Your first online experience

Shrykull · Post by **Shrykull** » 2003-09-15 06:12pm

What was the first time you ever went online in any shape or form over a service, whether it was a bulletin board, online service, ISP, whatever. Basically anything you connected to with a modem (or cable modem, etc) My first experience was with Prodigy in 93, and they had two different types of "pages" one was regular pages and second were "plus" areas. All of the bulletin boards were plus areas and costed about $5.00/hour! Did regular dial up isp's used to cost this much too? Some of it was a good thing though, they used to have online games which AOL had which were paid with with this hourly fee, and they defected in droves to the internet when they started offering flat rate unlimited service
Someone told me that the internet was still in the ARPA net days until the early 90's, but I remember reading the manual to the microprose game pirates which came out in 87, which stated Microprose's internet site, but it didn't use the http, rather just a long number with periods in between.

DarthBlight · Post by **DarthBlight** » 2003-09-15 06:36pm

Prodigy in the mid-late '80s. Don't really remember much of what I did then, though

Embracer Of Darkness · Post by **Embracer Of Darkness** » 2003-09-15 06:41pm

The Microsoft Network, although I can't remember the year. All I remember was that StarTrek.com was the shiznit back then.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-09-15 06:44pm

Various online bulletin boards, early 90s. Primarily to download shareware games and such, with my dad. Eventually moved onto Sierra Online, didn't get formal internet access until late 1995.

Icehawk · Post by **Icehawk** » 2003-09-15 06:44pm

First time I ever used (and heard of) the internet was years ago back in 1994 when I was about 12.

I had just gotten home from a friends place when my dad drags me over to the computer and shows me the new uber 28.8kbps external modem he just bought for our screamin fast 90mhz Pentium PC and told me that it was for connecting to this really cool thing called "the internet" which I hadnt heard of before. It was an especially memorable expierience when my dad and I first stumbled across the Playboy website later that night.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-09-15 07:00pm

I first visited playboy.com on Valentine's Day, 1996, when my parents were out to dinner. Memorable experience, though I felt guilty as hell at the time (I was 12).

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2003-09-15 07:49pm

My first time using anything remotely similar to the Internet or such connections was when I used an external modem to contact a friends computer. We didn't know WTF we were doing yet we managed to open vaguely compatible chat programs that opperated over our 14.4 modems. This was back in 1993.

My first experience on the Internet was in the winter of 1996. While late for anyone who knew stuff about computers, this was just at the begining of when the Internet truly became big. It hadn't quite been "discovered" yet. After that I quickly learned about the net and all the things I could do on it. My first online game was in the winter of 1997 playing Red Alert. I also played X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter online for the first time that year. I joined my first message boards back in 1998 and joined the online gaming comunity for real in late 1998.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-09-15 07:54pm

Shrykull wrote: Someone told me that the internet was still in the ARPA net days until the early 90's, but I remember reading the manual to the microprose game pirates which came out in 87, which stated Microprose's internet site, but it didn't use the http, rather just a long number with periods in between.

That may well have been a gopher or FTP site, though DNS did not exist in its current form back then. Thus, one had to use the IP address.

My first online experience was also via Prodigy, in this case over a 2400 baud modem.

Exonerate · Post by **Exonerate** » 2003-09-15 08:33pm

1995, when I was in second grade. Went to some demonstration, got to use some browser to look around the site. About 7 minute load times for pages less than 5kb.

My mom who worked at a university was later given a free internet account, so we visited their school website, and subsequently spent a couple hours trying to download an anti-virus program, only to discover that we had to download Winzip to decompress it. Ah, good times, spending 8 hours on a 28k to download a file less than 10mb...

Montcalm · Post by **Montcalm** » 2003-09-15 08:42pm

Our first experience was in October 2000 with AT&T,and we change ISP after a month when we recieved a fucking big bill...fucking AT&T hope someone ruin the fucking company.

Anarchist Bunny · Post by **Anarchist Bunny** » 2003-09-15 09:01pm

Well, it was several yeast ago, I'm not quite sure how many, met her in a B.net chatroom after a late night of gaming, princess something, looking back it was probly a guy, but I prefer not to think abou....

*reads first post*

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Jacen Solo, roleplaying(not that kind) chatroom first callled Chat B, then the Dungeon.

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2003-09-15 09:03pm

Let's see. Early 93 with Prodigy. I remember playing a rather strange puzzle/riddle game, set in a LOTR-ish fantasy world. And we had a 2400 baud modem, which still sits in a drawer in my dad's house today.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-09-15 09:23pm

A BBS back in the late eighties.

I was an early addict of the Information Age. I learned to play TradeWars very early.

Post by **LadyTevar** » 2003-09-15 09:26pm

1988. College.
A Commodore 64 hooked to a 800baud modem, connecting to a BBS ran on a C-128 with a 1600 (2400?)baud. The server had only one phoneline into it... so I can't recall how many actually could get access at a time.

It was "The Crow's Nest", ran by my roommate's boyfriend from his dormroom, aka "Lair of the Electric Squid" because of all the powercords running about.

