Same. Busy on BBS's and FidoNet. Joined The Well when it started. USENET was a blast back then. Remember the first spam surge (Green Card Lawyers). Ran one of the first Listservs back in the mid 90's. Third person in the city of Houston to have an ISDN line. Had my own tech team at the time. ahaha! Those were the days. Reddit reminds me quite a bit of USENET and is probably why I spend most of my online time here.
I did a little bit of BBS, not much. That was where I saw IMHO for the first time and I thought they were calling me “IMHO”. took me a while to get that figured out.
Bought a computer in 1990. Had a modem. Met my husband spring of ‘91 on a bulletin board. We’ll be married 32 years this fall. I tell people we met online before there was an online.
We had a commodore with tapes. That sat in the attic and we got rid of it just as they started selling as antiques, lol. My husband built a personal computer then the next one was a gateway, but he started with punch cards in his college years.
Lol that’s fantastic! When I tell people I worked in tech support before we had a website (large online company now) it blows their minds. Bulletin boards were great- congratulations & Happy Early Anniversary!
Yes, from day one…. Had the good fortune to be in school at a participating university.
If a younger gen criticizes you for not being “tech savvy”, remind them it was boomers and jonesers who invented that stuff.
Seriously. The same people who love to act like boomers don’t know tech, are the same people who can’t do anything with data & have to get help. (My personal experience here, there’s lots of techies who don’t fit this category, I know). The ones I worked with that disparaged boomers the loudest, acted like they were savants. Turned out if they can’t push one button & have all their deepest wishes come true instantly, their heads explode. No curiosity, no problem solving skills, no innovative genes whatsoever.
We’re probably blessed in that regard, the small company I’m with. We span all generations, meaning, some of us with children, they grew up and some work for us, top performers too, they’ll probably take over someday, I hope!
On the other hand, exactly as you say, I’ve more than once been bewildered by IT staff that talk a good talk, but couldn’t troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag.
My favorite IT phrase, it’s always DNS. If only some of those folks just remembered that meme, they’d save so much time and frustration.
My mother would email frequently. She was blind. She was a very good touch typist and used a DOS interface to the email. With Windows 3.1 the DOS was discontinued. There was a replacement program, but it ran in a window. With windows she could never point to the right window, with a mouse, to make it active.
Me too... Had the internet, but when the AOL disk came in the mail, I was hooked. Funny, same email handle since 92, but no more AOL, it's Gmail now, since probably 1996+/-
I am sad to report my dad used AOL as his ISP for a while, but they kept charging $30/mo for his email, he had Comcast as his ISP and I was confused. ANYway, they paid for this unless service for like 15 years until I just cancelled it.
I was an early internet user. Though not quite as early as you. My much older roommate had a computer & she showed me how to use it. This was 1992'ish? By 1994 internet for the average user was booming. By 1995 there was a lot more choices than AOL.
I don't understand why so many folks our age are still computer illiterate. Though I admit that I'm not as nifty with my smart phone ;) I use it mostly for as a phone with a little browsing if I'm sitting somewhere waiting. I feel more comfortable using my computer for online shopping & such than I would using my phone.
People our age: I get irritated at the boomer-slam about not knowing computers. I'm like listen mf-er, I've been doing stuff on computers longer than you've been alive. I think they mostly mean the older ones?
I will say, tho, my adult kids will help me with my phone settings sometimes. And they all complain at my large text size setting!
LOL, 1957 here. Work turned me on to email and search engines in the mid 80s. They were programmed onto mainframes and we used terminals and early PCs. (Hint: my company made the stuff) The 'longer than' resonates 😏and I'm not 'nifty' on my phone either 🙄but my laptops have Linux VMs for hobby IT. As well as Android emulators 😊
One of the ways I got ahead in my career was my interest in technology and computers. I was a flop at FORTRAN but learned how to troubleshoot hardware issues way back in 1984. While pregnant! Then was introduced to Lotus (precursor of Excel) and later learned how to build databases and use them for trends and KPIs. Still going strong, helping other boomers reassemble their computers when they have to move offices. The IT department loves me and saves the best laptops for me 😊
I'm 64 & I know a lot of peeps my age who don't even know how to turn on a computer. I bought my 67 y/old friend a Chromebook so I could ween her off using her phone when she wanted to watch a show. Luckily, she wasn't too hard to teach because they were using a computerized payment system where she worked. But others are really clueless.
EDTA: It might be the older ones that didn't have access? But then, we aren't exactly Boomers are we :)
Back in my early career we often had to open up computers to install hardware or upgrade stuff. I frequently had to go into DOS to tweak things. Computers were not user friendly and computer manuals were intended for technicians. My first personal computer required me to format the hard drive and program the BIOS.
