What was your introduction to the internet?

Actually thinking some hot woman local to me was interested in my 15 year old self.



I miss nothing about the 'old days' of the internet other than it being new
It sucked
was slow as hell, quite limited on websites, AIM and random discussion boards were cool...but they still exist in a different form today
My dad sprung for a model with a 56k modem when most of the units still were on 28, still was slow compared to today
phone rings and youre kicked off
oh it's 7:30pm? Yeah, too busy, try again and again for the next half hour or more and you might get through
Graphics sucked, websites looked janky as crap compared to today

Any of yall thinking it was better back then are nuts
 
i was 5 when we got our first pc, an HP Win 95. i remember aol, funbrain.com games my mom let me play and endless commercials for dial up internet services.

from middle school i remember the napster saga, burning cd's, kazaa and limewire p2p sharing, images of nekkid girls, and a lot of viruses.

i can still play the dialup noises in my head.
 
Mentioned earlier I worked for Digital and managed a networked VAX750 in the early / mid 80's. The Vax had four dial in modems (DF03's) . At some point I realized these (under software control ) could dial IN or dial OUT. I must have inadvertently read the manual....

It didn't take long for me to move one of the engineering office WATS (toll free long distance) lines from one of the vacant cubes out to the computer room, where I connected it to the WATS line. What this enabled, was for me to be at home , dialing into my VAX and then dialing OUT through the toll free line to any of the fun BBS's that were all the rage at the time.

The fun thing about Digital, is that they encouraged this kind of mayhem , as in the process of playing, we were learning. This was true, as in my case, I did a lot of the system management stuff at night from home.
 
Sometime around 1996 I bought a computer for my son when he went to college. The motherboard needed a bios update in order to properly recognize the cpu, but I didn't know the manufacturer. So I posted a question on a board and got my answer from someone in Hong Kong, as simple as talking to your neighbor over the backyard fence. That was my real introduction to the internet and its possibilities.
 
A buddy of mine made me an admin level key for the university computer labs where he was attending. I would ride the train up there and spend all weekend on Usenet pulling down spicy jpgs to package on themed floppies and sell to the local pervs at the flea market.

Alt.binaries.etc.etc. It's like downloading a picture now, if the picture was a jigsaw and all the pieces came in different individual boxes and sometimes the boxes weren't named the same as the other boxes or weren't available and you had to have special software to put it together.

This was before most folks had a pc and before you could even get dialup in my home town, so for a while I had a nice little money making thing going.
 
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I started with an Apple II Plus in the early 80s and learned to program in BASIC, but that wasn't connected to anything. A few roommates had computers in college, but they were using MS-DOS and only useful for word processing. I can't remember the first time I used the internet- we did have some online computers in my college computer lab in 1991ish with the first Macintosh versions. But I think the first time I got online with a browser was after I got married in 1995. My wife had a Power Mac as a gift from her Dad. We got a 33.6k modem (which was super fast in those days. Everybody else I knew was using 14.4k) and I signed up for AOL. The websites were pretty basic and mostly text, but it was super cool. Pictures took forever to download.
 
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I remember being excited that "you've got mail" because it meant someone you knew figured out how to internet. Oh for the days before spam email.

Also when my friend came in to school with the address to playboy.com like he found the Rosetta Stone
 
I did not have a computer and was in grad school at Duke and got a pine email address that took something, like, 5 steps to get into. I would have to go to a handful of computer labs on campus to check email.
 
Was working for a large software company but I dont remember exactly what or where my first browse was but Im pretty sure it was somehow job related. We used to move around a lot of blue print files and some graphics and pictures. You had to wait for it to "dither" for the graphics or picture to come into focus.
 
NCLivingBrit said:
A buddy of mine made me an admin level key for the university computer labs where he was attending. I would ride the train up there and spend all weekend on Usenet pulling down spicy jpgs to package on themed floppies and sell to the local pervs at the flea market.
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At my first real job, the engineering computers were all linked together via 50 ohm coax running an early version of Ethernet. We shared a 56K dial up connection for Internet and you could browse it and google things, but it was certainly clunky by today's standards.

The guy who administered the dial up PC, Jeff, put together a collection of artful material on a CD and descriptively named it "Jeff T's Net Babes 98" and he gave out free copies to anyone who wanted them. Eventually he got called into the HR office and the HR manager pulled a copy of it out of his desk and said, "please explain this".

NCLivingBrit said:
Alt.binaries.etc.etc. It's like downloading a picture now, if the picture was a jigsaw and all the pieces came in different individual boxes and sometimes the boxes weren't named the same as the other boxes or weren't available and you had to have special software to put it together.
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Another coworker once described the Alt.Binaries.Etc as having anything and everything you can imagine, including baseball bats.

One afternoon I was messing around on my work PC and managed to get the Usenet channels to work (I forget the details, but the setup was more complicated than simple email, though it used the same program to explore it. Jeff comes over and says, "I see you got the usenet working. Here.... started banging away on my computer and the next thing I knew I was subscribed to a bunch of black and Indian pornography channels.

