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samalex
November 29th, 2010, 03:35 PM
Another post mentioned FreeDOS and it reminded me of the first time I used the Internet, which was back in the DOS days. Just curious, what was everyone's first experience like with the Internet? And for those who used it before WWW was 'the thing' how did you use the Internet?

For me the first time I used the Internet was in 1993 or early 1994 (can't remember exactly) through MetroBBS (http://www.metrobbs.com/bbs.html) which had a dial-up number in our area. They had IRC, FTP, and Usenet access which the BBS which I don't think at the time I quite understood that I was using the Internet per say.

Then Fall 1994 after graduating high school a friend was going to a local technical college who offered dial-up access, and he gave me his login to use. I dialed in from my MS-DOS system with Telix and was on their Unix system, which was my first Unix experience. I grabbed a few books on Unix and started learning Unix, plus finding Simtel's Shareware FTP site it blew me away! No waiting for the local boards to become available to download software. I remember posting on our local Net 388 echo about the Internet and how awesome it was, which little did I know it would take over a few short years later.

Later 1994 my folks bought a Windows 3.11 system, and I downloaded Trumpet Winsock and Netscape 2.something and used SLIP to get a TCP/IP connection from my system. I'd like to think the first site I went to was something awesome, but IIRC it was Playboy.com :)

Either late 1994 or early 1995 I picked-up the Internet Yellowpages which looked like a phone book, but it was full of FTP, Telnet, Gopher, email addresses, listservs, and other Internet sites (very few if any WWW sites), which kept me busy. I also eventually quit using my friend's account and used Spry Net through their Internet in a Box (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box) package.

By 1996 I was picking-up HTML and doing some websites for friends and local bands, and later 1996 to early 1997 is when I grabbed Red Hat Linux from Best Buy and blew away MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 on my folks computer to install Linux.

I just wish in those early days I would've researched more about getting my own domain name because back then most common names were still available. I didn't grab my first domain name until 2000, and even then I gave like two seconds thought.

So that's my story-- when did everyone else get online for the first time, and what OS and setup did you have?

Take care --

Sam

Spice Weasel
November 29th, 2010, 03:38 PM
'97, probably, can't really remember that much but from what I remember I was just messing around on my Granddad's PC.

Properly started using it at around 2002.. To play RuneScape. It was actually fun back then. ;) I quit in 2007. For obvious reasons: Miniclip, overpowered weapons, too many updates, them taking out a major aspect of the gameplay, RS1 dying. I went through a few accounts in my time, but I can only use the most recent one.

Here's my character. I went on RS1 a few months back, and it was completely empty. But I took a couple screenshots.

http://www.cspacezone.com/forums/uploads/gallery/1217008939/med_gallery_8912_53_7493.png

Excuse the URL, it's from another forum I go to.

CharlesA
November 29th, 2010, 03:40 PM
Long, long time ago on a Win 3.1 machine with some oddball version of Netscape..

Hmmm...

ndefontenay
November 29th, 2010, 03:42 PM
1998 on win 95 as far as I remember. Actually not sure if it was that or win 3.11.

anyway. There was netscape and yahoo already.

It's from memory. Could be wrong x)

kaldor
November 29th, 2010, 03:49 PM
School computer on Windows 95. For nostalgia, I went to that school's website (the first website I ever saw) today and I can't believe it hasn't been changed over the years. Apart from updated news announcements, the website is the same.

:)

Edit: Reminds me... anyone remember the days of cyan backgrounds, yellow text, and horrible gifs on every website around?

Spice Weasel
November 29th, 2010, 03:52 PM
School computer on Windows 95. For nostalgia, I went to that school's website (the first website I ever saw) today and I can't believe it hasn't been changed over the years. Apart from updated news announcements, the website is the same.

:)

School websites are usually awful. My old school's website was made in FrontPage by the "Network Manager", used a wheat and yellow colour scheme and not a single two pages had a similar layout. I couldn't ever get it to work in a browser other than IE6 either. It just refused to load.

danbuter
November 29th, 2010, 04:00 PM
Back in 93, when I was in college. I remember using Gopher to find stuff.

samalex
November 29th, 2010, 04:57 PM
Back in 93, when I was in college. I remember using Gopher to find stuff.

