Describe the first time you connected to the Internet at home. Me? AOL with a dial-up modem.

[Miles Archer]

Bought a Sony PC from Circuit City. Came with AOL bundled. I knew I didn't want AOL but signed up for the free trial until my AT&T could get connected. Thought I was king of the world.

There was no "high speed Internet" for home then. I worked in a tech environment, the people who needed that at home were getting T-1 lines installed.

You?

[Purveyor]

1. Prodigy and I was trading stocks online with PCFN around 1988-9. eom

[Kaleva]

3. WebTV with dial-up

Every time one of my aunts would send an e-mail with pics, I could get a lot of housework done while the e-mail was down loading.

[patricia92243]

4. I had Web too. It served as a good introduction to the internet. I was not "afraid" of it. I

had heard so many horror stories of viruses, etc. that I was terrified to even try it.

THEN - I got a PC. It came with the default on the firewall off. (I had never even heard of a firewall, so didn't know I had to turn it on.) In less than 24 hours I had so many viruses it quit working and HP had to restore it to factory setting - and turn on firewall.

Ah, the sweet innocence of youth (computer wise, that is.) lol

[Kaleva]

5. I recall telling an uncle how much I liked the keyless keyboard that WebTV used.

He asked me how such a thing worked. I thought a bit and realized I had meant to say "wireless keyboard".

[femmocrat]

6. We had dial-up when I first joined DU so I remember it well!

We had a computer of some sorts in the mid-1980s. My kids played video games on it, I think. I remember Prodigy and Netscape and having a local email address.

[Miles Archer]

7. Good old Netscape.

My first PC came bundles with Netscape and IE. Always used Netscape.

[GentryDixon]

25. My main email is still Netscape. 😊

[sarge43]

8. An IBM desk top w/2megs, dial up and Compuserve, 1993 n/t

[Gomez163]

9. "YOU'VE GOT MAIL"

[CaliforniaPeggy]

10. My dear Miles Archer!

It was 2004 and my brother wanted me to have my own computer so I could back up my little hand-held device (don't recall the name, lol!) myself.

He was a computer nerd and had pieces of lots of machines lying around his house, so he cobbled together these parts and brought them down to me, and he set it up in my study. I was enthralled!

That year I found DU and in 2005, I joined.

We no longer have dial-up, but FIOS. It's grand.

[alphafemale]

11. I remember trying to unsubscribe from A Oh Hell!

What a wretched company.

[Paulie]

12. When you mean the internet you mean the era of WWW?

Me was 1986 and dialup to a local public UNIX system (with my TI-99/4a) which got a news feed and email via UUCP.

[benld74]

13. Gateway-modem-aol

[mainstreetonce]

14. Anybody do MIRC chatrooms?

Made a lot of friends there.....in the nineties.

[Miles Archer]

16. A few, back then..."ping, uh, PONG?"

Never got into it enough to know what that meant.

[Pakhet]

15. 1989. 8088 Tandy with a 300 baud modem

and an external hd. Used local bbs' (mustang was my favorite platform.)

[csziggy]

17. About 1982-3 with an Apple ][ and a 300 baud modem

I connected through the Florida Library computer system that was designed to allow searching computerized library catalog systems all over the country - and as it turned out all over the world. There were also some BBSs but my husband and I mostly used the library systems.

At the time he was researching a chest that his family has with the date "1540" carved into the lid and a map of Macao painted on the inside of the lid surrounding the coat of arms of Philip II as king of Portugal (rather than the coat of arms as king of Spain). He was looking for reference books to request through inter-library loan when he accidentally made it into the catalog for the Library of Macao. Unfortunately most of the books that looked interesting were in Portuguese and the Florida State Library had no inter-library loan agreements with foreign libraries.

The internet system was amazingly slow - we'd request a page and could go off and do chores, cook dinner, or take a nap before the page would load. It didn't help that our rural phone system was more than a little iffy - down the road on a curve the phone lines came up out of a perpetual mud puddle where broken ends were spliced together, "sealed" with a good wrapping of duct tape and held up out of the puddle by being taped to a stout stick. If a vehicle took the curve wide, it wiped out the stick and the splice and our phone line went out. If it rained, that seeped through the duct tape and the static destroyed any chance of a data connection.

About 1987-8 we upgraded to a PC clone made by Packard-Bell that had a built in modem - 2400 - and joined The Source which had forums dedicated to different subject. Later The Source was acquired by CompuServe which had a much stronger forum system. After AOL bought CompuServe they screwed around with the setup and pretty much has killed the old forums though some vestiges remain.

[LiberalElite]

18. Juno dial-up -

a friend passed on her old Compaq PC to me in 2003. I was amused by having to come up with a password. I chose "baloney."

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

19. Sweet music to my ears.

I became an avid BBSer in the 80s, when DOS and Win 3x was still the standard. One of the local BBS feeds turned commercial when they added the SLIP protocol (an ancient portal to the internet) and I paid my 20 bucks per month and was happy. I flirted with Compuserve for a while then turned to Mindspring (originally called something I can't recall). I eventually got cable as it became locally available, and never looked back.

[So Far From Heaven]

20. Set up my workstation at school

for modem and called in from home. T-10 line at the time.

[grasswire]

21. yep, AOL

I vividly recall the first time I saw a chat room. It was the ACLU's Free Speech Zone on AOL. The only uncensored chat on AOL. It was just a blast. I learned so much there...me and my sheltered life. LOL. I still have two friends that I met there. What was it, twenty years ago?? One of them followed me here to DU, although he left eventually. I serendipitously tripped over him on facebook, so we are connected yet again.

[hobbit709]

22. SBC with a dialup. It took a year and a half longer than promised to get DSL.

I now have Google Fiber.

[Miles Archer]

23. I moved out of a place in California the week they were putting in fiber.

Moved to a house where it was still old-school DSL. Had drop-outs and disconnects all the time. SBC repairman came to the house and pointed to the tree in the back yard and said "See that line? You're at the end of it. That's why you're having problems." They had to downgrade my service because I had top of the line speed and they were nowhere close to hitting it. Never actually got to live in a neighborhood where they had fiber.

[JCMach1]

24. Atari 600XL with a 300 Baud Modem on Compuserve

Back in the Dark Ages

That's the same type of modem just the 300 baud vers. ...



Must have been around 1983...