Amazing how little BBS's have changed in 15yrs. Same idea, fancier smilies.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-09-15 09:27pm

LadyTevar wrote: Amazing how little BBS's have changed in 15yrs. Same idea, fancier smilies.

But I can't play TradeWars 2002 here!

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2003-09-15 10:23pm

SirNitram wrote:
LadyTevar wrote: Amazing how little BBS's have changed in 15yrs. Same idea, fancier smilies.
But I can't play TradeWars 2002 here!

God, that game was the SHIT.

...in a good way, that is.

I love that game! I could be in an ISS in 3 days with 1K turns per day. And in later versions of the game, I could have a port up and running and trading ~1M credits of goods a day within 3 weeks. I think I lost some of the zing off my fastball since I haven't played in more than 2 years, but it all comes back to you so fast anyway.

For some reason, though, I could never master being evil, even though you had the potential to make obscene amounts of money with the SST method.

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2003-09-15 10:31pm

I think it was around 94 or so when I first logged on to a BBS to search for porn. Soon after that I got hooked on this game called "Barren Realms Elite", which is similar in concept to "Nukezone" but far more primitive.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2003-09-15 10:31pm

I hacked some kind of government institution that had an outgoing connection to a thingy called Telenet or something like that. I stole some password from the local BBS and managed to get the whatever-it's-called telenet code and I got into the satellite feed, then some MULTI-USER (!!!) bbs system - hey, it was pretty neat back then with only local BBS accesed via modem, one person at a time with 20 minute time-limits - then I played some wacky maze game in ASCII where I shot plasma projectiles, of course I got kicked since the other guy had basically ping 10 or 20 and I had a ping like 10,000.

I had a 300 baud modem "overclocked" to 400 or 500 baud back then, and was using a term program on my commodore 64... don't remember the name but it had this funny typewriter-looking thing.

A pity that I lost all my l33t hacking skillz because I was too lazy to keep up with technology.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2003-09-15 10:35pm

I don't remember when I first entered the internet, nor do I remember what the first thing I did on it was.

All I can say for sure is that during that time most of my internet use was in playing games, Starcraft and Quake 2 the most.

Darth Garden Gnome · Post by **Darth Garden Gnome** » 2003-09-15 10:39pm

1999. I found the Internet in its prime. I mostly surfed around Star Wars vs Trek sites believe it or not (I was a much bigger SW nerd then then I am now), and I discovered SD.Net long before the BBS came up, which is, coincidently, the first BBS I ever joined.

We had a 56K modem running on a Pentium II. Slow as hell, but that didn't stop me from locating porn the first night of that computers life.

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2003-09-15 10:54pm

Prodigy in '91 or '92 or so, with a 1200 baud wall-socket modem on a Tandy IBM clone. I remember how when we upgraded to a 2400 baud (and later a 14.4 kbps) a year later that it seemed really fast. How times change. I remember my favorite part were the monthly Nova segments. The very first set of pages I called up were the Prodigy news pages, which I wanted to look up for a "current events" report due that week. The teacher refused to accept "sources of dubious value" (as she referred to any non-print sources) for the report, though, and I had to redo it with a standard newspaper article.

My first experience with the actual Internet came when I gave my "B" account authorization to access it sometime in '93 (behind my parents' backs, sad to say -- let's just say they never changed the password on the Prodigy "A" account). I stuck exclusively to the newsgroups and FTP at first, until I convinced my parents to switch to a "real" ISP in '95 and I discovered the Web.

TrailerParkJawa · Post by **TrailerParkJawa** » 2003-09-15 11:22pm

Very first experience was sometime in the 80's on a friends C-64. We accessed some BBS via a 300 baud modem. I dont remember much about it except that we started a flamewar because we did not even begin to understand the rules of board behavior.

My first modern experience with the internet as we know it today was at San Jose State University during my last year. 95/96. I got a PINE MAIL account and talked to a friend in Cal Poly SLO. I browsed the web with Netscape in the computer labs and went to places like www.microprose.com and read about X-COM and Civ 2.

Shrykull · Post by **Shrykull** » 2003-09-15 11:26pm

Alferd Packer wrote:Let's see. Early 93 with Prodigy. I remember playing a rather strange puzzle/riddle game, set in a LOTR-ish fantasy world. And we had a 2400 baud modem, which still sits in a drawer in my dad's house today.

Was the game called Madmaze? I remember that

I never finished it though, or maybe I did, I remember it gave me this huge long poem/riddle I couldn't figure out.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2003-09-15 11:38pm

Oh and the first thing I did on the Internet proper was telnet to some MUD called StarMUD. It was either that or e-mail (Netscape was only available on some Sun terminals, and there wasn't really much to see, and downloading stuff was out of the question).

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2003-09-16 12:08am

Shrykull wrote:
Alferd Packer wrote:Let's see. Early 93 with Prodigy. I remember playing a rather strange puzzle/riddle game, set in a LOTR-ish fantasy world. And we had a 2400 baud modem, which still sits in a drawer in my dad's house today.
Was the game called Madmaze? I remember that I never finished it though, or maybe I did, I remember it gave me this huge long poem/riddle I couldn't figure out.

I played that. prodigy, 10 or so yrs ago. it blurs.

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Your first online experience

Your first online experience

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