When was that, 11 years ago?

Do you remember the very first time you tried the internet?

First homepage?

First "LOL" ?

I'll share my memories:

I didn't even know what Google was, not sure if it even existed. Homepage was set to MSN, where I read the news. All I knew at first was MSN, HOTMAIL, and ICQ.

Most of the early days I spent on ICQ. I remember the excitement of talking to people all over the world, just for fun. That's also where I picked the internet jargon. LOL was indeed the most common one. Also, every conversation had to start with A/S/L...I guess it's still like that on ICQ, though I haven't used it in years.

Then I tried all kinds of search engines, typed in all my favorite things and checked all kinds of websites. Eventually I found this place as well.

That's about it, I guess. What was your first experience online?

It's funny all the ways to chat that have come and gone. ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Myspace, Facebook...
My first internet memories are from around 97. It was dial up and I can't believe people were that patient to even use it. Other memories I have are looking up Dragon Ball Z videos constantly with my friends.

I still have my first email address that I made in 97'. I'll probably keep if for life. Remember when E-Cards were popular? No one sends them nowadays.

lol I didn't go online until 2004. I'm 39 though, so I didn't need a computer for school, or studies or such. My first email account was a yahoo one. Never did the messenger thing and still don't. This is the third forum I joined. One was for the tv show LOST. Then Real Deal and onto here.

Oh and I never had a myspace acct, but I do enjoy facebook now.

And for the longest time I was typing "LOL" thinking it meant "lots of love" until people started acting weird to me everytime I'd type it. Eventually someone clued me in.
And today I refuse to start typing this "smh", or "smdh" and half of the other crap like that. I'm old school and if I'm laughing my motherfucking ass off (LMMFAO), I'll type it out!

haha, Yes, Blake I remember those e-cards. I thought they were the cutest thing ever. Of course they weren't, but whatever. lol

I had a computer at work in the late 90's that had internet, but got my first computer (used HP desktop) from a co-worker in 2000.Started out with dial-up (how antique is that) I couldn't use my phone while on line so I had an "internet phone" in which calls came on line.

I use to use messenger a lot but haven't in years. The BB was the first site I actually joined going on 10 years now. I don't belong to too many sites but do frequent political sites a lot. I still use LOL though and occasionally send an e-card. I too have the same e-mail address I've had from 2000.

In jobs of the past, I had to learn it. But then to save on postage, and news ! Playing cards, and such. It works damm well,
got in touch with you guys.

Like the guy back in 2000, that made me a deal on my first computer, said I know enough to be dangerous . And that he did , goodthing he had a bad heart , and I liked him.

Now if I have ah problem get ahold of a youngen, I like.

Funny they really know more about this than, us older farts.

My then employer, Bell Laboratories, trained me to use their Unix operating system in '79, with a terminal and modem on my desk. All of their computers were interconnected in a corporate LAN, so I was able to use internal e-mail to contact others, and to access a limited number of games that they'd loaded for people to use.

A couple of years later, all the company's computers got hooked up to DECNET, which was a kind of bulletin board/affinity group network, for all Digital Equipment Corp. computers around the country. It was like the Internet without Graphical User Interfaces. Suddenly, everyone in the company was spending hours a day posting on their bulletin boards and sending/receiving e-mails. So much productivity was lost that the company abruptly unhooked everyone.

I got computing at home at the same time--first a Texas Instruments Silent 700--like a portable typewriter with "muffs" to accommodate a telephone handset; then a HP 2621P terminal with external modem hooked into a corporate LAN. The company gave me my first PC in the office and at home in '87, but it didn't run Windows. That came two years later.

I started up an AOL account around '93. My first chatroom was a site for '50's and '60's music--a highly competitive quiz every Friday night. Lotsa fun. I've been a Web junkie ever since.

Didn't most everyone have AOL homepage and e-mail in the beginning?



TIS

I remember my first time. I was young and inexperienced, but she was patient and gentle with me. I'll never forget it.

... But then I got the phone bill. Madonne!

Jeez, where do I start?

While I got my first computer (Apple //e) in high school in '83, I never used it in college (damn manual typewriter!). Late '80s I snagged the old Apple and started playing around with it, and getting online. (Well, before getting online I was actually using it for ham radio RTTY (radio teletype) which allowed me to talk to other hams all over the world with my keyboard -- I contacted over 120 different countries (and all US states) in the couple years I did that).

