What was you first contact with internet?

[Cydonian Monk]

My first contact with the Internet? It was a cold winter's morning in 1993. I was late to this 'net thing, as we only had an old 8086 at home, and my Junior High School could barely afford to pay their heating bill. So 1993, 10th grade, first year of High School. There was this gorgeous beige box, a 486. Lean, sleak, fast. It was just... sitting there in the councellor's lab, unused, along with an old 286. Maybe there was a Tandy 1000 too. The "creative" types were always monopolizing the 30 or so Macintoshes in the English lab, so us low-born geeks were stuck with the 486 and its older brothers in the lab. So we used it to play games. Games as old as computing, passed around on tapes and giant floppies. New games we'd written in GW Basic or Pascal. Simple games, complex games, didn't matter. It was something to do.

One morning an older geek nobody knew walked in and asked to use the 486 for a few minutes. "Just so I can telnet into my PC at home." We were stunned. "Telnet? What's that? It can talk to your PC at home? How? Elucidate."

A few weeks later and we were all carrying around little black books with phone numbers of BBSes and IP addresses of all the good Gopher and WorldWideWeb sites. Those were the days before DNS was ubiquitous, or even available, so if you didn't get the digits, you didn't get the data. We spent countless hours and days logged into a particular local BBS, scouring the world for interesting sites, becoming some of the first UseNet trolls, and generally acting like teenagers on the 'net.

And then Mosaic happened, and everything changed in an instant. But that's another story, and meant for another time.

[WinkAllKerb'']

Almost it's public release in within the frontier where i m born. (the name of the place in is itself totally meaningless facing the the internet thing)

Sadly i missed the old telegraph along the railroad, i believe "electric signalecticly speaking" it's where it significantly changed, this or maybe the smog signal from indian it's hard to say seing the amount of similar process at other scale in history.

[tg626]

1996 - Unix Dial up, the text based predecessor of

http://www.sailor.lib.md.us/

Back then you still dialed up their server on a telnet connection, although PPP was available - before long I got Win3.1 so I could use Nutscrape and it was all downhill from there...

My first website address was http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~tthompsn

Before that I spent many years on local DialUp BBS's - anyone remember FIDOnet?

Edited March 5, 2015 by tg626

[sedativechunk]

I got my first computer in 1997-ish when I was only 7 years old (and man was excited when we got it!). I am now majoring in IT and work on computers everyday as a programmer, I grew up in an era where PCs were an amazing thing introduced to homes and I appreciate them being in our lives whereas kids today now have portable iPads and all the wonders of 2015.

I think we got internet probably that year or soon after, I'm gonna say 1998 at the earliest, 1999 at the latest. We had AOL back then with 56k dial up. It took me about 10-15 seconds to sign on the internet with those crazy dial up sound effects that used to play when connecting that OP posted in the first topic. I do miss that sound... the only game I ever played online successfully back then was "Age of Empires II", and it was VERY laggy. I remember once also downloading the trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It took me about eight hours to download the entire thing, I will never forget that day in my life as a child. I sat there for 8 hours waiting for that thing to download! I don't remember my first time signing on but I do recall I went on there quite frequently...

I got broadband around 2005, I couldn't wait for it at the time (so I could play Halo 2) but I miss the old old days of dial up! AOL homepage, AIM, those funny sound effect discussion boards. I am 25 now, and I feel old because of how much I have seen technology change! Kids today have it SO lucky and easy. I had to wait 8 hours to watch a trailer. Now we can stream entire movies in high definition. Gameboys, I had the pocket which didn't even have a color screen yet, and the only way I played with friends is if they came over and we used a system link cable! There were no iPads or even portal MP3's yet. I didn't even get a CD player until 2000 or so, and soon after that's when iPods first came out.

No wifi, no broadband, no HD TV's, no cell phones, no flat screen screens (yet), no online gaming like there is today. I always want to live to be 100 at least to see the world change and when I do, I want to spread the stories of the "golden age" of the internet and computers. I bet things are going to only change even more in the future. Oh, as an IT professional I'm also making a prediction. I am going to say within 20-30 years quantum computers are going to replace our silicon-based world we live in. iPad technology is going to be dirt cheap to produce and we will have such things as disposable tablets (like on Star Trek). I also am predicting that there will be advancements in quantum mechanics, allowing us to communicate and send data at speeds faster than light.

[magnemoe]

More important than my first contact with internet who was pretty unimpressive was in my first work after university.

Work was mostly fixing and upgrading computers, I found that the motherboard manufacturers had put out drivers and more important manuals on internet. Back in the beginning of 1990 486 was still the most common computer and motherboards had a lot of jumpers for various settings like cpu type and speed, nobody had the motherboard manual and it was very hard to upgrade cpu without it.

Finding them was now an minor task, I tend to search rather than use the manual even if I had it as the online was updated for newer cpu who did not exist then the manual was printed.

This was a decade before google.

Now I work as an software developer and google is my best friend, other has had the same problems I have.

Looking back to my schooldays before the net and finding information is not only magnitudes faster and easier but you also get way better answers. Like how to upload multiple files from an http form into an database. This was though as the setting is special, main issue was finding how to search.

I say the jump is far larger than going from an hand saw to an chainsaw. More like from an stone axe to an chainsaw, as OP as if you gave the 48-7S the trust of the mainsail and the ISP of the ion engine.

[jmiki8]

I first met the Internet when we got our first dial-up Internet connection at home in 1996. Internet became available only in 1995 for Hungarian households (by Westel), and we were one of the first families to have a connection at home.

Edited March 13, 2015 by jmiki8