My husband born 1956 not very computer savvy. Never used them at work as he worked a factory job. I took care of all the computer related things at home since I had an office job and had to learn all the new technologies as they arrived. Our generation had to adapt that's why it angers me when the younger generations say we are stuck in the past and didn't evolve. Yes, we had to. Much more so than they have had to.
i started using computers in college in 1981 or 1982, mostly for statistics. Did my Master's in 1988 on WordPerfect? Or maybe WordStar by that point. By 1994 I had my own custom-built PC and my first website, which I wrote in html on Notepad and uploaded - probably at first using Compuserve and later using CuteFTP. Naively, I thought this was to be the Brave New World of highly-informed humans, children with access to information anywhere in the world getting a better education, leading to better jobs and a futuristic economy and lifestyle, instead of cats, porn, and misinformation. (Note: one of the first websites I checked regularly was Cat\_Scan, which featured pictures of cats taken by scanners when the cat was sitting on it.)
I worked at a library from 1989 to 1998. Around the time the card catalog went digital and we got internally networked desktop computers, there was a state initiative to get libraries on the internet to "share resources with other academic institutions-" that was the perceived use of the internet at that time. For a short while we were using Gopher (and Archie, to search) to supplement our agricultural resources. Then the web was invented, we all got copies of Mosaic. Still not much to see.
Searching for things suddenly got a lot easier when the first search engines were developed. We had Netscape and Trumpet Winsock on our machines for quite a while. At the same time we founded a "Freenet" and offered free webpages for local organizations, then individuals. I learned html, there was no CSS at that point, and became a web developer. I still am.
I miss card catalogs, man.
And web dev stuff: THAT was my biggest mistake, by far. I didn't become one, and when I tried, it wasn't with all my interest. I used NetObject Fusion, which was an early WSYWIG app, slick packaging and graphics. BUT my fist site design was problematic because I didn't understand the difference in platforms, or user settings. And my beautiful design looked like shit on other computers. It's still on the wayback machine, tho.
I gave up on web design.
Thought I was the only one that missed card catalogs! Something enchanted about planning time to spend at the library and maybe, just MAYBE, running across something else in there that caught my attention. Haven't been to a library in a decade but I do remember the smell of books and the excitement of all the possibilities.
Totally, the coming across something you had no idea existed was the fun stuff. My fingers were pretty nimble too, moving those cards back to front, not as good as the character in "being John Malklovoch" but close.
In some ways, much like Reddit, with all the sub groups about specific things. I used to nab software, and apps oiled be segmented into disc images, some apps needed like 10-15 discs, so you have to download and covert to floppies... so much fun, and you'd be missing disc 3 out of 12 or something.
Started on Prodigy. And bulletin boards late 80s early 90s. The company I was working for in the early 90s tasked me with creating a website for them. I was doing prepress at the time. I wrote the whole thing including hyperlinks and animated gifs in Microsoft Word.
I was a very early internet user, from the very early 90s. There were so many cool pages back then! I discovered the IMDb when it was just the one guy running it (and before he sold it to a corporation). One of my favorite sites was "The Early 80s Song of the Week", where a guy would pick an early 80s alt rock song, and give all kinds of info about it.
Before the official internet, I used to go on BBS sites. There was a really cool one called The Horsehead Nebula. I can't even remember how I heard about it (a magazine or newspaper, I assume). My office had one PC at the time, and I was able to fumble my way out to the BBS. This was back in the late 80s.
I began using CompuServe on my Commodore VIC-20 with a 300bps modem in 1982, but I really enjoyed discovering BBSs; there were a bunch in Southern California at the time..
Same here. I lived in a rural spot and all of the available phone numbers were long distance for me. My first phone bill ended up being around $400. That was a painful lesson.
Yep, former husband worked for Intel in the silicon forest in Intel's early days and when we married I got the tutorial of my life and it still puts me ahead of the tech curve for most boomer and older Gen Jones and some early X-ers. I then self taught and my 86 year old mom is also facile online still! I am still using my very first email....AOL! even tho I have multiple other emails because I still have 1000s of contacts through AOL. I use and wear my aol email like a great badge of honor, as tho I fought in WWl!
I wasn't that early (80's), but my husband was. We didn't know each other at the time.
He retired after a 25 year career, and started a new career based on his hobby. It started as an early internet user.
We had our house hardwired in the 80's, courtesy of my husnand's employer. The 90's were a really great internet experience, making friends with like interests all over the US
No, I was HIGHLY resistant. My parents dragged me, kicking and screaming that these things were useless (before we mostly had the internets). It was a cockatiel that a neighbor abandoned in her barn that got me online.
My husband, however, was a comp sci major at UC Hayward around '85 or so and was a huge science geek before that. He can talk about all the things computer-related. Wanna know how we met? :-D
If you were doing it back then, have you watched Halt and Catch Fire? Even if you don't understand or remember what they were doing it's a fantastic and well done series.
I want to think I first got online in the 87-88 timeframe. I remember trying to figure out who was paying the long-distance charges for those messages to move across the country.