Oh, and don't forget the early days with things like CompUSA and the chat rooms. Late one Friday night as a pre or early teen I managed to stumble into an "alternative lifestyles" chatroom and was that an education. Though now that I think about it, not quite as much as the private chatroom I wound up in with someone describing sex acts in a detail far beyond what my young mind was ready for, and still remember today involving fingers.
 
NotYourSupervisor said:
I remember being excited that "you've got mail" because it meant someone you knew figured out how to internet. Oh for the days before spam email.
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Funny story. In a previous job, I was on the phone with our sales rep from Chicago, a rather interesting old dude, and I heard the "you've got mail" in the background. He started speaking really slow and then I heard his fist slam on the desk as he yelled "G-d D-mn it, ever since I started taking that viagra, I get more advertisements for products to make my dinger bigger!"
 
My introduction was around 1992, drinking beer in a navy buddy’s barracks room and watching him troll gay and lesbian chat rooms.

He was the only one in the school who even has a computer.
 
noway2 said:
Another coworker once described the Alt.Binaries.Etc as having anything and everything you can imagine, including baseball bats.
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After finding out just how much gore was on there, we used to have a contest to find the absolute worst thing we could.

I won and also motivated the others to stop the contest after I found police photos of an Italian girl who committed suicide by hugging the big bus bars at some sort of power station.

It's definitely not good kids have unlimited access to the internet these days. I didn't start until my late teens and it definitely changed me.
 
NCLivingBrit said:
After finding out just how much gore was on there, we used to have a contest to find the absolute worst thing we could.
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Indeed. As odd as it sounds, things are greatly filtered by comparison with the reliance on indexed search engines today. The content available, at least without going to the dark web (Tor based .onion sites) was much more raw than you will find today.
NCLivingBrit said:
I won and also motivated the others to stop the contest after I found police photos of an Italian girl who committed suicide by hugging the big bus bars at some sort of power station.
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Ugh, I had a former coworker who attempted to commit suicide (we believe) by grabbing the 12kV feeders on the distribution side. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he lived, but was badly burned and lost both of his hands.
NCLivingBrit said:
It's definitely not good kids have unlimited access to the internet these days. I didn't start until my late teens and it definitely changed me.
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One Christmas eve, my oldest brother in law had set an alarm clock so that he could go down in the basement and use the computer, i.e. Google himself, after everyone else was asleep. The thing is that he got excited and went down early and forgot to turn the alarm off. It woke his dad up who turned it off and went down in the basement and found him hiding under the desk with the computer on. The next morning, he received some sort of computer program and asked me to help him install it. I said, "while were at it, let's see what you were up to last night and pulled up some of his search history, before showing him how to delete it.

My youngest brother in law came to stay with us for a little while right after graduating high school and my wife introduced him to Game of Thrones. If you recall the soliloquy with Little Finger training the two girls who worked his brothel ... well, on the computer he used I later discovered someone was making some interesting searches with key words like: shaved, lesbian, and fisting.
 
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okay...first intro to the net.
Ran a PCBoard BBS, 100 nodes with "doors" outside world aka internet, Also a Mustang software BBS package. USR HST modems, a rack full of em. You had to know the IP addresses, would use "Telnet" to get around, CDNOW was my site I would hit up for "CD's". A very crude version of "Netscape" not of the graphics of today, rudimentary text / ascii for graphics

Then prior to all that was a Hayes 1200 baud moden, Hayes chrono for a clock, Heathkit H8 computer ( Trionyx MB ), 10 mb hardrive, ran ZCPR3 (CPM on steroids) Fido mail every morning at 4am. Was really fun..

-Snoopz
 
Not my introduction but 30+ years ago I was into flight sims (still am) and played a massively multiplayer WW2 based combat flight sim called Air Warrior. Connections were dial up and barely adequate but one year we had a get together in Wash DC with about 50 of us on a LAN. It was awesome. There is something about being physically together that has been lost by the modern internet making it unnecessary. Ah, progress.

0d05ee9ae8423ee2b78e42e2f0ac14d4.jpg
 
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My first computer was a Apple 2e. 128K with the extended card. 5 and 1/4 floppies. Around the very early eighties. It was just before Window first came out I think. I was hooked fooling with it. I have spent so much money on damn computers since. But it really helped when computers hit the work place. People actually though I knew what I was doing.lol Only because most didn't have a clue.
 
Flashpoint said:
Not my introduction but 30+ years ago I was into flight sims (still am) and played a massively multiplayer WW2 based combat flight sim called Air Warrior. Connections were dial up and barely adequate but one year we had a get together in Wash DC with about 50 of us on a LAN. It was awesome. There is something about being physically together that has been lost by the modern internet making it unnecessary. Ah, progress.

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Dude I was in the Sky Raiders squad in air warrior via AOL , always played on A as GLK22 back in the day, I started off in Spitfires and worked my way up to B&Z planes like the Mustang and A8 but once I got the throttle, combat stick and rudder pedals I was a menace in the P38 on the Europe servers and the F6F in the Pacific.


