Retrotalk : Retro Central : Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet?

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Syrinx Member Since: March 2006 Contributions: 19 Gold Stars: 1 View User Posts	Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:47 pm Central Time I recall around 1994, my neighbor got AOL (remember all those free discs you'd see everywhere? Some are actually worth good money now!) I was fascinated! I was looking at the activity in a "chat room". I also remember all the early buzz about getting "e-mail".
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mwsmedia Member Since: September 2009 Contributions: 214 Gold Stars: 4 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 9:30 pm Central Time Syrinx wrote: I recall around 1994, my neighbor got AOL (remember all those free discs you'd see everywhere? Some are actually worth good money now!) I was fascinated! I was looking at the activity in a "chat room". I also remember all the early buzz about getting "e-mail". view I think it was 1994 or 1995 -- I joined Compuserve because my mother and some of my wife's friends were on it. Before that, I was on various BBS systems, but I couldn't quite get into it. Accessing the Internet through Compuserve -- that was another matter! I remember graduating from Compuserve to the real Internet shortly thereafter... using the Mosaic browser, browsing Gopher sites, Usenet newsgroups...using the Eudora e-mail client... IRC chat... it was amazing, mindblowing, and without a doubt, the Internet has changed my life. My first website was a Geocities site (RIP, Geocities!) I registered my first domain name in 1998; my first real website was up in May of that year. The Internet Archive has a version of it from December of 1998 that is probably my earliest available Internet fossil: http://web.archive.org/web/19981205073122/www.sovereignserials.com/main.html Good times! Great topic! _________________ Matthew Wayne Selznick Chief Evangelist http://www.retroland.com
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Retromaniac Member Since: September 2005 Contributions: 7508 Gold Stars: 153 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 10:51 pm Central Time My grandparents got it before we did, and I was fascinated with the dialup noises. It sounded so high-tech. When we called up Comcast to sign up for cable internet, we had to wait six hours just to get a real person to talk to us. When I was on a chatroom, I had trouble understanding what "lol" meant. _________________ Oh Gloria, with hair like granite.
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Sith Penguin Member Since: March 2006 Contributions: 2048 Gold Stars: 224 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 9:40 am Central Time Retromaniac wrote: When I was on a chatroom, I had trouble understanding what "lol" meant. view when i first joined here, i had trouble understanding what lol, g2g, lmao, etc. all meant. it's difficult for me to pinpoint a specific first moment. my dad had a computer for as long as i can remember. one of the functions he'd use it for was email, although i don't recall having an actual web browser at that point. my first real time using the internet would probably have been when i was 9 or 10 (1996-1997). my dad worked (and still does) at the local community college, and there he taught me how to use a web browser. i mostly looked up sites pertaining to goosebumps and garfield. _________________ can't talk now, the ninjas are watching me think. The new Halloween Special is up...enjoy! http://the-rl-story.bravehost.com/index.html Last edited by Sith Penguin on Sun Nov 08, 2009 12:45 am; edited 1 time in total
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Tom1956 Member Since: December 2005 Contributions: 1343 Gold Stars: 34 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 10:56 am Central Time It's hard for me to pinpoint when I first experienced the Internet, but it was sometime in the mid 1990s. I was working at a university library at the time, and our email system had converted to one which could send and receive emails from outside the system through the use of an .edu domain name. The students had set up their own service called Cybernet, and that was available to all university staff. At first, much of our Internet use was text-based, and even our "dumb" terminals could access a text-only browser called Lynx. Through this, I discovered the early system of public Internet providers known as Free-net, which originated at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Eventually, a local library system established its own Free-net. These were not designed to compete with early Internet providers such as Compuserve or America Online (or even local services), but to provide email and other access to those without computers or who could not afford to subscribe to a commercial service. As paid ISPs grew, and provided things the Free-nets could not (they were generally text-only), the systems eventually shut down, and the local library began offering Internet access instead. The odd thing for me was that although the Internet was new to me, it was not a totally unfamiliar environment. In the mid 1980s, Knight-Ridder Newspapers and the Miami Herald experimented with a teletext service called Viewtron. This involved a dedicated terminal with a modem that connected to your phone line and displayed the service on your television set. By today's broadband or even dialup standards, modem speeds were very slow -- imagine driving a go-cart compared to a Lexus -- but for 1980s users, 960 baud was a lot. My roommate at the time worked for a Knight Ridder newspaper, so he was able to get us a Viewtron system on an employee discount -- I think they sold in the stores for about $400 at the time. We had to pay $1 an hour to use it -- I remember getting a demonstration prior to that in a local department store that sold Viewtron and wondering how they would bill if I used less than an hour at a time, not knowing that once I had access to one, an hour would be considered a short session! Viewtron provided a lot of what we take for granted today: electronic mail, message boards, news updates, community and advertiser information. There was even a feature called Viewtron CB which was similar to what Internet chat rooms would eventually be, although there were limits to how many people could be on it at one time. One difference, though, was that it would be shutdown overnight, causing Viewtron addicts to go cold turkey until morning -- some of us would be chatting on CB until the last second, or the "poof" as it came to be known, when Viewtron went to bed for the night. As a result, the Internet to me was like Viewtron taken to the Nth degree. Home computers were coming into vogue around that time, early Atari and Commodore models as well as the first Apple computers, and Viewtron was eventually shut down by Knight-Ridder as having failed to live up to its potential. But we had a lot of fun while it lasted. (I imagine those stuck with the terminals when the system went under could use it to access local BBSs, but otherwide, they probably made for nifty doorstops.) _________________ "Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -- Ferris Bueller "A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice" -- Dr. W.H. Cosby, Jr.
