What was your introduction to the internet?

Exspiravit

Exspiravit

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I've been recently thinking about the form the internet has taken and comparing it to the "wild west" days of the early net. In comparison, the internet seems more sterile now. More claustrophobic. The niche interests and groups mostly swallowed up by transient social media like Facebook and Reddit.

I was trying to remember what my first experience with the internet was and I can't recall exactly when I started using the computer for something bedsides Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem. But there are things I recall from those early days that I miss. Yahoo chat. Yahoo games. AIM. ICQ. Some very niche usenet stuff.
And then the personal sites started springing up. Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire. All these tiny little spaces made by passionate people who wanted to share their love of whatever with someone else.

Anyway, what was your introduction to the internet? What do you miss about the 'net as you first found it?
 
I worked as an intern at the AF Weapons Lab in the 1970s. We sent data files back and forth to defense contractors on the milnet/Arpa via terminals while getting my degree. At school we used PDP-11's to remotely submit jobs to the mainframe IBM360's (Oh, the joys of learning SPICE via batch jobs!)

When I graduated, I went to work for DEC and we had internet (terminals to mainframe) in the early-mid 1980s. I "acquired" a VAX at work in the late 80's and got it on the net and impersonated a system manager while I learned how to use a Vax and the early Web.
 
Exspiravit said:
I've been recently thinking about the form the internet has taken and comparing it to the "wild west" days of the early net. In comparison, the internet seems more sterile now. More claustrophobic. The niche interests and groups mostly swallowed up by transient social media like Facebook and Reddit.

I was trying to remember what my first experience with the internet was and I can't recall exactly when I started using the computer for something bedsides Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem. But there are things I recall from those early days that I miss. Yahoo chat. Yahoo games. AIM. ICQ. Some very niche usenet stuff.
And then the personal sites started springing up. Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire. All these tiny little spaces made by passionate people who wanted to share their love of whatever with someone else.

Anyway, what was your introduction to the internet? What do you miss about the 'net as you first found it?
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You must be my long lost brother. Duke Nukem got me started gaming. I built my own first pc. Then on to leading a Q2 clan. I remember when Quake and Quake 2 didn't have mouse support. I met a lot of good friends that I still have today from that era of life.
 
Sp00ks said:
You must be my long lost brother. Duke Nukem got me started gaming. I built my own first pc. Then on to leading a Q2 clan. I remember when Quake and Quake 2 didn't have mouse support. I met a lot of good friends that I still have today from that era of life.
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Ah yes Quake. Then Quake II, Quake III Arena, then Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Then later on Tribes.
We didn't have a connection fast enough to play online but there were lots of weekend LAN parties. I think the largest one I remember was almost 30 people.
 
I still remember external 14.4 modems and dialing into BBSs. Sounds like @JohnFreeman has us all beat though.

As for games, I still remember our LAN parties in the college computer lab late at night. Command & Conquer on the IPX/SPX network. Damn do I miss those days. Fun all night. Of course I remember Doom and Quake with my first 3D graphics card. The first game I played seriously online was MechWarrior.

I really don't play games anymore. No time. Games are too involved. Thanks to the "Greatest economy ever" about all I can do is work.
 
Exspiravit said:
Ah yes Quake. Then Quake II, Quake III Arena, then Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Then later on Tribes.
We didn't have a connection fast enough to play online but there were lots of weekend LAN parties. I think the largest one I remember was almost 30 people.
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We used to have lan parties at what is now Barnes precision. 50 or so people from all over the country. We also had local 10-12 people. Then someone got broadband and we started setting up servers so people could join remote.

We got into counterstrike as well. Q3 capture the flag was fun, I wasn't a big fan of q3 deattach.
 
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Exspiravit said:
Ah yes Quake. Then Quake II, Quake III Arena, then Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Then later on Tribes.
We didn't have a connection fast enough to play online but there were lots of weekend LAN parties. I think the largest one I remember was almost 30 people.
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Do you happen to remember a q2 clan called Mage? Ran a warehouse only server forever as well as others.
 
Man, yall bringing back memories.

I loved playing warcraft via dialup (56k US robotics modem!!) against my wife's cousin. He was a lot better than me...even let me be the Orc which were more powerful than the knights.
Then I started using the cheat codes
"GLITTERING PRIZES"
Gave you a bunch of money I believe...he'd be chatting saying to stop...of course I wouldn't... did it again....he warned me again......did it a 3rd time....and oh boy....the butt stomping he gave me was utterly speechless.....good times!!! šŸ˜šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£
 
DirtySCREW said:
Man, yall bringing back memories.