I started my internet life on IRC and went from there, I believe I started gaming on dial up on the WON network playing Wolfenstien (spelling?) Quake & Duke Nukem etc.
 
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Flashpoint said:
Not my introduction but 30+ years ago I was into flight sims (still am) and played a massively multiplayer WW2 based combat flight sim called Air Warrior. Connections were dial up and barely adequate but one year we had a get together in Wash DC with about 50 of us on a LAN. It was awesome. There is something about being physically together that has been lost by the modern internet making it unnecessary. Ah, progress.

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Other than the teenage funk, LAN parties were awesome.
 
Exspiravit said:
Usually drowned out by the smell of cheap delivered pizza, cheetos, doritos, and empty cans from those old school 24 count cubes of soft drinks.
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You mean "Jolt", Coke with guarana extracts
Mountain Dew, Ripped Fuel, and some other things, used to order and work the natural food section in Retail.

First computer Heathkit H8, loaded the OS if you will with a cassette (yes cassette) or "Perf-tape" (yes teletype ASR33) 32k ram, hard sector single sided 5.25 floppy..high tech back then, also had a DEC PDP 11/03, heathkit sold em..


Was never into any gaming..does a Atari count "missle command"


-Snoopz
 
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g19 said:
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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Usenet was a big deal. I'd have a lot more money if I'd never found rec.guns and some email lists like ar15-l and the curios & relics list. And speaking of usenet, if you followed alt.tasteless during the mid 90s, you might have seen the original post of the Ryan's Steakhouse story, which became internet legend and was posted by a guy named Steve Crisp from Raleigh. IIRC, the 'incident' supposedly happened at the Cary Crossroads location of Ryan's.

After Prodigy and AOL, I ended up getting my access through nando.net, which was one of the largest BBS systems in the area and owned by the News & Observer before they sold out to McClatchy. Sometime after that, DSL became available and I left my USR modem behind. It might still be in a box somewhere.
 
remember walking to class at ncsu in fall 76, i think harrison hall (round building by memory) and glancing in classrooms
chalkboard with weird symbols...
only later did i remember and recognize as computer code...
advance to late 1990's
Netscape and dial up... geeze... listening to the dial up connection sound.... on a compaq 'puter'
never did AOL
best thing was the landline was out of commission when on 'puter' sort of wish that was true now with all the damn spam phone calls....

still visit pretty much daily one site... 'the keeper'....
 
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AOL for sure, first time I started a system without it I didn't know what to do with the normal browser.
 
Nice to see some old school gamers here. Would be cool to get some Quake 3 or something fired up with members.
 
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Dialup to bulletin boards on the company supplied computer at work after hours.
We were in Somerset Ky but the GE had leased lines to all the major cities so there was no long distance phone line cost.
A few of us used it to look for jobs by networking.

5-6 years later a young boss at Sylvania told us old guys that we needed to get with modern times and learn how to use the internet. I asked him if he had ever used dialup to access bulletin boards and to get local info and he had no clue about what I was saying. Most of us “old guys” were already using the internet but this guy was so self centered he thought any one approaching 50 was a fossil.

Castle Wolfenstein. Here… early non-graphic edition first then graphic with lots of blood splatter.
 
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Not quite the 'earliest'of days... but I do recall using Windows 3.1.

But my biggest/best memory?

AIM. :)

Right before texting took over cell phones, back in the early 2000's when I was in college. Walking by the dorms with the open windows and hearing that little ding going off like crazy. My screen name was RAWRCOWBOY.

It was awesome.
 
papa_smurf said:
i was 5 when we got our first pc, an HP Win 95. i remember aol, funbrain.com games my mom let me play and endless commercials for dial up internet services.
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Mods, i request you change this joker's name to Baby_Smurf

Snoopz said:
You mean "Jolt", Coke with guarana extracts
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Hey now, back then JOLT was just regular cola with enhanced caffeine. You're thinking JOSTA, which was the pepsi competitor that had guarana and came labeled with red, yellow, and a panther. I think I still have my josta hat in a box somewhere.

Atla said:
AIM. :)
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I went through so many AIM handles... In fact, this one started off as a joke that sat unused for many years, but I decided to revive it when i retired a "......Kid" handle. Also, that ".....Kid" handle was linked to a lot of stuff I don't necessarily want following me around these days. a whole lot of stuff. but i stopped using it in the early days of google getting popular.
 
DrScaryGuy said:
Mods, i request you change this joker's name to Baby_Smurf


Hey now, back then JOLT was just regular cola with enhanced caffeine. You're thinking JOSTA, which was the pepsi competitor that had guarana and came labeled with red, yellow, and a panther. I think I still have my josta hat in a box somewhere.


I went through so many AIM handles... In fact, this one started off as a joke that sat unused for many years, but I decided to revive it when i retired a "......Kid" handle. Also, that ".....Kid" handle was linked to a lot of stuff I don't necessarily want following me around these days. a whole lot of stuff. but i stopped using it in the early days of google getting popular.
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JOSTA....that's it, used to down that stuff
Couldn't think of the name of it.

-Snoopz
 
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