What is your first Internet Experience?

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What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 6:33 pm

Hey for those who still remain here, what are your meatspace stories of how you remember getting "online" for the first time?

Mine is I subscribed to the Planetary Society's magazine and I can't remember how they put it on the page but I desperately I desperately wanted to access the site (all text back then). My 386 computer with a 24kbps modem was hella underpowered for what we are used to today. However getting even remote text was something of a miracle back then. I couldn't believe I was reading something that wasn't on my computer but on someone else's computer instead but I could access it. It was all windows 3.1. Then I got the first AOL FLOPPY diskette in the mail and everything changed. Computers back then lacked any kind of CD ROM capability at all. AOL made it fairly easy.

And here I am.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Mar 09, 2016 6:50 pm

Reading about it for years in Omni magazine until it showed up at the Johnston State College library.

Been underwhelmed and disappointed ever since.

To be fair, that's mostly because my expectations were so high: the illustrations were much more interesting than the actual interface.

All in all, the internet is still vastly more entertaining than television or books, I'm a fan.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby tapitsbo » Wed Mar 09, 2016 6:57 pm

downloading shareware was my first net experience/the netscape navigator loading page with the sailboat was my first web experience
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 7:12 pm

I should have added cellphones into that too. I remember calling friends while I was driving just to say I am totally driving right now. Everyone would be what the fuck you're seriously driving right now? There weren't no call logs or built-in address books, you just knew people's numbers by heart. The roaming charges definitely sucked which I found out the hard way. I remember going to Vegas and I was feeling like a high roller. I was 21. So I would just call people to tell them I was on a cellphone in Vegas. Man that bill was lame roaming AND long distance.

As an aside I called a friend in Canada last week and I got an almost $50 dollar charge because of it. I complained and had it reversed. I said he lives five miles from the US border, why can't I call him? Do I want to put the calling to Canada and Mexico plan on my account? I could do either one but had to choose. Just told them I'll use skype.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby NaturalMystik » Wed Mar 09, 2016 7:38 pm

Back in the 80s I was a BBS junkie making daily calls into a variety of local sites on a C128. I don't remember how I got the first number, but once I got one, down the rabbit hole I went. For those that don't remember BBS's, they were basically web sites that were hosted on an individual computer and accessed by single access dial up phoneline. They were effectively forums and download sites, of which could be run on an entire 3.5 floppy with a hefty download archive. These sites were often set-up to link up with other sites over night, in order to synch data across networks and serve up fresh content. It was a slow internet, with lots of feedback delays. From there I remember 'surfing' gopher sites and using email on the actual live internet. Gopher sites were basically text only monochrome web sites. Then came netscape and WWW and that changed everything...
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby DrEvil » Wed Mar 09, 2016 7:49 pm

Can't remember the exact first time I was online, but I remember marveling at one of the old computer mags I used to read that had a small feature in the back where every month people would write in suggesting the most obscure topic possible, and this guy would find it on the internet!
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1994

Postby IanEye » Wed Mar 09, 2016 8:56 pm

82_28 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 6:33 pm wrote:Hey for those who still remain here, what are your meatspace stories of how you remember getting "online" for the first time?




Shelley René.

CL: You first posted photos in the early days of the Internet. When and how did the site begin, and when did it metamorphose into Digitrix?

Shelley: Yeah, Trey posted them before the Internet was anything like it is now. I don't even think the World Wide Web was around. He posted them to USENET newsgroups, I think.

Trey: The pictures were originally posted to the USENET news groups,
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, etc. We used a cheap handheld black and white scanner that belonged to a friend. I posted them to the newsgroups, two or three at first to see the reaction... The reaction was overwhelming. At the time, the only nekkid pictures on the Internet were loads of copyright infringements involving scanners and people with too much time on their hands. So, I think the reaction was so strong because these were actually photos of a brave, real person. As the responses started to pour in, I think she really started to enjoy it.