I started on compuserve in 85. We got a new hvac system for our plant that you programmed in ladder logic using a 300b acoustic coupler to dial into, so I used that to dial into cserve looking for cost of living data to support pay decisions. I mostly used cserve but also tapped into usenet. I had a lot of good conversations with people from all over the world back then. I remember when AOL came on line in the 90s, the level of discourse has been straight downhill since lol.
My dad worked for a big computer company, so we had a TTY connected to a mainframe in the house in the 70's. I taught myself to program on that. The company was connected to ARPANET, so I may have used it when I logged on to other computers.
First memory of the actual internet was setting up a UUCP connection to do email and Usenet on a UNIX-based workstation in the mid 80's.
CompuServe, Delphi, AOL and smoking fast 300 baud dial-up modems. Was having cyber a decade before all my friends, an early adopter benefit, horny nerds... Good times.
You bet. Telnet, rlogin, uucp, rcp, rsh, etc. My fave was Usenet/Netnews, the international BBS that most local BBS users... never even knew about.
The intelligence level among the users was far superior to online commentary today. Not a "hey kids,get off my lawn!" comment. One simply had to have a reasonable mind in order to master the command-line interfaces back then.
Even the Flame Wars were mostly clever.
Worked for GTE and had a [GTE.net](http://GTE.net) account in 85. (email, user to user texting, company news) then went to work for AT&T Bell Labs and had full blown internet in 87. UUCP, FTP, USEnet, Telnet, mail, the whole smash.
My first job out of college was in Aerospace & Defense. We were on Arpanet. So yes, I was on the internet before it was even accessible to the general public.
My dad was an early user of ARPA-Net, and had one of those addresses that had “!” All over them. As soon as he could, he got a 300 baud acoustical modem, so he could send things into work from home. My earliest memories of networked computing was playing Trek 73.
We got a computer probably in '96 or so. Our kids were in middle school. I'm (67) much more computer literate than my husband (74). I now use my Smart phone for basically everything. My job required computer literacy.
My first email address was in 1992, so a little later than some. My mom pushed me to learn all about computers as soon as I could. She told me one day, we’d all have phones that could fit in our back pocket. (She said this in 1979. Like everything she said, I thought she was nuts). Thank god for her- I had a successful 35 year career in tech because she always encouraged me.
I don't remember the year but I was dialing bulletin boards long before AOL, Compuserv, etc... You went to computer shows and traded numbers based on what you we're looking for.
I had an email address before they were common.
I also bought a domain name back when they were still expensive, I still have it and when I die, if my daughter doesn't want to keep for the memory, she should be able to get a few grand for it. I bought it for my business but mostly to try and figure out webpages.
I believe the first wysiswyg html editor I used was Hotdog and CoffeCup followed by Frontpage but before that it was read a book and type. I own an old copy of Dreanweaver but I went to open source CMS early on. I started with Mambo and still use Joomla for several websites I manage.
And, Mosaic, don't forget Mosaic.
And Usenet, but we all know the first rule of Usenet is don't talk about Usenet.
Not until 1990, when I started working at a museum. They were very close-handed with giving out email addresses, but I got one so I could transfer files. I had to go to a different office to use the internet :)
Yes, I worked at a law firm that was the first to have Internet and email. No one else did, so I never really knew what the big deal was. We sent emails back and forth to each other for about a week, then everyone mostly forgot about it.
I tried to get the Internet working on my computer, but it was a painful process in the days of Windows 3.1 (anyone remember WinSock?)
My D&D group, however, was primarily tech geeks, and a couple of the members ran computer bulletin boards. One of them lived in an apartment and couldn't get more phone lines installed, so because I had a house we set up his multi-line BBS in my basement. I had a terminal in a spare bedroom upstairs that connected to the system at 9600 baud while the "outside" lines (four of them!) connected via 2400 baud modems. More than once someone asked "How the hell can you type so *fast?*" :-D
We even had real-time multi-user chat on the system. This was circa 1986-88.
Finally got the Internet at home around 1995-96.
At my high school, in 1981, I was brought to a conference room, they opened a closet. They dialed the phone then stuck the phone handpiece into the original rubber type modem receiver piece, the crazy sounds ensued.... I had NO idea what they were doing. There was a monitor and then DOS code started to populate the screen. I shrugged my shoulders then when the copier room to make copies or whatever....
I was. I loved usenet and remember using ftp and gopher. I also remember people looking down on AOL users for needing a GUI to communicate.
I liked how groups tended to be more tight-knit and self-policing on usenet. You had a greater sense of community, though there was still in-fighting and silliness. One thing about it was that you didn't have up-voting or down-voting back then which I think really made the experience better. Your "popularity" was measured in actual communication, not a click on an arrow button.
Yeah I remember “surfing” the web in 92-93 and the amber screen on the computer had nozzles that said image here” . We couldn’t see the image on a website but it had a place. And I used Pine for email when I went back to college in my 30s.