I started with Prodigy (we called it P* for shorthand). Back then the Big 3 were Prodigy, CompuServe, and then AOL. I was using a modem that ran 2400 or 9600 baud max (that's 2.4k/9.6k), which was pretty quick for the day. I also went on local BBS's (bulletin board systems; that's where the "BB" comes from here) that connected way down to 300 baud. Prodigy later sold me a whopping 14.4k modem for only $150! After 14.4k came 28.8k then 33.6k then 56k by the late 90's, and that's pretty much where dialup maxed out. (All those speeds were theoretical, never actually attained)

In the early '90s I had switched to AOL dialup. And it was a toll call. On top of the $25/month or whatever it was for AOL, my phone bill was another $100+.

By 1995 I was fed up and found a local ISP for dialup that was $20-25/month, but was a local call. I was one of their first 50 customers, and still am 'til this day (not for dialup). Soon after I started the Godfather site (July 1995) simply because I searched for one and never found one. There wasn't much of an internet back then, and what was there was pretty simple and basic -- and the site hasn't changed much the past 15 years.

By 1996 personal homepages started looking like this spoof I made in '97. (And it still cracks me up!! )

Anyway, thank God broadband came around in the '00s!! First Comcast, which was fine, but now FiOS is Da Chit!

I first got online with Prodigy too, back in 1990. It was on an 8088 based computer with 640K RAM, 40MB hard drive, and 2400 baud modem. I remember when I bought an Intel 486 computer a couple years later with Windows 3, 4MB RAM, 120 MB HD, and 9600 baud modem, I thought it could never get any better than that. lol In the early to mid 90's I ran a BBS in North Jersey for several years until the internet killed all of them.

I got a Packard Bell "multimedia" computer around 1994. It was good mainly because it was so bare bones that it could be upgraded in a lot of ways, and so I learned how to open up a computer and replace memory and modems.

The first actual service I subscribed to was AOL. I had a homepage there where I wrote about baseball. It wasn't till many years later that I found out I had been a blogger.

I first went online around 1998 when i was at college.The first webite i think i went on was the yahoo.co.uk website, which i used as my search engine. I also have the same email address i had in 1998 but its not very often i send personal e-mail.

This site was the first message board i joined in 2004 and is the only one i still visit seven years later.

We got our first computer in 1989, and went online in 1992 when my husband got a job working for Prodigy. Pretty much made the progression after they were gone to a local ISP and then to broadband with IO.

In 1999 I upgraded to a 486/66 (I think it was 66 MHz, or maybe 100 -- does that make sense? The Apple //e was 1 MHz). 200 MB HDD which I thought I'd never fill up (lol). I think it came with 16MB RAM which was mind-blowing. I assume it came with Win 98 -- I did have a PC before that and ran Win 3.1 and Win 95 (and DOS). I never upgraded to Me, but my next computers did have XP which I used until just last year when I got Win 7.

Between '96 and '01, for 3 years in there I worked on a Mac at work.

BTW, I was using a GUI (graphical user interface) on the Apple // well before I got Windows -- I upgraded the mainboard to run GEOS in the late '80s.

The 486's bus ran at either 25 or 33 MHz, but you could get 66, 75, or 100MHz with their 486 DX2 and DX3 chips which multiplied the bus. My first 486 was 33MHz. Then I bought the 100Mhz "Overdrive Chip" as an upgrade. By the late 90's, I was building my own systems using mostly chips by Cyrix and AMD because they were so much cheaper than Intel, and ran just about as fast. The first system I built ran a Cyrix 5x86 running at 133Mhz. Later on I built a system running an AMD K2 266MHz chip. The last system I built was was a Pentium MMX 233MHz, that I overclocked to something like 300MHz.

Okay, that's right -- memory gets fuzzy after 20 years lol. It was a 486/66. I also used a few AMD chips, which I liked then. I also tried Cyrix once and didn't like it at all. The "super computer" I built in the early '00s had my last AMD (Athlon) chip -- I've been back to Intel since.

I've been debating whether or not to build a new system myself again, but the savings aren't like they used to be. Years ago, you could build a top system for a fraction of what a pre-built system cost. Now, you can go on sites like Newegg and buy a loaded, super fast system, for under $800. Even if you're on a budget, you can buy a muti-core system for under $500. If I built these systems myself, I'd be lucky to save $100.

Yeah, there's no point any more DIY...

1998. About 13 years old. Friend showed me rotten.com. Thus began my descent into internet desensitization.

I can't remember the exact year, but I know it was some time in the late 90s. We got our first computer, which was a hand-me-down from one of my dad's friends. It was an old Macintosh with the monitor that sat on top of the modem. It was a really old computer (probably 5 or 6 years old at the time) but I remember it had a TON of different computer games downloaded onto it. To this day, that was my favorite computer.