Gopher was awesome, and it's still around if you know where to find the sites. If U of Minnesota hadn't tried to make a buck off it with crazy licensing fees and released Gopher as FOSS I really think it might've gotten enough momentum to trump WWW since later versions of Gopher could handle media and graphics just like WWW.

malspa
November 29th, 2010, 05:04 PM
The first time I remember was in the early 90s on the computers at a small college I was attending (Phoenix College, in Arizona). I looked up info on an inherited blood disease that I have, and found some very useful info from the Duke University Med School. It was a huge moment for me, because for the first time I was able to obtain really good info to help me to better understand my disease, and to help me live with it better.

Spice Weasel
November 29th, 2010, 05:05 PM
This reminds me... I have Mosaic installed. :p

Its user interface on X11 is horrible, sadly.

Evil-Ernie
November 29th, 2010, 05:24 PM
Local library in Chelmsley Wood, Birmingham around about 95'-96'. I remember it was on a Sun Server, used PINE for email and Netscape Navigator to browse.

I remember most of the machines running on Windows 95 as they had an investment but Im sure there was a couple of machines on 3.1 and UNIX of some description!

fontis
November 29th, 2010, 05:26 PM
Wow... hmm..
I don't really remember exactly when, it was a very long time ago. But I would say perhaps around 1996 or 1997, with simple internet surfing and chatting.

I would say I started playing online games around 97 and 98. And well, it's just been going onwards ever since. Mainly due to the accessibility of internet lines, and the price. Also the speed.

I grew up in Sweden after all :)

samalex
November 29th, 2010, 05:41 PM
This reminds me... I have Mosaic installed. :p

Its user interface on X11 is horrible, sadly.

Actually I mentioned in my post I used Netscape, but now that I think of it I think I did use Mosaic with that first venture on the WWW. If not I know I had it downloaded along with Netscape at one point. Dang, 15 years ago! Wow!

Spice Weasel
November 29th, 2010, 06:07 PM
Actually I mentioned in my post I used Netscape, but now that I think of it I think I did use Mosaic with that first venture on the WWW. If not I know I had it downloaded along with Netscape at one point. Dang, 15 years ago! Wow!

It's horrible that Mosaic turned in to the monster that is now IE. :(

samalex
November 29th, 2010, 06:22 PM
It's horrible that Mosaic turned in to the monster that is now IE. :(

True, and according to Wikipedia Internet Explorer 7 is the first version with zero Mosaic code so they dropped the references to IE being based on Mosaic.

cariboo
November 29th, 2010, 06:24 PM
I used the internet for the first time in 1995 on Win 3.1, my isp supplied a couple of 3½ floppies with netscape, and an email client I forgot the name of :).

chriswyatt
November 29th, 2010, 07:30 PM
I first accessed the internet with my grandad's computer I think, though I don't know what year that was. But I remember playing some crappy game on the Warner Bros. website, some Animaniacs game where you went water-rafting. Also remember downloading the Theme Hospital demo and having some fun with that :D. Hmm, can't remember what else I would've gone on, when I first went on the net I was basically thinking of products and brands that I know of and typing them in the address bar, it seemed so exciting back then.

I guess it was probably around 95/96 when I first used the net though, Windows 95 was brand-spanking new when my grandad got it.

dpny
November 29th, 2010, 07:49 PM
1989, on whatever version of Unix Carnegie Mellon was running on the machines in their computer clusters. No web yet.

DOS4dinner
November 29th, 2010, 08:10 PM
About 1999, getting my parents to buy me a copy of Quest 64 for $18 on eBay (the idea of getting a n64 game for $18 was absolutely mindblowing to me at the time). Still have that cartridge too.

toupeiro
November 29th, 2010, 08:16 PM
1991 via CompuServe on a windows 3.0/3/1 machine running WinCim, a primarily text based frontend, and a 2400 baud modem! /oldschool

standingwave
November 29th, 2010, 08:34 PM
BBS's back in the eighties. Then Compuserve which started providing access to USENET around 1991 or so. Then the web via the Mosaic browser at work. Then accessing a local ISP from the home starting in 1994. Anyone remember Trumpet WinSock PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol)?

oldos2er
November 29th, 2010, 08:40 PM
Back in 93, when I was in college. I remember using Gopher to find stuff.

Gopher, and Archie. I lived in those apps.

libssd
November 29th, 2010, 08:45 PM
Long, long time ago on a Win 3.1 machine with some oddball version of Netscape..