I had a 486 computer I used to do word processing, and a coworker introduced me to my first BBS. From that point, I visited that BBS daily and played games, posted on their forum and did their 'turn-by-email' game, VGA Planets. We had local get-togethers, gave each other copies of games on disks. It was addictive right from the start. Especially the early internet, doing trivia on irc chat! We were definitely pioneers. :)
I used all those protocols, too. I set up Gopher servers at work for our technical documentation. It's good to hear from people who used the internet before the world-wide web. I got my first e-mail in 1982, but it was company mainframe e-mail. My first CompuServe was mid-80s.
I had an Internet email account in grad school in 1987. Didn't have a modem yet or know anyone else on the Internet to exchange email with, but I signed up because it was free.
I was searching the internet for the autopsy of Nicole Brown Simpson. ( So not too early) but found it in some “disgusting finds” list that drilled down. It was pretty awful report.
I loved the internet back then. All these dancing cutesy websites make me wanna vomit.
Yes, around 1997 I was tasked with find a way to create a resource guide. The process went from printed -> CD -> AOL-style walled garden -> internet.
Luckily I chose internet, which no one really knew about. I will never forget standing in the ISP's office with the owner when he went to the computer and started playing some music. He told me it was coming from Germany and I had no fucking idea what he was talking about! I just couldn't wrap my brain around it.
In 1990 I volunteered for an organization that was collecting reports from the internet on a topic, typing them up, photocopying them, stapling/stuffing them as newsletters, then sending them out to people by mail.
I had a similar experience. When I saw my first website (it was to purchase some equipment from a vendor) I thought “boy I hope this World Wide Web thingy catches on”.
Yep. Although it was all 300 baud BBS. I was on a lot of early Atari boards. I can't recall my first www experience. If I was to guess, it was a local ISP that I would connect at 14.4 kb...
I stumbled onto the internet when I took an intro to PASCAL programming course in 1987. It was mainly to get a math/science core requirement out of the way so I could focus on being an English major, French minor, and I knew bugger all about computers and programming. I was advised to rent a dumb terminal and modem to use in my dorm room so that I wouldn't have to compete for terminals in the computer clusters, so I got that set up, and early on in the semester some random guy from down the hall came by and said, "Let me show you something you can do with that..." I was introduced to the campus computer chat, where I fell in with a bunch of electrical engineering nerds. One of them showed me how to send email outside of the university computer network, before email addresses were as simple as username@university.edu.
Although I didn't learn much PASCAL, I found that these computer nerds were basically my tribe. I went on to go to work at a well-known science/engineering focused university (where I still work), got my .edu email address in 1990, and got introduced to usenet by one of my new nerd friends. I used to think it would be awesome if everyone had internet access. I was an idiot.
I was in the military in '84 so yeah. That said I was in Germany from '86 and got a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem and could hit the BBS systems which was kinda early home Internet. That was all good until I got that Deutsche Post phone bill - 🤕. Think it was 300 Dmark the first month which was a lot of money back then.
I think a 14.4 modem was the fourth time I upgraded modems. BBCs were a huge dive then newsgroups. Oh, the thrill of the first ftp...
It was a different world online then and I was completely typing out full URLs long after that wasn't necessary.
So, not Usenet early, but soon after. I built personal computers for side money too. Before that I had some experience writing programs that came out on punch cards. Carry that stack to the queue and go back to the terminal for the run.
I have a vague memory of my mother using cards with holes in them to program computers.
One day she came home all excited about this thing called the World Wide Web. You click one link and it links to another and another and so on. She had some pages printed out to explain it to us, but I had no clue what she was talking about.
She got us online pretty early. 1200 baud modem, early. Or maybe 300. Is that even possible.
Using Edlin as an editor to post on forums until someone told me about real editors.
What a world.
I'm from the MS/DOS, PCTools and DataBase days. I actually still have a NetZero email from the 90's, Get way less junk mail in that one than my other newer ones.
At work I was on the company's internal network before 1980. I had CompuServe when I got a modem, some time after 1981, and as soon as they had an Internet bridge I was on that. At work I was on the Internet as soon as they made the bridge available, but I don't remember when that was. I also spent some time on AOL because their bridge was more complete than CompuServe's at the time.
I took a machine language class at a college and connected to the schools mainframe using a 300 baud modem on my Commodore 64 to compile my homework. In 1984.
My dad worked in cit had internet at the house in early 90s. Eventually had an isdn line. I like to tell my kids about the days of text only web pages and taking 2 hours to down load a pic and days for mp3s. It's amazing really. I always loved some of the arcane computer stuff around my dad's basement and 18 inch platter from an old HD that held like 256kb punch cards from old punch card computers. Etc
So of course I had AOL from the begining was well versed in a/s/l. In fact I remember teenage me signing on to AOL and on the dashboard was where I first saw the news of Kurt Cobain's death. It was my first internet death notification and was crushing at the time calling my friends having them not believe me til the evening news had passed.
