Jump to content

What was you first contact with internet?


Pawelk198604

Recommended Posts

My was in late 90's when first internet cafee, i was very curious but at first almost run from there because of this :D

I doubt that younger member remember this, there ware time when Internet wasn't so widespread as today an most people used so called Internet Caffe at least in Poland.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was a Cub Scout, and the leader person worked for a software company. One time we spent our weekly meeting chatting with someone in Japan. That was the first time I used the internet. I remember it was slower than slow, and it was explained to us that because of the time of day, a lot of people were on the internet, and clogging up the pipes. And I mean slow. Like it took us like 30 minutes to get connected. That was the early 1990s.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny, if you have a moment for a long story. I was in the U.S. Navy from 1987 until 1993. In the Navy I was a nuclear mechanical operator, I worked on the mechanical systems associated with the nuclear power plants on submarines. On my sub I was our divisions Quality Assurance guy, which meant that I wrote all of the work packages associated with all of the work we did on critical systems such as the reactor plant, seawater systems, etc. I also oversaw that particular department's transition from handwritten procedures to procedures written in a word processor on a laptop computer (I'm sure it's much more advanced now, but at the time it was very "ooh-ahh"). When I got out of the Navy I answered an ad for a pump company who was looking for a technical writer. They were looking for someone who was familiar with: 1. Industrial rotating machinery, such as pumps, 2. Writing complex technical procedures, and, 3. Writing procedures on computers. I fit the bill quite nicely and got the job.

This company's primary customers were oil refineries, and as such they were all over the world. And, in addition to selling the pumps themselves they also made a lot of money selling service on their existing pumps, so they had service centers all over the world as well, Houston, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. Their process for ensuring that these service centers had the latest technical information was staggering. Their technical drawings were printed on large D and E size (that's 24" and 36"-size , for those who don't know) sheets of paper, then filmed on a microfilm camera the size of a large billiards table. Dozens of copies of these microfilm cards were kept in decks all around the company production facilities and in the service centers. Once a month or so (or more often, in the case of emergencies) a large stack of deck changes would be FedExed to each of the service centers and a clerk would have to go through the decks and remove the obsolete cards and replace them with the new ones. As you can guess, this system was horrendously prone to error, there were constant problems with cards being lost, misfiled, or destroyed. The Technical Services folks were getting constant calls, "This service center needs a copy of card XXYYZZ, get one made and overnighted to them today." The costs were staggering.

So here I was, the new technical writer, and I'm sitting in a meeting with all of the big wigs in the company one day where they are trying to come up with ideas of ways to use technology to reduce costs in this department. And they've got all sorts of crazy ideas, like shipping whole computers around the world instead of cards, or using video cassettes, all sorts of stuff. And at this point I was a computer enthusiast, and I knew enough about them to be dangerous, so I raise my hand and say, "Why don't we just send them as electronic files over the Internet?" And the head of engineering says, "What's the Internet?" So I get up and give a 30,000-foot explanation to him, and he's really interested, so he says, "Put together a proposal with costs. Have something for me to put in front of the GM next week." I went home that night and called my best friend, who was a computer programmer and a serious Internet early adopter and said, "I need to know everything about the Internet, now." I put together a proposal, and the entire startup cost of the system, computers, scanners, everything, was less than the cost of one month's lease on the microfilm camera. They ran the whole system on dialup Internet accounts over email. It worked so well they used it (with some changes to accommodate broadband connections) until the company got bought out in 2002, long after I had left.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was born in '97 and we got our first computer in 2000. I obviously don't renember the first website i visited or anything, but that dial-up sound brings back so much nostalgia.

Reading through these though, It's pretty crazy to step back looking at my gaming rig, and thinking what it would look like to someone from 20 odd years ago

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1996, using it from my middle school library. Though I had seen someone using it in 1994 or 1995, don't remember exactly. But of course, my parents wouldn't get internet at home until most everyone else already had it- not because they couldn't afford it but because they didn't see any "need" for it- so we didn't get 56k until 1998.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sadly, I don't remember. I do know that the first internet community I frequented was Muppet Central, and I found it by clicking a link on a mock webpage for a Kermit/Gonzo U.S. Presidential campaign.

