What was the first computer you used to access email?

[jmowreader]

Mine: IBM 4361 mainframe with 3278 terminal.

[Srkdqltr]

1. A Gateway something 1997 or 8 maybe.

[NightWatcher]

26. I remember the day those two huge 80lb boxes showed up at my door

We thought we were high tech shit. Had a handful of aol cd's and a list of local dialup numbers.

[DBoon]

2. mac powerbook 160

[AllaN01Bear]

3. the last 8088 series of cpus before the pentium series . win 95.

[dweller]

4. Acer Boat Anchor

on a dialup connection 😐

lol, recalling that pos now, lightening struck outside my house, literally knocking me out of my chair, reversed the polarity of the electricity in my house and smoked that sucker … I was actually happy so I could get another computer


✌🏻

[bahboo]

5. a Motorola Mac clone.....

[TreasonousBastard]

6. An Atari XL something. Compuserve and AOL.

[GPV]

8. We had Ataris, too.

[Earth-shine]

23. I still have Ataris. I have determined that this will be the year they sell on eBay. nt

[Pas-de-Calais]

7. Yours sounds awfully familiar

[left-of-center2012]

9. My roommate's computer

I do not know that it had a name as he bought the parts at an electronics store and put it together himself.

[mopinko]

10. that would have been my 2nd or 3rd.

i started out w a commodore 64, w a terminal emulator, and one of those modems where you set the handset in the cups. i snuck into the loyola chi mainframe and stole printing when no one was looking. and played star trek.

might have been the only assembled computer i had til i got my white mac book.
it was an att, which i went out and bought when the hubs was out of town, cuz it was on sale. i screwed something up, dont remember what.
after that, he built his own.
i dont rly remember when i started using email. early, but it wasnt aol.

[Turbineguy]

11. A 286 series

Compaq.

They had keyboards able to withstand people in need of anger management.

[Kali]

12. still have it in a drawer

[Tetrachloride]

13. VaxStation 2

[Foolacious]

14. IBM 360 mainframe with 3278 terminal. N/T

[unc70]

15. DEC PDP-11 with terminals; Multics a bit later

[Klaralven]

16. PDP 11/70 with HP 2621 terminal

[csziggy]

17. Packard Bell XT PC clone

While I got online with my Apple ][ I never set up an email address. It just wasn't done in 1982 when I bought the Apple. By the time I got the Packard Bell, email was fairly routine. I signed up for The Source community but didn't do much there. When CompuServe bought The Source, I got into the online forums there, using TAPCIS since CS charged by the minute. Eventually, as the CS forums were dying, I found this place through someone on the CS Democratic Forum. The CS in my user name is for CompuServe!

[MLAA]

18. Sounds about right for me.

I worked for IBM and it was a dumb terminal to mainframe connection accessing profs (email app). I think it was 1982 or 83. It was the first time we had email if I remember correctly. Before that it was fax machine and overnight mail!

[IggleDuer]

19. Commodore 64

AOL, CompuServe or Quantum Link.

[cinematicdiversions]

28. Same here.

At some point in my young life I learned what all those weird symbols on the Commodore's keyboard keys were for and did.

More useless than taking French.

[sinkingfeeling]

20. IBM 4381 mainframe and 327? terminal.

[zipplewrath]

21. HP unix workstation

Forget the specific model number. It would have been around 1995.

[lastlib]

22. AST Premmia466e

Win 3.1 486 w/ 350MB HD (which I boosted to 1GB after a couple years), 8MB RAM. A beast of a machine brand new, but a few months after I bought it, Pentiums came out.

(This isn't counting the machine at Fort Lxxx I got onto (while waiting for a Boy Scout training course to start) and hacked into the base e-mail system. That was quite an interesting adventure, but I'd better save the details.....I don't know what kind of machine that was.)

[Earth-shine]

24. IBM-type PC. 1994

[CloudWatcher]

25. IBM 360/75 running MVT

UCSB was one of the first four sites on the ARPANET. Email was new enough that they published an RFC documenting our new email addresses:

RFC 574 Sept 26, 1973

Yeah, I'm one of the six mentioned in the RFC. I'm also included in the list of people that received the first-ever email spam ... and I think I may have gotten a copy of every piece of spam mail since!

[Backseat Driver]

27. I initially used a Telex machine to send 2-way

communications pre-email. At home we began with the C64; then HP Compaq with a dial-up, via really messages from work; at home: slow low-baud modem and the AOL service, accessing bulletin board groups and other content as became available; finally an early HP featuring Win3.1...and advancing from the large floppies to the smaller/tougher ones, CVDs, DVDs and advanced gaming graphic specs and storage. At one time, we played the network service games, with AOL, Netscape via Earthlink satellite, and Time-Warner's Roadrunner. We also got a second dedicated home computer phone (not digital) line because no one could use the single phone dialing up the services w/ emails at each and attempted to learn web pages from scratch, LOL! When DOS's easy access disappeared, using a computer was so easy that I got very lazy, LOL! and so sad that spam, spoofing, and hacks; adware, malware, ransomware, and tracking will always be concerns of users, sites, and networks--eek! censorship, privacy (haha), and cyber monies and mining...

The kids got pagers, but an Apple 6s was my first cell phone while DH went android to cover all the bases. Things sure have changed so rapidly; now preparing devices for 5G speed. TMI, no doubt, and just wow!

[Xoan]

29. IBM AT

[Akoto]

30. Not the first I used, but the first I used for email was a Windows 95 of some sort! n/t

[I_UndergroundPanther]

31. Hewlette Packard

[Submariner]

32. Leading Edge desktop

In ‘97 an up an down earthquake jolt in Venice, CA destroyed the machine by making the stylus needles jump around to the wrong spot on the huge 25MB hard drive. Not salvageable.