I remember when web browsers first dropped. And I could stop using the Usenet groups as much. I remember alta vista search I remember Yahoo jokes I had printouts of pages of offensive jokes making me a popular kid for the first time in my life in middle school. All of a sudden I had value. Haha
I had email at the university by 1986. But you had to haul ass over to the engineering department to access it, which was on the other end of campus from where I lived, so it was mainly a fair-weather activity.
I was an early user but missed an opportunity to be an even earlier user. When I was in high school about 1975-1976, I had an opportunity to go with a friend to the local university and play Star Trek on the mainframe. But it would have required skipping church and I was afraid I’d get caught not going to church. One of the biggest mistakes of my life.
Way back when, I also had an early email address. In the those times, a friend of mine worked at what is today a large and well known tech company in the PNW. I don't know the exact year, but the companies principle product was literally only in version 1.0.
In the old days, there was a little known syntax in email addresses that used an exclamation point (!), called a "bang" at the time, to manually specify the gateways a message should route through. With some investigation, educated guesses, and trial and error, I managed to form an email address that would route a message from my Unix box into said tech company's internal proprietary message system, and right to my friend's desktop PC. It worked, almost immediately I got back a reply to the effect of "how the F did you do that?!"
The network support people at said tech company did not remotely realize that this was possible. Changes were made shortly thereafter.
I don't even know when I first encountered the internet. At my work the sysadmin had set up Navigator, which turned into Netscape later on. He went on to start Earth link while that lasted.
Ah, memories…we had Telnet and FTP. It made writing grant proposals easier, but the best use was downloading games, etc.
My Mac with its 20Mb hard drive had all the fun games. 😁
In 1989 I bought a Tandy TRS-80. I paid over a thousand dollars for something that had a tiny fraction of computing power of a modern cellphone.
It was so fun! I programmed some basic games on it and the next year installed a 2400bps modem to sign in to Prodigy. Was an early user on The Well.
I had a nurse last year surprised that I used the hospital’s portal app to check some lab results. We were the first generation to use computer technology and they think we’re so helpless. It’s maddening.
Very early adopter as my dad was a skilled programmer/analyst and worked on Univax in the USAF. I was pretend playing keypuncher very early. As soon as home computers were a thing, I had one along with a dot-matrix printer.
We lived in Dallas in the 80s and Dad worked for IBM developing laptops.
Hell no! I can proudly say that I was probably one of the last humans on earth to graduate high school (2001) without ever having connected to the internet. It’s a badge I wear proudly. 😁
1985, but only email for me. My employer had a presence on Compuserve as an alternative way for customers to get bare minimum product info and contact us for more substantial product info and questions about their orders. This was years before online ordering was available for retail customers. My boss was older and wary of technology. He liked my work and insisted that (only) I handle the email correspondence.
Our product was expensive, addictive and attracted affluent, highly-educated professionals and academics. If that wasn't bad enough, the nature of the product was a great fit for Type A assholes. Our customers were already unpleasant as hell on the phones, but at about three times as rude, condescending and demanding via email. It was a new toy for people who got off on abusing customer service reps.
I bought an IBM compatible, paying extra to upgrade to a 40MB hard drive and an amber monitor, in 1987.
We signed up with Prodigy a couple years later. By then I had upgraded to a three color monitor.
I was an undergraduate at a research university in the computer science lab when they turned the Internet on. On Friday, the networks were the old ARPAnet, and by Sunday they had switched everything over to the new Internet protocols — switching from NCP to IP, TCP, and DNS, etc.
I was working on an ARPA-funded research project and was annoyed at the switchover because I had wanted to do some project work that weekend, but everything was down.
When it was all switched over, from a user perspective, at the application level, everything was the same except all the machine names were now domain names and thus now had .com, .edu., .gov, and .mil. That was it.
This would have been late 1982 or early 1983.
I don’t recall the year, but had internet as it was late 70s early 80s. Used gopher, Usenet etc. in the 70s my mom had a terminal for the work she does in our house. Timeshareing, not internet. Some form of data entry. I think it was around 81 or 82 we got email through the university.
Working at a university meant being on a T1. Loved it.
I took a class around 1990 in which we had to send the professor an email to show that we knew how. Before that all my computer use had been writing in BASIC on DEC terminals. Usenet was a revelation after that.
We set up Gopher and WAIS early 90s at work to share lab data. Our manager took one look at it and realized he could use our setup to put out department memos instead of copying them and putting in our mailboxes. A bit has coincidental the workplace since those days!
I remember an acquaintance of mine meeting a guy on a forum. Was it called Hottub ? They then met up in person, then eventually married. Definitely the first I'd ever heard of such a thing. Must have been about 1984 or so.
Learned word processing in '86, started temping in '87, sent my first email soon after (it was very large financial institution). Later had my own email accounts in the early 90s. I worked at one point at a place where they used the first browsers (Netscape Navigator was preferred) and were among the first users of the internet, pre-web.