Other than that, I just remember two things. One was the annoying hassle of getting OUT of AOL's info portal to get to the "open web." It took like 5 minutes of dial-up to click through everything to get to the button I needed to get to open AOL's embedded Netscape browser (IE still wasn't standard with windows yet).

The other thing, I remember the day that the only remaining BBS I used, shut down to host webpages. Instead of the old dial-up log-in screen, I just got a simple message, telling me the url/IP that the old computers were now being used to run.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny, if you have a moment for a long story. I was in the U.S. Navy from 1987 until 1993. In the Navy I was a nuclear mechanical operator, I worked on the mechanical systems associated with the nuclear power plants on submarines. On my sub I was our divisions Quality Assurance guy, which meant that I wrote all of the work packages associated with all of the work we did on critical systems such as the reactor plant, seawater systems, etc. I also oversaw that particular department's transition from handwritten procedures to procedures written in a word processor on a laptop computer (I'm sure it's much more advanced now, but at the time it was very "ooh-ahh"). When I got out of the Navy I answered an ad for a pump company who was looking for a technical writer. They were looking for someone who was familiar with: 1. Industrial rotating machinery, such as pumps, 2. Writing complex technical procedures, and, 3. Writing procedures on computers. I fit the bill quite nicely and got the job.

This company's primary customers were oil refineries, and as such they were all over the world. And, in addition to selling the pumps themselves they also made a lot of money selling service on their existing pumps, so they had service centers all over the world as well, Houston, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. Their process for ensuring that these service centers had the latest technical information was staggering. Their technical drawings were printed on large D and E size (that's 24" and 36"-size , for those who don't know) sheets of paper, then filmed on a microfilm camera the size of a large billiards table. Dozens of copies of these microfilm cards were kept in decks all around the company production facilities and in the service centers. Once a month or so (or more often, in the case of emergencies) a large stack of deck changes would be FedExed to each of the service centers and a clerk would have to go through the decks and remove the obsolete cards and replace them with the new ones. As you can guess, this system was horrendously prone to error, there were constant problems with cards being lost, misfiled, or destroyed. The Technical Services folks were getting constant calls, "This service center needs a copy of card XXYYZZ, get one made and overnighted to them today." The costs were staggering.

So here I was, the new technical writer, and I'm sitting in a meeting with all of the big wigs in the company one day where they are trying to come up with ideas of ways to use technology to reduce costs in this department. And they've got all sorts of crazy ideas, like shipping whole computers around the world instead of cards, or using video cassettes, all sorts of stuff. And at this point I was a computer enthusiast, and I knew enough about them to be dangerous, so I raise my hand and say, "Why don't we just send them as electronic files over the Internet?" And the head of engineering says, "What's the Internet?" So I get up and give a 30,000-foot explanation to him, and he's really interested, so he says, "Put together a proposal with costs. Have something for me to put in front of the GM next week." I went home that night and called my best friend, who was a computer programmer and a serious Internet early adopter and said, "I need to know everything about the Internet, now." I put together a proposal, and the entire startup cost of the system, computers, scanners, everything, was less than the cost of one month's lease on the microfilm camera. They ran the whole system on dialup Internet accounts over email. It worked so well they used it (with some changes to accommodate broadband connections) until the company got bought out in 2002, long after I had left.

Really?! Interesting! 1987-88, an involvement with my friend "Tom" - for Strategic Data Systems Corp., party to Maersk, party to USMC. Container ships. Ships cargo, personnel, parts inventory. Mobile satellite link. I was called in to solution the uplink/downlink delay timeout problem.

