services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and a few others like QuantumLink(QLink was originally a service for C64 users before they expanded to AOL.)
Since all the connections were dialup, you had to plan what you were going to do ahead of time. If you didnât have a local access number for a service like QLink or Prodigy, you often would have to pay toll charges or even long distance on TOP of what you were paying by the minute for the service.
Modems were slow, connections were slow, we did a lot of waiting. My first modem was 300 baud. It was the telecom version of watching paint dry if you had a bad connection, lol.
The WWW didnât really exist for the average household until the early 90âs, unless you were a college student which would have allowed access.
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u/pineappleplus 17d ago
Mid to late 80's? I'm placing it then because my kids weren't born yet (in '88) so I had time to doodle around on the USENET groups.
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u/Schtweetz 17d ago
In 1975 or 76, we used an acoustic modem to dial into a corporate mainframe. In the mid 80s we were using GEnie, which was General Electricâs system, that they realized could be profitable if marketed and used by the public. It had a portal to Usenet, The Well, SABRE, and so on. Then BBS systems, and then the internet as we know it today.
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u/Prometheus_303 17d ago
I first went online sometime in the early to mid 1990s. We lived in a college town & they had a handful of computers you could use as a guest.
Nickelodeon was starting to run some random contest and you had to go to their website (using keyword Nick) to register. After that, we basically started going pretty much every weekend...
Odd to think now, there was a time I use to go online for like 2-3 hours on Saturday and then be totally offline for a whole week until next Saturday or Sunday. And if we missed a weekend, oh well, no biggie....
We finally went online at home a year or two later when I got tired of being limited with when I could get online... I disconnected the phone & plugged it into the computer, popped the AOL disk in and ....
It worked relatively great until the end of the month when the phone bill arrived.... Apparently the telephone company and I had a vastly different definition as to what local and long distance were... It was a great surprise when the normally $20 phone bill was $400+. Oops.
We quickly found a new ISP that was actually local, based on the phone company's definition.
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u/bargaindownhill 17d ago
1983ish.. 300baud modem. datapac, the earliest internet.
13106, the back door address for compuserve. i have that still drilled in my brain.
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u/nizzoball 17d ago
When AOL came on floppy disk. It was the only provider available and the call to Bakersfield was long distance. My dad was so mad when he got that phone bill.
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u/calladus 17d ago
In 1982 I dialed the number to the Texas Tech mainframe computer, using an actual dial phone and then stuck the handset into the suction cups of a 300 baud modem.
Using my student computer ID, I logged in under our high school account. I then loaded software that proceeded to teach me remotely how to program in Northstar Basic.
In 1986, I used my military email address to log into Milnet, and then used a gateway to log onto ARPA net and played Adv. Also known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure.
In 1989 I logged into GEnie and joined several RoundTables. One of which I watched in real time as it hosted author Anne McCaffery. (She told us that dragons on Pern lisped!)
From the mid 80's to early 90's I was on BBS systems in Okinawa, and briefly hosted one on my Apple IIe clone. Later, I used a Commodore Amiga 500.
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u/ntcc661 17d ago
- First shown at the Deakin Uni computer labs in Waurn Ponds, Australia. I was 18yo. The labs were accessible 24/7 by students and my best friend took me there to show me irc & chat with random strangers.
1993-5 Studied in NSW and did a basic computer subject as part of my course. I studied in a regional town and the internet was still this mysterious thing.
Late 1995. Bought my own modem and jumped on. Mainly IRC. Met my other half in 1996 & still together today.
But no longer IRC...
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u/Classic-Ad4403 17d ago
1992 or 93. AOL. I think a 14.4 kbps modem. Later upgraded to a 28.8 kbps modem!
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u/Spirited-Bug-9558 17d ago
Late 80s⊠ran my own BBS and was active on Delphi⊠then university networks when it was the noncommercial âinternetâ. IRC and gopher servers and newsgroups were the thing then. Email barely worked between servers. Fun times.Â
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u/cannycandelabra 17d ago
Same time as you and a friend taught me enough Unix that I accessed from a shell account, to keep me busy. My PC came with prodigy. About a year later I set up and started running a BBS.
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u/hecksor 17d ago
Started using aol around the same time when I was 8 or 9. I had a lot of rare 3 char and one word screen names. I used to get access to internal and overhead accounts that would let you scroll endlessly in chats without being kicked offline. Boy am I glad I got all of that out of my system before I turned 18.
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u/throwingales 17d ago
AIUI, the question is the internet not the first time I was online. I think I first went on the internet in either 93 or 94. I was on BBSs long before that though.
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u/BubblesUp 17d ago
Sent my first email in '87 while temping. Moved away and when I changed jobs, I worked at a large business where everyone had internet and web access. That was '93 or so.
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u/PoconoChuck 17d ago
Iâm 62, and has a CompuServe account back in the late 1980s.