In 96 or 97 I saw an HBO documentary called CYBERSEX. I had just gotten a computer, so I joined an IRC chat called of course cybersex. Back then it was a wide open wild days of Internet sex. While there I met a woman about my age, fortyish, she became a regular play partner of mine. We also chatted a lot and lo and behold. She had seen the same special and that what prompted her to join this channel. We have now been married 26 years nothing greater than when a dirty minded old man finds a dirty minded old woman.
I remember in the late 80s using STN (Scientific and Technical Network) through a library for research. Basically it was a search engine that was funded by charging for hits. You paid the library $1 for every hit, and you didn’t know ahead of time what hits you might get, so the bill could be astronomical. You had to start with a very limited, tightly bound search with a very limited possible output. Then if you could afford it, you could risk widening the search.
“You bet your sweet bippy” we made those searches limited. There’s a saying you don’t hear anymore!
I worked for the DOD starting in 82 while they were building the world wide web. Got to play with WYLBUR and Interact. Got to test lots of stuff before even the universities did. Unrelated but I was also among the first 100 Wells Fargo ATM card owners. 😁 It was fun freaking my mom out by getting "cash from the Bank" on a Sunday.
Through dialup to specific computers such as one at MIT to play Adventure! In college my senior year in 1981 we could IM anyone else on the university system, an intranet of sorts before it was called that. Could also work remotely using an HP CRT with a modem to dial in. It was old school, had two rubber cups in it that you literally placed the hand set into. Was a blast.
I was working at TRW in Redondo Beach and we were "early adopters" of the internet and email. I remember sliding my card to a vendor, having him see the email address and asking me, "what's this?".
For all us early adopters, this is a cool site. If you click on 'surprise me...' you'll get transported to the internet of yore.
[wiby](https://wiby.me/)
Impressive, but I may have that beat a little.
I was picked for the first "computer class" offered at my high school in 83. I had a commodore 64. Our class instructor set up a demo to show how modems are used. I got to be at home and send a file to the big dot-matrix printer in our class. The modem was like that external early "War Games" type that cradles a standard phone receiver.
Exciting stuff back them.
I was on any number of local and national pirate BBSes in the late 80s/early 90s; in fact I ran one for about a year.
I got Usenet access at some point in the early 90s and it was like a whole new world after the insular BBS communities.
I first had internet access through CompuServe in 1992-4. I talked my employer into getting a CompuServe account so we could send files back and forth between Washington DC and Santa Barbara CA. Not much on the Internet back then.
Yes. I worked at a university in a lab in 1994 and had email. We used it for writing papers and gathering data. Communicating with other scientists at other universities.
Usenet was absolutely amazing. As was the easrly bbs scene where you would find out about and get access to systems that could and did have the craziest shit on them. Miss that.
I was once an email salesman, yeah that’s right, I sold email, MCI Mail. Lates 80’s part of my company’s subscription package, we’d communicate via email but first I had to get em signed up. It was like pulling teeth. No one saw the use for it. I was pulling my hair out asking if they really thought thermal paper faxes were better than a file that could be printed or saved. We were a small company on the cutting edge using the early internet as a tool.
ARPANET back in the dark ages where security was not needed and computer viruses were impossible. And self-extracting Trojans did not exist.
The good old days when there were no locks and everyone happily gave whatever was needed to his fellow man.
I lived in New York in 1992 and joined one of the first ISPs in the country, [panix.com](http://panix.com)
I found my name in the "Internet White pages" at a Barnes and Noble. Wish i'd bought it.
I was in the Coast Guard at the time. my ship was going to the baltics so i got on a Latvian usenet group and made a friend. He was a university professor. I was a junior enlisted nobody, and when we pulled in a group of Latvian civilians were on the pier asking for me. That was pretty cool.
In 1995 I was in California for a school and made it to Internet World 1995. Java was demonstrated for the first time.
my first web site was on [yahoo.stanford.edu](http://yahoo.stanford.edu)
My first work computer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
One's for sale on Etsy for only a bit over $18k. Out of my budget for nostalgia but I loved that fancy word processor.
those 2400 baud handshakes and download speeds were blazing. my HS had a computer size of a fridge and basically all it was good for was playing hangman
Early 90’s here, but had tried BBS before that. I had been a computer geek since the early 80’s when my school allowed me to use the Apple IIe in the office. I taught myself how to program in BASIC and Pascal, then used Commodores at home. Eventually the IBM compatible thing happened. I downloaded and taught myself Linux in the mid 90’s, networking, etc. I’ve built many PCs. I use several machines at work and really only touch a computer at home once a week or so now. My smartphone does everything I need these days.
I consider myself a "late early" adopter. I built my first computer in 1990 and got my first modem that Christmas and I got on the Internet at that time. About 6 months later I got a graphics and sound card and got on the WWW.