Hmmm...
Pretty much the same, except Netscape hadn't been invented yet. My first "surfing" the net was done with Gopher. Prior to that, mostly e-mail and FTP.

I built my first web page around 1993, in a demo for a Macintosh users group. I had a horrible cold, was taking *******-based cough syrup, and was so out of it that I was having difficulty plugging in an ethernet cable. But the audience loved the idea of a world wide Hypercard.

desnaike
November 29th, 2010, 08:45 PM
1994 netscape and internet at work Aol at home. Both on Windows 3.11.

andymorton
November 29th, 2010, 11:08 PM
I'm not 100% sure but I think it was around 1998 on a computer at school running Windows 95. I barely knew what the internet was back then and I'd never even heard of Linux.

Dustin2128
November 30th, 2010, 12:33 AM
Let's see... it'd be some version of netscape on a 386 or 486 windows 3.1 machine, at some point in the early nineties at an extremely early age. I have the geek genetically encoded into me.

t0p
November 30th, 2010, 01:04 AM
Back when I was at uni (definitely before 1994, cos that's when I graduated), my then-girlfriend worked at the same university, in some admin/staff-support role. At the time I was into contemporary science fiction, I used to read a British SF magazine called Interzone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interzone_%28magazine%29); and one of the mag's writers, David Langford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford), used to put out a monthly newsletter called Ansible Links (now called Ansible (http://news.ansible.co.uk/)).

Nowadays Ansible has a web page: but in '94 you could get a photocopied edition via snail mail, or, if you were a "tech-head" you could get it emailed to you. I used my then-girlfriend's official university email address to get the newsletter sent to me. Oh, how wonderful technology was back then!

There wasn't really a whole lot of internet stuff going on back then. I remember, one year I wanted to take a course that covered the relatively new concept of hypertext; but it clashed with an English Literature course on "Feminism & Literature" that was a mandatory requirement (I was studying for a degree in Eng Lit, fool that I was) so I didn't really get into the whole www thing until after I graduated and began using computers for their primary purpose... FUN!!!

Oh, what a wonderful trip down memory lane that turned out to be. Was I alone in thinking that the (nearly) all-text internet back then was a load of crud?

endotherm
November 30th, 2010, 01:24 AM
I think I first willfully used the Internet in '96 on win95 with netscape 3.x I think. I remember dumping netstape after 4.7. 5.x never jived with me. set up my first caching proxy server in '98 on NT4.

those were the good old days. no money, no skills, and a heap of old semi-functional parts. it was a good time to be a kid, though I sometimes feel like I would be very wealthy now, if I had then had the skills that I possess now.

Old_Grey_Wolf
November 30th, 2010, 02:29 AM
I used the ARPANET or NSFNET in the mid-1980's. It wasn't called the Internet back then. It was all ASCII text based and worked on Unix platforms.

Maybe this will help to explain it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

holiday
November 30th, 2010, 02:53 AM
1988, I think. I had an XT with a 10MG hard drive, 64M RAM, and a 1200 baud modem. I was on a local BBS, a small one-woman business, and I used FTP to download applications, games, and compilers.

Usenet was a lively community.

It was an exciting time.

It is still exciting, yes, but the excitement now is about another application, another gadget. But even holographic skype would not have for me the same newness, the same wonder, as that first moment when, at forty, I discovered a whole new world.

It changed my life. It changed the way I think.

Austin25
November 30th, 2010, 03:02 AM
I was very little. I remember we used the phone line to dial into the bank where my dad worked at, or something... I remember the fun noises (http://www.aporcupine.com/dialup.swf) it made!

Rasa1111
November 30th, 2010, 06:31 AM
i think it was a windows 3.1 machine,
and it belonged to my friends father.
probably 1993 or so, I think I was about 13.

i remember the website to,
it was a website we saw in the back of a "high times" magazine,
all about 'hippy' stuff, and cannabis paraphernalia. hahah :lol:

The website had a character "mascot" I guess,
and his name was "Twiggs", this friendly looking little cartoon hippy guy, , and i believe it was called "trippin with twiggs" . lol

it was all colorful and fun and had pics of of all sorts of cool stuff. hah

I remember like it was yesterday..

then, I believe we also probably then navigated to some site like 'playboy.com' or something. :lol:

I remember thinking.. "man, this internet thing is amazing!!" lol