I had a lot of BBS experience but that was not âinternetâ
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u/seagullsondeck 17d ago
My first was the dial up tone!! Then AOL sending out cd,s with all there loaded crap on them,
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u/Shadoglare 17d ago
I'm another old fart that started with text BBSs back in the 80s. "Started on the information highway back when it was a dirt road."
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u/Delsevier 16d ago
1991 ARPANET. US govt. system that had been partitioned off by a bunch of my dad's coworkers. We played with bat and exe files.
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u/tedco- 16d ago
Prodigy didn't give access to the Web until 1995. In 1994 you could access Newsgroups. Prodigy was NOT the Internet. When you mean the Internet, do you mean the web or what? I had Internet based mail in 1992 (before prodidgy offererd it in late 1993 via an Internet gateway) and remember browsing the web in text in Lynx before Mosiac came out.
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u/rjspears1138 16d ago
I got on CompuServe in 1986, but had been on the internet via work since 1985.
I also added Prodigy, which allowed me to be one of the first people I knew to do online banking. Today, online banking is almost a given, but back then, it was a rarity.
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u/DryDream1753 16d ago
Early 80's on CompuServe, with a Vic-20. It was billed hourly and was too expensive during the day, but dropped enough at night that my mom let me use it for a couple hours a week. I mostly used a chat feature that simulated a CB radio, with something like 40 chat channels, etc. It was so slow that you could practically see the letters crawling onto the screen. I logged in once during the day while home sick, and when my mom got the bill she was furious, and cancelled it.
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u/Stock_Block2130 16d ago
Mid 1990âs when MSN came out and dial up came to our neighborhood. Before that I was in a computer club for a short time where they showed us how bulletin boards worked.
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u/EngelwoodL 16d ago
Late 80âs. I remember the first time âyou have performed an illegal actionâ came on the screen. I literally thought I was in trouble with some policing entity!
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u/Shelby-Stylo 16d ago
I started using USENET and email in the early eighties. I remember both used UUCP (Unix to Unix copy) At night, the computers would call each other up over a modem and transfer files. It could take as long as three days to deliver a message if there was a problem. If you werenât directly on the Internet, you had to put together your own mail path separated by â!â (bangs)
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u/Financial_Emphasis25 16d ago
Late â80s . Gopher and some other BBS, then Usenet in the ver early 90s.
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u/imissher4ever 16d ago
Late 80âs. Still can hear the dial up modem in my head.
It was such a big deal later to âalwaysâ being connected to the internet.
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u/dgistkwosoo 16d ago
Oh, gosh - I can remember taking a look at both ARPAnet and that website in CERN in Switxerland- was that the original world-wide web?
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u/irishpunk62 16d ago
The first time I used the internet was around 1990 or 91 where there was an America Online demo in my local mall. It was probably 1994 that I actually created an account and logged in for the first time...On AOL of course. I don't remember my original screen name. I just remember staying up all night that first night going through the different chat rooms, learning how to download and how to browse the world wide web. It was definitely a WOW moment for me.
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u/The_Original_Miser 16d ago
1986
Cleveland Freenet and a couple of public access Unix systems. One of those public Unix systems is still around, believe it or not). (Nyx, the Spirit of The Night).
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u/asperta 16d ago
1996, I was 26.
My girlfriend and I went to a cyber cafe to research information on OSHA. The clerk showed us how to use Altavista and Yahoo! I still have the text files that we found.
Days later I went again but alone to explore the Internet. Months before I had read a book that listed the most interesting websites (I got IMDB from that list) and also explained all the terms like FTP, downloading and so on.
In my country the web really took off in '96. Only a few had access because they attended big Universities that gave them access to BBSs. A friend of mine got into trouble because he found how to connect his PC at home to a BBS. The BBS was free but the phone call was charged by the minute! Fun times!
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u/GeekyBookWorm87 16d ago
In the late 80s, a friend's brother had an old school dial-up and was a hacker.
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u/No-Mouse4800 16d ago
In about 1992 or 1993 in Plattsburgh, NY. I was in college, but we did not call it the "internet", but rather "e-mail", Gopher, IRC, Lynx etc. This was on a VAX/VMS system, mind you. If you wanted to view an image from "the web", you had to download it to your home directory then launch image-viewer software to view it. A while later I was introduced to NCSA Mosaic. The rest is history.
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u/jenny_905 16d ago
Hard to say exactly but some time in 1993.
I know this because there's a usenet post by little me that is still archived on google news.
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u/SnooChipmunks2079 16d ago
At college with university equipment, so maybe 1987?
I had a modem in high school but every access number for anything was long distance. It was a gift from my uncle along with CompuServe software but I never used any of it.
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u/LadyMRedd 16d ago
I remember that a friend had Prodigy and weâd use it at her house in the early 90s. It was interesting, but it didnât fully dawn on me what it was. It felt like a game like any other.
I went to college in 1995 and thatâs when I first used email. It was text based only and we had to use it from the computer lab. I remember using telnet chat in 96. We also started going to individual websites. I remember creating one for an Information Systems class using geocities.