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H2IZCOOL Member Since: November 2005 Contributions: 3305 Gold Stars: 70 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 1:46 pm Central Time First of all - I just find it funny to think of the Internet as a retro topic. Not wrong - just funny/strange. But it certainly has been around long enough; it just doesn't seem like it. I remember back in '94-'95, our company was just getting used to emails Our entire office (about 70 people or so then) had a total of four email accounts, which we shared! Then our IT group - or computer guy as they were called then installed an internet connection on one of our email computers. I remember that it had a tab that said "www". I just remember a couple of us sitting their and clicking on various icons to take us to some websites. We never were able to get anything to load - I thought the whole concept was rather useless! _________________ The spammers are taking over. It's the end of the world as we know it!
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sbrening Member Since: May 2007 Contributions: 7605 Gold Stars: 235 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 2:33 pm Central Time I got my first taste of the internet in 1996-1997 when my aunt gave me her old Windows 3.1 computer..... I thought it was awesome at the time, but GOD it was slow! I remember it taking all night long to download the newest AOL software so that I could log on..... I tried many different dial up connections and then in late 1999 early 2000 I got connected to Time Warner Road Runner. I've tried DSL since then, but high speed cable connection is the best thing out there right now IMO. _________________ www.hauntingheather.com DISCLAIMER: I'm not trying to sell anything, just spreading the word.
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Retromaniac Member Since: September 2005 Contributions: 7508 Gold Stars: 153 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:48 am Central Time My mom thought LOL meant little old lady. _________________ Oh Gloria, with hair like granite.
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Zoetrope11384EB Member Since: March 2006 Contributions: 322 Gold Stars: 67 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 3:06 pm Central Time My first time accessing the Internet was in the summer of 1996. I was taking my final course for my undergraduate degree in a course about Walt Whitman and our instructor gave a the name of a website where we could find out more information about Walt Whitman and his poems. I did not have a computer with access to the Internet at this time, so I had to use one of the college computers to do it. I remember that this was also the first time that I used an Internet browser and it had the Netscape "N" logo with comets shooting by it as part of the animated logo. To show you just how far computer technology has come, the handout our instructor gave us with the website information was on a mimeographed sheet of paper.
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Jughead Jones Member Since: December 2005 Contributions: 5731 Gold Stars: 297 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 5:50 pm Central Time Oh, sure. It was September 1997. I took a high school course called "Computer Communications" which was basically a kind of a "Internet for Dummies" type course. I was 16, and had wanted to learn how the Internet worked...great class. _________________ "Every heartbeat is a soundtrack to your life" ~ Kylie Minogue
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hulk Member Since: October 2006 Contributions: 3561 Gold Stars: 241 View User Posts	Re: Remember your 1st time experiencing the Internet? Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 5:56 pm Central Time It was 1992 I was in my second year of advertising design class. I worked part time at the help desk at school and they said they were starting off a intranet school to school online help line which eventually lead to the Internet and all we could do with it...and it took forever to send pictures. I was was the admin there. Cell phones weren't the fad yet and everything went through the phone lines cable not even heard of connections where always cut off. _________________ Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage -- it can be delightful." -George Bernard Shaw
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