How Long Online?

I've been interactin' in cyberspace via keyboard and monitor since before it was called cyberspace. When I got started, a color display was your choice of either white-on-green or amber-on-black, as opposed to the standard white-on-black, and the modem - 300 baud was fast - had a cradle with a mike and speaker onto which the telephone -which had first to be manually dialed - handset was placed when you wanted to connect to another user or a bulletin board (the fore-runners of what became The Web). When you were done, you picked up the handset and hung it back up on the phone.

The computer and modem I started out with looked sorta like this:



Really cuttin' edge stuff in the early '80s - and cost about as much as a good used car.

Wow, you certainly are an Internet pioneer/veteran! It seems this topic hasn't got much "legs", but I appreciate the posting, nonetheless, Timberland.

Allan, sometimes it's hard to notice a topic when it's hiding in its rightful corner.

I've been using the internet since 1997, but I've never ever used AOL. Operated a small community of forums from 1998 until 2001. I've always enjoyed keeping in touch by email and participating in various forums. Never got into the concept of chatrooms; they always seemed like a total timesuck. Instant messenging is hot, though.

bm

This was my first computer



The modem looked like timbers. There was no disk drive but you could save data to an audio tape player.

There was no internet, but people operated what we called BBS. You could dial up to one computer and leave messages or information.

I remember being very proud that I upgraded my memory to 4KBytes of RAM. that is 4,000 bytes compared to the 512,000,000 that now seems insufficient in my current computer.

My first connection to the internet was with DarpaNet when I was working for a government contractor on a Sun system. Does anyone else here remember being shut down by the Rob Morris worm?

Around 1999.

I was a dinosaur.

Me too Lash. I spent a year going to the library to use theirs a half hour at a time.

Those are some odd looking contraptions eb and Timber were using. I had never seen any like those.

pan, I probably still wouldn't have one if my children hadn't insisted.

I joined yahoo email when you could only have 7 characters in a name

Late bloomer. I graduated college in 1999. Used the 'net a little then, but didn't understand it at all, and thought email was complicated. Didn't really use the internet regularly until later that year at my job.

just for giggles I checked the oldest email in my Y email it is 1994 - I think I can delete it now - LOL

I first got on line in New York City. In New York people were on line long before many other areas of the county. "Why?", you ask. Simple. In New York the terminology/phrase is Get On Line rather than get in line.



As for me it was October of 1998 when I hooked into the internet.

I got my first email address in early 1993, our faculty was the first of the university to give students an email address of their own. Mail programme NuPop, Ran on MS-Dos, had to learn the commands as i went along, cause I didnt know much about computers. Got subscribed to lots of mailinglists with news or debate on Eastern Europe.

I remember the first computer with WWW in the university library. Ran with a Mosaic browser, always a gaggle of geeks hanging around waiting for their turn, looking over the current lucky guy's shoulder waiting for four minutes for a page to load. But it went quickly after that: by 1995 there was a room in the faculty computer building with Apples running Netscape, great conspirative atmosphere there, the discovery in wonder of websites on Tuvan throatsingers with soundclips. Two years later, WWW was installed throughout the computer building and was no longer something special.

~1986... there weren't any websites to speak of back then, it was all mailing lists and usenet.

I think I remember it was like fido or something I dialed into the library, later joined Juno and then netzero

anyone remember door games - like tradewar?

Online
i have been online since the internet came to india in 1995
at that time it was very expensive
but now it is cheap and i am currently on a lan now
first i used dial up which led to my huge phone bills

I can't remember. I would have to guess around 1998-1999 is when I really started using. I was in college and it was a cheap way to "phone home".

i think about 1997