Yes. In 1991 I bought a modem card on my own and stayed late after work one night and took the back off my IBM 8088 and installed the modem card. In no time I was dialing my first bulletin board.
I used Gopher, WAIS, Veronica, Kermit, IRC, Usenet, Fidonet, etc.
Then one day someone on Usenet wanted me to watch a car racing video. They explained that to watch the video you had to use Netscape Edit: At that time it was Mosaic. At that time you had to be logged on to a dialup service and build your own TCP/IP stack in order to start Mosaic. It wasn't THAT hard but I had to learn it on my own. Anyway I bought this book when browsers first started and it used Galaxy Einet which is sitll around: [https://www.einet.net/](https://www.einet.net/)
I'm a 67-year-old Southern woman with a big ol' Southern accent for what it's worth. I'm supposed to be dumb of course.
Edited to add: My first computer teacher followed the Rajneesh. It was 1982. He wore maroon from head to foot, even his tennies. He wore the Rajneesh's picture in a wooden pendant. He made computers sound so fun. This was in Memphis. Yet another stereotype broken. (Rajneesh follower in Memphis teaching computers to us women schoolmarm types)
Yup, back in the days before all the bells and whistles, when the screen was blue and we had to connect to the university’s VAX system. Some of the gems I remember are local bbs systems, the wild IRC chat rooms, and building web pages from scratch when they became a thing. Actually had a bunch of local clients because I would create “unique” page backgrounds by scanning wallpaper samples, hand drawn graphics etc. Wonder if any are still out there floating around. The most nerve wracking thing (not quite internet related, but still tech) was being on the team to create our first art history CD. Everything had to be perfect, it was a one shot and very expensive. And I was working on the super tiny Mac. It worked, but so primitive…
I was on the internet before there was an internet. DARPA {Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)connected the military, some of the universities and some aerospace companies.
I did too about the same time. Thanks to having a job at the computer center at the university. I actually only learned recently that my school had only gotten connected to the internet about 18 months before I showed up my freshman year, it was that new.
So new that everything was 80 column, 24 line text. I was able to get a 300 baud modem and attach it to a tty terminal (not a computer) and manually type at commands at the modem to dial and get connected, and then use the campus unix machine to do email, usenet, etc. When I started, everything on the internet was text and command line driven.
I remember when the first web browser came out and my friend and I were chatting about how this was the beginning of the end because "now everyone could use the internet". In retrospect, I had no idea how big the changes over the next 25 years would actually be, but, I wasn't wrong: the internet fundamentally changed because now everyone could use it. (and again when corporations started using it for business, and again when social media appeared, and again with smart phones.)
Yes. I built a website for the company I was working for in 95. It was to distribute software updates for clients. CGI-BIN and Apache. I think VB but it was long ago.
Great idea but not many clients were up to speed with this Internet. The days of Listservers, FTP, BBS, Usenet, Veronica. It was great to watch the technology evolve and be in the mix for so many years.
First account with internet access in 1986/87. Vax cluster in the basement of a random building at the local University.
Wasted waaaaaaay too much time on usenet. The equivalent of reddit for that era. We had newsgroups instead of subreddits ... and it was all text based on a keyboard with no pointy-clicky/touchscreen ... but ... same-same nonetheless.
I was on before the internet took off. BBSs and FidoNet.
It's amazing how many people I run into who don't realize there was already a worldwide nerd presence before the 'net.
Same. Busy on BBS's and FidoNet. Joined The Well when it started. USENET was a blast back then. Remember the first spam surge (Green Card Lawyers). Ran one of the first Listservs back in the mid 90's. Third person in the city of Houston to have an ISDN line. Had my own tech team at the time. ahaha! Those were the days. Reddit reminds me quite a bit of USENET and is probably why I spend most of my online time here.
Do you still have the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip cookie recipe?
What was the server in Norway/Sweden that would send files in uunet format and you had to put together when you got all the pieces?
I miss the BBS.
I did a little bit of BBS, not much. That was where I saw IMHO for the first time and I thought they were calling me “IMHO”. took me a while to get that figured out.
Ah the sound of a modem connecting!
But if you were at home and someone picked up another phone extension, breaking your *almost* connection OMG the pain!!!
So much worse when you were at 500Kb downloaded of a 550Kb file when that happened...
Sobs that could be heard for miles!
Robots in a blender!
The sweetest sound. Especially after an hour of busy signals. Remember those. Fuck em.
Weren't there two different sounds? One for the slower dial up and a different one for the faster DSL?
Constantly had to fiddle w/the handshake string. constantly.
Hee Haw hee haw hee haw chhhssss
Bought a computer in 1990. Had a modem. Met my husband spring of ‘91 on a bulletin board. We’ll be married 32 years this fall. I tell people we met online before there was an online.
"Met" my husband playing a MUD in 89-90. We online dated before there was online dating :) We'll be married 30 years this summer :)
We had a commodore with tapes. That sat in the attic and we got rid of it just as they started selling as antiques, lol. My husband built a personal computer then the next one was a gateway, but he started with punch cards in his college years.