We signed up for AOL, and I still remember trying to log on with our dial-up connection. It was near impossible on the weekends because everyone was trying to log on. I also remember that the first email account I ever had got hacked.

Most of my internet time in those days was spent either in chatrooms or downloading music. Back then, it took about 30 minutes to download a single 5 megabyte mp3. It's amazing how far we've come!

Here, for a little nostalgia:

Ha ha ha. It wasn't that long ago but it is so dated now.

You all wanna feel really old. I asked my grandkids if they remember a time when there were no cell phones or computers. They've always known them. Same for answer machines and landline phones with cords (my granddaughter called it a phone with a "dangly thing". To little kids growing up now a world without computers is really ancient times.



TIS

memories.

As a college freshman at the University of Illinois in 1977/78, some courses included a "lab" that required completion of your homework on a newfangled computer system called PLATO. You can read the wikipedia history of PLATO by clicking on this link.

If you ever worked on the PLATO system, you might be interested in a book on the history of PLATO called The Friendly ORANGE Glow authored by Brian Dear. The title is a reference to the amber screen on the proprietary PLATO terminal. These were flat plasma panels invented specifically for this application, and the precursor to the modern plasma display.

Two features of the PLATO system included "Talkomatic" which was a chat room feature, and "term-talk" which was an instant messaging feature. "Term-Talk" allowed any user to "page" another user and chat peer-to-peer just like modern instant messaging. "Talkomatic" was a simple chat room. The display showed you six channels (I think...) and the names of up to six users in each channel. You chose which channel you wanted to enter by touching the screen. Yes...these terminals had touch-screen technology. It was a primitive system of LED's laid out on a grid around the edge of the display and functioned like an 'electric eye'. Touch the screen at a particular point and you break the beam. That corresponded to a particular command on the screen and away you go.

Users came from the network of interconnected universities and a few non-university installations as well. I was an occasional Talkomatic user during that time. Keep in mind that this technology was developed and deployed in the 1970's, if not earlier, and it was 1977 when I had my "first experience."

You'd be surprised at how much the modern internet owes to the concepts that were part of the PLATO system.

It wasn't until the mid-90's, when the computer reseller that I worked for had dial-up, that I got on-line with the internet as we know it today.

I believe one of the first searches that I did on Alta-Vista was for porn...

tony b.

I had a Commodore 64 computer back in 1984 but it wasn't until 1996 that I got on the web... my office finally got us computers (instead of the dummy terminals we had) and I bought my first REAL computer for home. The Windows 95 got me online and I spent the next week playing online.... it took me a day to figure out how to interact in a chat room.... I kept forgetting the mouse and would try to move the cursor by touching the monitor screen.

It was late '96 when I happened across a website dedicated to "The Godfather". It would be another year or so before I started hanging out on its message board, and I've been here ever since.

Don't blush... you were 20 years ahead of your time!

I used to write speeches and Congressional testimonies for the senior officers in my company. I was insane for high-availability computing because when the deadline comes, the bosses don't want to hear that "the computer's down." I had logins on four physically separate mainframe computers. After I finished a speech on one, I'd use a dialup feature inside the computer to move it to all the others--and I sat there watching the speech go over, byte by byte. I had access to a LAN at home and another LAN in the office, but I kept modems and even acoustic couplers at home and office in case the LANs went down. My basement was full of spare modems, terminals and mother boards.

Then, when we got PC's in '87, I found that I could simply copy the speeches on a floppy disc and carry spare floppies in my briefcase. If my PC at the office or home went down, I could simply drive to the nearest AT&T building, seize an unused PC, plug in my floppy--and work. No more mainframes.

My first time on the internet was extremely embarrassing - I went to set up a hotmail account and misspelled mail (male). Holy cannoli, you should have seen the images that appeared!!!

(Just kidding - I heard that from a stand-up comedian.)

My first time on line. Well let me tell you this girl was hot and very athletic. I was the eighth guy and ...... oh, you mean on the computer!? Jeez I'm sorry.

I think it was at work and someone showed my webcrawler and how to find "dirty pictures".

My first computer was an Everex, 80 mb hard drive, 386 mhz. Everyone at work was jealous because they only had 40 mb. I also got a dot matrix printer. I think it cost me about $4,000 for everything (could that be right?)

At work we were using Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3. No Mouse! All keystroke. Yeow. Like a caveman.

I don't know why I felt compelled to see if there was an actual site there. Yup, of course there is. Now you know, so don't bother checking! lol