Shelley: I met Trey in January of '92 and we took the first set of pictures the next year, Spring of '93. I believe it was May. Trey in the summer of '94 scanned them and posted them to newsgroups and bulletin boards in August. Like I said, the Internet wasn't like it is now with the World Wide Web. Since the pictures were becoming really popular, another A&M student put them in a web page with a student account using an A&M server. This was in the fall semester of '94, called "Sights from Texas A&M." You can still see that page with those pics. We keep them separate to this day! Then in December '94 the school newspaper (The Batallion) printed one of my pictures on the front page. That's when the shit hit the fan!


.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby MinM » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:12 pm

82_28 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 5:33 pm wrote:Hey for those who still remain here, what are your meatspace stories of how you remember getting "online" for the first time?

Mine is I subscribed to the Planetary Society's magazine and I can't remember how they put it on the page but I desperately I desperately wanted to access the site (all text back then). My 386 computer with a 24kbps modem was hella underpowered for what we are used to today. However getting even remote text was something of a miracle back then. I couldn't believe I was reading something that wasn't on my computer but on someone else's computer instead but I could access it. It was all windows 3.1. Then I got the first AOL FLOPPY diskette in the mail and everything changed. Computers back then lacked any kind of CD ROM capability at all. AOL made it fairly easy.

And here I am.

Image
Mine was similar to that with the computer and modem but it came with a Prodigy floppy disk to help install it. So it directed you to these early versions of message boards/chat groups sponsored of course by Prodigy®.

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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:15 pm

I figured out how to get a webcam running in 1999 and it wasn't getting any hits. It was just pointed at the space needle, downtown and the Olympic Mountains. I never got any watchers. Then one night we had a party and was explaining to the guests/friends that it was impossible to get anyone to watch it -- the Internet itself was very novel back then. So this girl who wasn't even Internet involved (1999) accepted a bet that I would give her $20 if she could get more than 10 viewers. She didn't get no naked or anything but did take off her shirt and danced around with her bra on. Within about 10 minutes I was up to 50 viewers. Needless to say I gave her the twenty.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby MinM » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:21 pm

I was a huge fan of the computer geek shows back then...

MinM » Thu Dec 29, 2011 10:31 am wrote:Image
Never heard of that 'TechNation' Show before. Probably just carried on it's originating NPR Station (KQED).

BTW it seemed that all of these "Tech" Shows had gone the way of Soledad O'Brien on MSNBC, and Stewart Cheifet on PBS... :offair:
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:29 pm

I honestly don't remember. Through my high school I got access to a college network at the age of 13 or 14, and played a Star Trek text game. But it was on another server in Ohio, if I remember, so that's Internet! I wouldn't have known to call it that. The real students at the computer center were still feeding punch cards into slots, since they had an old system for the time.

This reminds me of an unrelated story, just a couple of years later on some temp job. I delivered something to a data center in an office building basement. It turned out to be a huge data-punch sweatshop. I remember all these women of color, mostly, in closely-spaced rows at mechanical keypads, typing data on to punch cards. All next to each other. These were "jobs." Completely gone today.

I was also screwing around with X/Y protocol modem connections and getting on to message boards soon as I had my own computer from 1990 or so. The www would have been just starting then, but I had no idea. No one called it the Internet yet. It got started as a big social phenomenon under that name with the mass www rollout of 1993-94. Well, mass by comparison, but by mid-1994 or so it was already a thing for tens of millions of people. Usenet! Compuserve! By 1995 I was able to work from my village in Greece and deliver translations through the Internet at 1200 baud!
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby coffin_dodger » Wed Mar 09, 2016 10:04 pm

sexpicnet.com, circa early 90's. I was young. :oops: on my Tulip 286 with 640k base memory and 20mb hard drive. Oh yeah, baby - that machine flew. Not.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby KUAN » Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:40 am

.