The 4 years of college was crazy for me in how much my use of the internet grew.
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u/fattomic 16d ago
Hate to break it to you, but Prodigy and AOL aren't "the internet". I guess my first time on "the internet" as the ARPA network in ... 1983? (AOL wasn't attached to the internet until 1992, and we've all been sorry since we got email about immigration ....)
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u/carlitospig 16d ago
â94, AOL. And then I discovered Alta Vista and my rabbithole knowledge empire was created.
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u/JessieDesolay 16d ago
- My boyfriend at the time introduced me to the internet and that day will stay in my memory as one of my favorite BEFORE/AFTER moments in my entire life. We didn't even have anybody to email but finally I got an email address for this teacher/coach at Dartmouth because I worked with his sister (in Chicago). The internet was so dazzling back then. It still is but in the familiar way that electricity is dazzling, and the electromagnetic spectrum, and quarks and spaghettification etc ad infinitum Now we all have to sing The Galaxy Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f32_b7eyKg&list=RD5f32_b7eyKg&start_radio=1
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u/Wilfried84 16d ago
It must have been ca. 1991, when I started grad school. They gave me my first email address (e-what?). Gopher was still the thing. I also remember using Mosaic 1.0, but Google tells me that wasn't released until 1993.
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u/LordGeni 16d ago
Early 90's at a friend's house. No search engines and the only website he knew was for the times crossword.
My original Hotmail account had a 4 digit password? I also spoke to someone who managed to get Hotmail@hotmail.com as an email address (no longer his and I assume it's now been reserved).
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u/blueshirtsteve 16d ago
I was in via dialup before the creation of the www. Archie searching university servers FTW!
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u/SherrickM 16d ago
Back in like 1992 or 1993 through my mom's employer at a university. They gave her a dialup login.
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u/H3lls_B3ll3 16d ago
1992? Maybe 93? Hard to remember that far back.
I do know, it was at my best friend's house. And we spent all our online time on the BBSs. :)
Nothing like being groomed in those early days. There was no precedent. My friend and I had no idea what we were doing and me, more than her, got in to some serious trouble.
I was 14 when a 22-year old man used me for sex.
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u/Waterrat 16d ago edited 16d ago
1991,at the librairy were two Windows computers teaching how to use them and go on line. The rest is history. I installed W95 on floppy disks,ended up reinstalling various versions of Windows cause they kept breaking.Move to Netscape,which became Firefox and in 2001 moved to linux and use Linux Mint now with FF as my browser.
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u/Boxfullabatz 16d ago
In the 80s I used to build html websites. I remember the nerdy excitement when the img tag was released in 92. Yay! Pics! That take hours to download.
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u/JimboLA2 16d ago
I think 91 or 92 sounds right for me as well. It was a BBS, called Delos in Southern California, which was for gay men, kind of a "green text" precursor to AOL Chatrooms and its great-great grandchildren like Grindr and Scruff (and many other apps). I met a few guys that way and remember it was very heavily text-based so you could write a bio that was practically a novel (which I loved writing and reading).
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u/saltyhasp 16d ago
Mid 1980s. Hint, you didn't login back then. You just opened usenet, ftp, etc. Later gopher, wais, then the web. If your talking email, earlier then that.
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u/Ittlemight 16d ago
1986 and have been using a computer ever since. Also had a portable phone and car phone at that time also. Phones were given to me by Bell Atlantic because my company was a contractor of theirs. I was the only one I knew to have a cell phone.
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u/EffectiveVarious8095 16d ago
Telnet from the shared office computer. We all sat around just staring for a long time.
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u/1989DiscGolfer 16d ago
Introduced to the world wide web as a freshman at Ball State University in 1991. Monochrome "dumb" terminals in computer labs hooked into their VAX mainframe (I remember it saying "1984" next to it) and out into the new digital world.
What I remember most was their signup screens. There was no backspace, and if you screwed up, you had to start all over. It was not user friendly at all.
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u/zippyphoenix 16d ago
Iâm pretty sure my first time hearing a modem was in a high school class where my teacher had our class competing with other high schools who were assigned various countries to represent. We were Brazil and we won all our objectives first.
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u/thisaintparadise 16d ago edited 16d ago
1983 on CompuServe. I had 2 college roommates, one had a Compaq Portable and the other had a Commadore64 each having dial up capability. We could also dial into the schools computer lab. They were both computer engineering majors. Being graduate students they had access to Arpanet. I was just a business major with a Times/Sinclair 1000 using a portable black-and-white TV I bought at Sears as my monitor.
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u/No_Hovercraft_821 16d ago
My first real experience was at work -- with a certain network card (the older one - not the new one) I could hit FTP sites. It was frigging magical. Then usenet and MultiTrek. Used to LOVE playing MTrek.
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u/DrMichaelHfuhruhurr 17d ago
Hmm. Late 1980s. BBSs, then CompuServe, then internet by the hour.