We wouldn't be talking the same animal, would we?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It was the mid to late 80's I think when my parents invested in some fancy ham radio equipment. I'll have to go ask dad about the exact setup we had at that time, but I remember we had some new digital equipment that could tune in the neighbors wireless telephone handsets. Some of the conversations we eavesdropped on were interesting to say the least. Anyway, we had what I think was a teletype machine and commodore 64 connected to the ham radio equipment. I remember it sounded very much like what dial-up internet sounded like later on. Our setup was very much like what you see in this video (fast forward to 5:02 to hear what it sounded like) :

You could "talk" to anyone in the world by typing on the commodore 64's keyboard and reading the teletype's printout. Sure was a whole lot easier than the Morse code. It wasn't long after that that my neighbor subscribed to Prodigy. I would consider our setup on the ham radio closer to today's internet than what Prodigy was. Prodigy was similar in that it used a computer, a modem, and a telephone, but wasn't really for communicating with the world. It was pretty much just a fancy newspaper.

My first encounter with what I would consider today's internet was actually at a rest area/truck stop in southern Minnesota on I-35 in 1999. The rest area had public internet access. I had no clue how e-mail actually worked. I tried typing in my brother's name in the address bar in hopes that the computer would magically find and talk to him. O boy, was I ignorant.

Edited by Otis
spelling
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My was in late 90's when first internet cafee, i was very curious but at first almost run from there because of this :D

I doubt that younger member remember this, there ware time when Internet wasn't so widespread as today an most people used so called Internet Caffe at least in Poland.

Usenet, NNTP, 1988 Pine, . . . . . .frustating as trying to find an address be having to go through every address in the phone book.

BTW if anyone wants to know the ultimate fate of the Internet (so-called neutrality) just take a look what happened to NNTP services, the day Deja-Vu moved NNTP postings to WWW the bowels of hell opened and unleashed every fancy of loon that walked the earth. After that the only functional groups had moderators.

Edited by PB666
Glitch removal
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My first time accessing the internet was back in the 80's.

I got a job as an operator for a Singer mainframe computer.

There wasn't much to look at.

I used a typewriter work station and just type out commands onto paper and received an automated typed response back from a centralized computer in another part of the country.

Back then it was all about memorizing commands, error codes and DIP switch settings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

University, early 90s. I remember everyone getting excited about this new Mosaic program for finding stuff on the Internet. It beat the pants off Gopher or FTPtool. :)

Same here, however I found ftp more useful than mosaic at the university, all the stuff you could download while not many pages who was interesting and no good way to find them.

The year after it kind of exploded with netscape and altalavista.

- - - Updated - - -

Usenet, NNTP, 1988 Pine, . . . . . .frustating as trying to find an address be having to go through every address in the phone book.

BTW if anyone wants to know the ultimate fate of the Internet (so-called neutrality) just take a look what happened to NNTP services, the day Deja-Vu moved NNTP postings to WWW the bowels of hell opened and unleashed every fancy of loon that walked the earth. After that the only functional groups had moderators.

Guess it got a lot of spam too, has seen open forums who drown in spam too, remember NNTP but that was back in the days open smtp servers was standard.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My first contact with the internet (darpanet, actually) was in the military, Desert Eagle '86 if I remember correctly. The army was testing a system for electronically filing certain types of reports with higher headquarters over a satellite based network. The hardware and much of the software was pretty standard issue civilian stuff, including Sun computers running a derivative of SysV, and standard email was the underlying communications mechanism. Both sides were using this system for that field exercise.

I was in military intelligence at the time, and while it wasn't in my job description, I made it a point to intercept the OPFOR communications so we could hand the G2 actual some very accurate intel. My supervisor laughed his ass off when I told him what I did, and we gave the data to the G2, but it wasn't passed on beyond that since it wouldn't be "fair."

After that, the next time I ran into it was at college at the late 80s/early 90s. By 95, I was running the company web site and developing web integration for our products, and even had a full time connection at home, using my home machine as a web server.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mid 90's. Post collapse Russia. I was able to get, and I remember it still, about 200 bytes/s on average out of a 14k, because the lines were bad and the only available connection point was overloaded. It sufficed for e-mails, though, which is pretty much all I've used it for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My first job in the early 90's was in a research center library where I worked on correcting databases on an old Data General terminal like this:

dg3.jpg

Boring as hell. Luckily a friend showed me how to use it to access a Unix telnet account from which I could access NNTP Newsgroups and play MUDs. I spent a lot of my evenings lurking on the Star Wars forums and playing KobraMUD. I also used public FTP sites to get tons of freeware for my old Atari ST... The entire library of Atari ST software would probably fit on a CD these days.

