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What are your first memories of the internet?

The only thing I really miss about the more wild-westy days of the net, after there was an actual web, was the unrivalled joy of the early to mid days of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa, where the most amazing ****ing music (that I still have!) could be found.
 
Tanngrisnir said:
I was likely 10 years old or so, so around 1977, at Ft. Hunter Ligget, in CA, where the father of a friend ran their computer systems they used to track tank 'battles' in TRL on base. He sat us down at terminals (remember those), activated a modem and we could play an 'online' tank game against his counterparts, one base away, as it were, at the adjoinging Camp Roberts.

Later, say 1979, during a visit as an 8th grader to UC Berkeley, we visited the computer lab and could play and game mimicking "Star Trek" (still all x's, o's and i's), in real time, against people all they way across town. I was pretty much hooked.

And, yeah, it was slower than all hell.

In highschool, we upgraded to cassette drives for our TRS-80s!
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The “Trash-80” was my first computer. :)
 
Tanngrisnir said:
The only thing I really miss about the more wild-westy days of the net, after there was an actual web, was the unrivalled joy of the early to mid days of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa, where the most amazing ****ing music (that I still have!) could be found.
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And Nutella. :) The first home of the free we rip off the labels music. :)
 
If I might go somewhat "off topic" for a moment, but I have to wonder if you early adopters have watched, "Halt and Catch Fire"?
I highly recommend.
I'm sure many of you would appreciate the history with your computer knowledge (and pick up on a helluva lot more than I did), besides the characters' stories.

Carry on:cool:
 
I remember waaaaay, back in the day, I was in a dalnet chat room, and a girl was just raving over this new song that she'd heard by Boyz II Men. Well this was back before file sharing, so she just "sent" it to me. Regular song, and I started downloading it about 8pm, and the next morning at 8 am, it was still downloading. :lol:
 
Skeptic Bob said:
I thought it would be fun to ask what everyone’s first memories of the internet were. Some indicators of your age at the time might be useful as well.

I was a senior in high school in 1992 when some guy came and spoke to our economics class about something called the World Wide Web. I remember thinking it sounded interesting but didn’t give it any other thought throughout the rest of my time in high school. My freshman year in college I remember seeing students in the “computer lab” always typing away. But it was always the same students. And it didn’t look like they were writing computer code or papers. Someone told me the computers were connected to the internet. Oh yeah, that guy in economics mentioned that.

My sophomore year, 1995, I began hearing about more and more people getting online. I still didn’t understand what the big deal was. In 1996 a couple friends and I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment. One of my roommates signed up for, I think, an AOL account. He told us you could look up porn online. That caught my and my other roommate’s attention. So he logged on and searched up a nude photo of Cindy Crawford. The picture started downloading. This was going to take awhile so we went and fixed ourselves a sandwich. We came back to the computer and the photo was about halfway downloading. But we could see the top half of the photo and it was awesome. So we sat there eating our sandwiches as the photo finished downloading.
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Mid 90's my great aunt got internet,slow as hell, and when I used it it was hurry up because not only did the isp charge monthly, the phone company still charged by the minute for internet lie it was phone usage. That internet screeched at you when the modem logged on and took forever to get anywhere.
 
I was playing multiplayer (text only) games (MUDs) before the internet existed via BBS and multiple modems. I guess AOL was the first time I went on the internet.
 
What are your first memories of the internet?
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Mid-1980s -- Via USENET email, solicited econometric modeling ideas/paper references pertaining to telecom industry R&D processes.

Those were the "good old days" of the Internet...when one'd share an idea and people who actually knew what they were talking about would respond with useful on-topic information/gravamen that actually advanced the discussion. People who had nothing of note to offer abstained from the discussion. Of course, that was before the "democratization" of the Internet.



Aside:
The research project I was working on at the time is one of the principal activities that led me to realize I could make living as a management consultant or I-banking analyst and that I'd probably enjoy doing so more so than were I to have pursued a different career. The Internet didn't have anything to do with that epiphany; it just happens that you asked about our first exposure to the Internet, and mine happened around the same time I was deciding what I wanted to do upon finishing my degree.​
 
haymarket said:
A friend hooked us up and I remember how it had to dial for a connection and that distinct sound it made when you finally got on. The idea of going through all that waiting and then some super slow speed is simply staggering compared to what we have today.
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Yes, but that funky connecting sound brings back memories.
 
My headmaster gave an assembly in like 1995 about ' surfing the web" and the " information super highway". I thought he was crazy lol.

My best early memories are probably MSN messenger and Yahoo chess/pool
 
I have no idea what year it was when I first used a home computer, I only remember the frustration of a slow dial-up connection. The palms of my hands still get damp with frustration seeing these old symbols




BA5o.gif

dribbble-spinner-800x600.gif


tenor.gif


Here's an informative YouTube video regarding the buffering symbol;

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Got my first PC in 1999. Discovered Napster right about then. Discovered a serious need for DSL the following week.
 
Dial up ICQ chat rooms. Alta vista searches for pictures of Michael Jordan that took 10 minutes to load.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
1. Asking someone "what is email?"

2. Someone giving me a fairly good custom built quality computer - that person a web developer - telling me "there's the button to turn it on, figure it out." It had a virus - bad one. I spent at least a year trying to figure how what was wrong going thru the cypto-codings, how to go online and even building a website starting with a blank page using ancient Navigator software. Figured it out. Killed the virus, built the website and then understood the computer and was off and running. He said that was his goal - to force me to learn how computers work that way. VERY frustrating until I did.

Though I have no clue the technical language involved, since then I've dug out viruses and bugs using no software to do it - thought that was in the past. Not using Windows and instead learning DOS is quite an educational trip. However, after a while, the "language" of DOS starts to reveal itself.
 
Superfly said:
I remember waaaaay, back in the day, I was in a dalnet chat room, and a girl was just raving over this new song that she'd heard by Boyz II Men. Well this was back before file sharing, so she just "sent" it to me. Regular song, and I started downloading it about 8pm, and the next morning at 8 am, it was still downloading. :lol:
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OMG, I just logged on to Dalnet for the first time in a very long time today. Couldn't find anything of interest. Those were the days, 20 years ago.
 
Scrabaholic said:
OMG, I just logged on to Dalnet for the first time in a very long time today. Couldn't find anything of interest. Those were the days, 20 years ago.
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Man, that **** was great, at first. You go onto the server and find like 500 different chat rooms.

Then it got weird - really, really fast. It's been at least 20 years (probably more) since I've been on there. I wouldn't even know how to get there anymore.

Anybody remember PowWow? That chat client? I loved that ****. Loved the little whippoorwill sound that it made when you got a message notification.
 
I started on BBS systems, then got the Internet in 1997 on a 386 computer w/ 8mb RAM and a 14.4k modem. Spent a LOT of time on IRC back in the day.
 
eohrnberger said:
Yeah, I remember the dialup days. Back then a 2400 baud modem was the fastest you could get (first Hayes modem I bought).
DOS was the OS, and everything was still 24x80 character mode (43x80 came later).
Gosh, mid to late 80's? Before the NFS opened it to commercial use.
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In the late 70s we had a handful of computers we could take home from school. There wasn't a disk drive or anything. You hooked the keyboard up to your TV then dialed some number at the school, got a screeching sound and plugged the phone receiver into the modem. At that point I'd code "Mad Libs" in BASIC and play as ASCII version of Star Trek. The guys that were REALLY knowledgeable made ASCII porn pictures.
 
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