I loved playing warcraft via dialup (56k US robotics modem!!) against my wife's cousin. He was a lot better than me...even let me be the Orc which were more powerful than the knights.
Then I started using the cheat codes
"GLITTERING PRIZES"
Gave you a bunch of money I believe...he'd be chatting saying to stop...of course I wouldn't... did it again....he warned me again......did it a 3rd time....and oh boy....the butt stomping he gave me was utterly speechless.....good times!!! šŸ˜šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£
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Oh yeah, Warcraft II. Sounds and music from that game are hardwired into my brain.
 
We had Osborne luggables in the early '80s, but they were strictly for work and connectivity was limited to moving files between offices. I started using bulletin boards from home in the mid- to late-80s, probably working from an Atari 400.
 
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Dail-up AOL and all the chat rooms. Whatever you wanted done to the computer and files had to be done in DOS. IBM PCAT. We bought that thing for the fire department and it and the tractor feed printer cost 10k. We used a program called Q&A for work stuff and used floppy disks that started out holding 360k. I do miss a game called Leisure Suit Larry.
 
I never played any games, except for C Robots. I had a UUCP Routing Style email address before there was a DNS protocol. In Philadelphia, were wifey got educated in the early 80s, a bunch of us hacked the C source code for a BBS and recompiled it on a leased AT&T Unix Workstation to get the Phila Area Computer Society online. That group had some interesting visitors, including retired Grace Hooper, and young Bill Gates (representing Microsoft that was only a couple of years old). In the 90s, I was doing Unix and IP security for big RTP companies, and managed to share an account on the Cray to run the password QC tools every night. Those were fun times.
 
Late ā€˜70s we had a terminal at the house, no display everything printed on thermal paper rolls. Modem was 300 baud of course. Connections to a number of university and defense mainframes, dadā€™s work. By 1982 I had a terminal in my dorm for connecting to the university Vax, there was virtually no security in those days. Somewhere between those dates built a PC from parts at radio shack, including a cassette tape drive. Man those 5.25ā€ floppies were a nice upgrade. At university I think we had 8ā€ floppies after we dropped the punch cards.

Still remember buying my first retail hard drive, never expected to fill up 10mb.
 
I remember chasing the various free dialup trials from Juno, EarthLink, Netzero, etc because we couldnā€™t afford AOL.

AOL AIM and then Napster


Prior to that, we had an MS-DOS PC in the 90ā€™s but didnā€™t really know how to use it and we threw the floppy disks around like frisbees.
 
MacEntyre said:
...and Compuserve, don't forget them.
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I LOVED Compuserve for the free programs I could download while in computer science at Coastal Carolina. I hated having to buy time because it was damn expensive. I don't remember how I paid for it cause I sure as sht didn't have a credit card.

I loved how the net built with Flash was so much more fun. China destroyed that for us. Flash was a fun language and the websites gave art students jobs.
 
First computer game was star trek text only on an IBM 360. We would run it in "maintenance " time or as operator training.

We had displays with light pens and function pads with programmable buttons. One of the maintenance diagram for the displays was a functional check; played a whole lot like asteroids.

Fist computer at home was a c64; kept upgrading until I had a 256k ram expansion, dual 3.5" floppy disks and a 2400 baud modem. Had to choose between the modem or ram expansion. I used it on many bbs systems and to log in to the Air Staff Lan at the Pentagon to send emails and submit trip reports so I could come in late when flights got back late.

Had a Unix 3b2 system for personnel with a t1 connection to the internet. Had to install the lan drivers and tcpip stack; no auto-installation on ms-dos 5 or windows 3.1. Had to ftp the files for the mosaic browser and install it manually at first.

That wasn't yesterday...
 
AOL dialup. Netscape Navigator. Going to Fryā€™s electronics in the Bay Area with my dad. And old school online gaming over 56k. I remember watching the pilot episode of South Park on dial up. Shit took forever to load/buffer.
 
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I was exposed to the internet through IRC that my dad frequented for file sharing. But as a kid, Duke nukem, quake, wolfenstein. We thought graphics were insane when we got MYST. Man was that game confusing.
 