A few months later, we were all amazed with the release of the first Web browser:

1-422daf2d49f1a.jpg

Yes, Yahoo! was the most popular home page in those days. There was no such thing as a search engine, so they basically employed an army of people to manually compile and maintain an index of all web pages.

Edited by Nibb31
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have no idea.

I THINK it already existed when I started using a computer, but I'm not sure. It would have been late 90's

I do remember dial-in, and I'm pritty sure I only used it for 'research' back than (legitimate research, just not very serious as I was not even in high school at the time)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I discovered the internet in the late 90s when I went to work for an early dotcom to pay for my student loans from film school - except I didn't know what the internet was, or what photoshop was, or anything. I BS'd my way into a job and mastered HTML and photoshop in 4 hours. Amazingly enough I won a Yahoo! award for that site, which completely destroyed my career as a filmmaker (since I rationalized that making money fast would let me make my own films) and created a bunch of award winning sites... but then there was that dotcom crash and, yeah, here I am now writing sci-fi novels.

Thanks, internet, for destroying my dreams, you b@st@rd!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In college in 1992-3. I was taking a bunch of programming classes and spent a lot of time in the computer lab (poor college kid, so no computer at home). The VAX systems had persistent internet which I dabbled in a little bit.

Then I saved up some cash and bought my own computer (It was like $1200 for a mostly basic thing. Its equivalent today would probably cost $300) and found out (through a friend) about the Cleveland Freenet, which for me was a local call. That was when the Internet started becoming a more permanent thing in my life.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I discovered the internet in the late 90s when I went to work for an early dotcom to pay for my student loans from film school - except I didn't know what the internet was, or what photoshop was, or anything. I BS'd my way into a job and mastered HTML and photoshop in 4 hours. Amazingly enough I won a Yahoo! award for that site, which completely destroyed my career as a filmmaker (since I rationalized that making money fast would let me make my own films) and created a bunch of award winning sites... but then there was that dotcom crash and, yeah, here I am now writing sci-fi novels.

Thanks, internet, for destroying my dreams, you b@st@rd!

But all the best writers suffered from depression.

Now just take up heavy social drinking.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My was in late 90's when first internet cafee, i was very curious but at first almost run from there because of this :D

I doubt that younger member remember this, there ware time when Internet wasn't so widespread as today an most people used so called Internet Caffe at least in Poland.

Thanks for asking, Pawelk. Us old folk love to tell stories. :)

I spent the 1980s doing systems programming on a university hospital's IBM mainframe. It wasn't connected to anything external. But I had a math professor friend who controlled a unix supermini that was on CSnet, with a gateway into the non-military parts of Arpanet. In late 1982, BITnet got connected in as well. BITnet was mostly for IBM mainframes and their users, so suddenly there was an influx of IBM mainframe-related Usenet forums and databases coming online. In early 1983, that friend gave me a VIP account on his system so I could access them.

At work I used a 300-baud TI Silent 700...

texassilent700.gif

...but soon had a 1200-baud connection from my 8-bit home computer. I'd look up a pic, but can't remember which computer I had that year.

I only recall a couple of details from those early days:

1) I remember the changeover from "bang path addressing" to domain-name addressing. My original email address went !something!something!ucbvax!ukma!myaccount. Then changed to the much more sensible [email protected].

2) I remember spending many hours getting Usenet adult pics to download overnight. :) A pic was usually in several parts which you had to download, assemble, then run uudecode on it to change it back from ASCII to binary. I automated that process so I could look over the Usenet headers, mark pics I wanted to check out, then macros in my terminal program did all the rest while I slept.

edit: Just noticed the desk phone in that pic has the numbers going the wrong way! Anybody know what country that phone was from?

Edited by Beowolf
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...