I remember my first computer back in the mid 80's was am Amstrad..... you've stopped listening haven't you - I don't know, the attention span of people these days
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:16 am

Winter 1984-1985 I was a Fed employee and first line supervisors went to planning and training sessions for a DataGeneral system to be installed in Winter 1985-86.

One still sent written drafts for typing on IBM dedicated word processors.

The DataGeneral system was to have what would be described as an intranet email feature as well as word processing, database features, and internal security firewalls.

I quit the Feds in Fall 1985 to go attend the Cal (UC Berkeley) Haas Business School MBA program where:

1) A required class was a 2 unit - 1 hour lecture, 3 hour lab - computer flyover course eg unix week, spreadsheet week, database week, word processing week, Mac week, etc. We were introduced to the university intranet email service.

2) I bought an 8088 pc with two floppy drive and word perfect, lotus 123, and DBase software - we were required to do work on pc in many classes and I could not stand the computer labs.

3) Aside for yucks: I rented a room in a beautiful house in the Berkeley Hills. The owner/landlord/one of 4 housemates was the estranged wife of a well known San Francisco defense attorney. She had been staff at EST (Werner Erhard) but had been fired because she decided the simple solution to any human problem was to simply take off her / your clothes. This had bad impacts on her marriage as well and resulted in some odd household moments. The housemate I was close to was a recent Vassar grad who was taking time off and came to Berkeley to visit a gal pal starting grad school at Cal. She met some folks at a party who offered her a job and a woman who worked for UPS left our abode and Sofia moved in. Almost immediately she became VP Marketing for Centram / TOPS (Transcendental Operating Systems). Their one product was a hardware software package that allowed mac pc and unix to communicate seamlessly. No one else could do this in 1986 and the TOPS founder Nat Goldhaber was a star at Comdex, on the cover of pc magazines, and sold his product to Sun Microsystems for $20 million. Sofia dated "Phlash" the chief programmer. Goldhaber and Phlash and others at TOPS were hard core Transcendental Meditation people who did not proselytize. Sofia and I threw a holiday party / open house in December 1986 where the attendees were mostly Haas students and TOPS employees and the landlord clothe-less one did her thing and the party became momentarily legendary (largely because many b-school students also took off their clothes and splashed all the water out of the hot tub to my embarrassment).

I went to work for a management consulting firm and bought myself a 386 machine with a 20 MB hard drive and a laser printer. I spent nearly $2000 for the hard drive and nearly $5000 for the laser printer. I leased both pieces of equipment to my employer. While my job was in Portland, OR, the VP then President of the company lived in Redding, California where he maintained a small unofficial office (where I leased out my hardware). I also bought a home in Redding and was able to stay close to my elderly father who in Winter months spent more time in Redding than I did. We still used DOS.

I quit Oregon job in 1993 and went to work for Oregon State University in Fall 1994 funded by a federal research grant where part of my benefit as well as OJT would be to obtain a free PhD. I had shifted to Windoze in 93/94 in my independent consulting work. Part of the OSU orientation was my first introduction to email. We all were assigned an orst.edu account and told that this is how we could communicate. We could use orst.edu as an ISP at home. The first web browser I used was Mosaic and later Netscape. The modem was 2400 baud. I was into usenet and joined The WELL bulletin board. There were separate programs for email and usenet. Sometimes for OSU I would download or upload materials to FTP on orst.edu. In 1995 OSU halted the use of orst.edu as a home ISP because of a conflict of interest with private business. Initially I got an AOL account for home and soon there after an independent ISP started by the same students that had serviced the home orst.edu installations.

My pc expertise probably peaked in 1998. Where I live satellite was the only internet service available until Fall 2015 except satellite wifi at Tribe Offices and at a non-profit environmental group office. Now there is a small wifi tower to service about 250 homes max. I went without internet from 2012 until Spring 2015 when I got a new satellite connection and am retaining that service. I use a circa 2007 pc.
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Re: What is your first Internet Experience?

Postby 82_28 » Thu Mar 10, 2016 4:41 am

Good stories all. Keep 'em coming!
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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