First computer was a Commodore 64 with (eventually) a 1541 floppy drive, color CRT, and a 56k modem that I used to do peer to peer file transfer, connect to Compuserve, and independent BBS systems. I remember Q link which became AOL and in college getting a PPP/SLIP account and using Mosaic to get on the internet. Want to lose a web page? Go make a pot of coffee.

My downstairs neighbor and I played Doom together over the 50 ohm coax Ethernet he ran between our PCā€™s after drilling a hole through the walls and ceiling to connect. The landlord was not happy.
 
first - local dialup bbs with "internet access" that put a few minutes of text-only access in your timebank each day.
I had a buddy that had a pc with the orange monochrome screen running prodigy, and we spent some time on that
then I got windows 3.1 and learned about loading up winsock.dll to use netscape navigator
I would drive up to the local library and outrun 2 or 3 internet computer stations doing stuff, printing anarchist cookbooks, etc.
Then came the free home internet access stuff that was hit or miss
Then many many AOL trials that may or may not have been entirely legal
I was there when the lcd matrix screens on cell phones started using WAP (no, not THAT WAP) to serve up mobile access to popular websites.
By that time we were into win95 and I was off to college with dial-up access through the university, but it was much easier to just stop into a computer lab for most things.
Then I got cable modem and win98, then win2k, skipped right over winME... and so on
I didn't like blackberies, so i got phones running winCE/mobile.

to say the world has changed rapidly is a severe understatement
 
Exspiravit said:
I've been recently thinking about the form the internet has taken and comparing it to the "wild west" days of the early net. In comparison, the internet seems more sterile now. More claustrophobic. The niche interests and groups mostly swallowed up by transient social media like Facebook and Reddit.

I was trying to remember what my first experience with the internet was and I can't recall exactly when I started using the computer for something bedsides Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem. But there are things I recall from those early days that I miss. Yahoo chat. Yahoo games. AIM. ICQ. Some very niche usenet stuff.
And then the personal sites started springing up. Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire. All these tiny little spaces made by passionate people who wanted to share their love of whatever with someone else.

Anyway, what was your introduction to the internet? What do you miss about the 'net as you first found it?
Click to expand...
Local alternative radio BBS. Didn't even have a login, you just entered a user name along with the post. Moved on to more rock/metal stuff as I got more into guitar.

I miss the anonymity, but more than that (but very directly accompanying it) I miss the thick skin. Oh, some random stranger said something mean to you? Shrug it off, Sally. That factor is absolutely GONE.
 
Jerzsubbie said:
Yup, we had a packard bell. 4gb hard drive, which seems crazy because I have 128gb in a micro SD card smaller than my pinky nail!
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if we're going with first computers... TRS80, followed by 8088 with 2 5.25" 720KB drives and no fixed hard disk. I don't think we had a hard disk until we moved from 8088 to 386. that 386 was screaming with a 1.2MB 5.25" and a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive. I believe we were working with hard drives in the 40MB range at the time...
 
My girlfriend at the time, wife now, went and got her computer. IBM Intel Pentium 133Mhz, 2Gb RAM, 1.6GB hard drive, 28.8 modem I believe....with a printer and monitor and it was like 3 grand!!! šŸ˜³šŸ˜³
A $100 smart phone from Walmart now would dust that thing!!! Lol
 
I sold computers back in the 90s. Sold Packard Bells, IBMs, Compaq and HP.
Then I sold a bunch of "e-machines"...name of the computer brand!! AND They were actually pretty decent computers.
I'll never forget when a guy came in and spoke to my wife's cousin ( same one that beat me in warcraft)....he said..man...I'm not even gonna lie...just want a computer for pr0n....
šŸ˜³šŸ˜³šŸ˜³
He left with an eMachines.......lol

šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£
 
I bought a Glock 19 on rec.guns.swap. Paid with a postal money order and they shipped it to an FFL near me. I loved rec.radio.swap also. I made an XT clone computer with a 10Mb hard drive and modem. Got a dot matrix Epson printer. AIM was also fun.

This was a good topic, thanks for the good memories.
 
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Went to college in 96 without a computer and found myself always using my room mates. Quickly used my $1k gift from a grandparent to buy a Compaq Presario. Mainly uses it to play MUDDS and other games. Part time using music pirate sites and such.

My ā€œboomerā€ moment came with smart phones. Saw them and thought ā€œthose have to be fragile and canā€™t browse as well as a real computer.ā€ Saw a friend of mine toss his apple phone (as in throw it across a room) to his 4 year old son to play with. A few weeks later my wife had one, and me soon after.
 
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