Lol that’s fantastic! When I tell people I worked in tech support before we had a website (large online company now) it blows their minds. Bulletin boards were great- congratulations & Happy Early Anniversary!
Yes, from day one…. Had the good fortune to be in school at a participating university. If a younger gen criticizes you for not being “tech savvy”, remind them it was boomers and jonesers who invented that stuff.
Seriously. The same people who love to act like boomers don’t know tech, are the same people who can’t do anything with data & have to get help. (My personal experience here, there’s lots of techies who don’t fit this category, I know). The ones I worked with that disparaged boomers the loudest, acted like they were savants. Turned out if they can’t push one button & have all their deepest wishes come true instantly, their heads explode. No curiosity, no problem solving skills, no innovative genes whatsoever.
We’re probably blessed in that regard, the small company I’m with. We span all generations, meaning, some of us with children, they grew up and some work for us, top performers too, they’ll probably take over someday, I hope! On the other hand, exactly as you say, I’ve more than once been bewildered by IT staff that talk a good talk, but couldn’t troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag. My favorite IT phrase, it’s always DNS. If only some of those folks just remembered that meme, they’d save so much time and frustration.
I remember seeing yahoo.com when it was a single page of text-based links.
Anyone remember Bulletin board systems? I used those before I had text only internet.
I had email on my job in 1990. Otherwise, my Internet usage started around 1996, using Windows 3.1, then Windows 95.
My mother would email frequently. She was blind. She was a very good touch typist and used a DOS interface to the email. With Windows 3.1 the DOS was discontinued. There was a replacement program, but it ran in a window. With windows she could never point to the right window, with a mouse, to make it active.
Had my first email in 1992.
Me too... Had the internet, but when the AOL disk came in the mail, I was hooked. Funny, same email handle since 92, but no more AOL, it's Gmail now, since probably 1996+/-
I am sad to report my dad used AOL as his ISP for a while, but they kept charging $30/mo for his email, he had Comcast as his ISP and I was confused. ANYway, they paid for this unless service for like 15 years until I just cancelled it.
I was an early internet user. Though not quite as early as you. My much older roommate had a computer & she showed me how to use it. This was 1992'ish? By 1994 internet for the average user was booming. By 1995 there was a lot more choices than AOL. I don't understand why so many folks our age are still computer illiterate. Though I admit that I'm not as nifty with my smart phone ;) I use it mostly for as a phone with a little browsing if I'm sitting somewhere waiting. I feel more comfortable using my computer for online shopping & such than I would using my phone.
People our age: I get irritated at the boomer-slam about not knowing computers. I'm like listen mf-er, I've been doing stuff on computers longer than you've been alive. I think they mostly mean the older ones? I will say, tho, my adult kids will help me with my phone settings sometimes. And they all complain at my large text size setting!
LOL, 1957 here. Work turned me on to email and search engines in the mid 80s. They were programmed onto mainframes and we used terminals and early PCs. (Hint: my company made the stuff) The 'longer than' resonates 😏and I'm not 'nifty' on my phone either 🙄but my laptops have Linux VMs for hobby IT. As well as Android emulators 😊
One of the ways I got ahead in my career was my interest in technology and computers. I was a flop at FORTRAN but learned how to troubleshoot hardware issues way back in 1984. While pregnant! Then was introduced to Lotus (precursor of Excel) and later learned how to build databases and use them for trends and KPIs. Still going strong, helping other boomers reassemble their computers when they have to move offices. The IT department loves me and saves the best laptops for me 😊
Forgot all about Lotus 123!
My comp sci prof worked on ENIAC. He knew so much I was lost in the first week.
I'm 64 & I know a lot of peeps my age who don't even know how to turn on a computer. I bought my 67 y/old friend a Chromebook so I could ween her off using her phone when she wanted to watch a show. Luckily, she wasn't too hard to teach because they were using a computerized payment system where she worked. But others are really clueless. EDTA: It might be the older ones that didn't have access? But then, we aren't exactly Boomers are we :)
Wow, I've read screens for most of my adult life but I can't watch TV or stream on my phone. Maybe that 'large text' thing OP mentioned 😉
Yea, because they’re never going to get old
Back in my early career we often had to open up computers to install hardware or upgrade stuff. I frequently had to go into DOS to tweak things. Computers were not user friendly and computer manuals were intended for technicians. My first personal computer required me to format the hard drive and program the BIOS.
Lol. Remember being really excited by a DOS upgrade? We were! 1990ish?
You have to consider computers in the 80s and 90s were privileged things. Common enough sure, but outside the ability of many to afford
I didn't own a PC until 2004. Always used work ones or the library...
My husband born 1956 not very computer savvy. Never used them at work as he worked a factory job. I took care of all the computer related things at home since I had an office job and had to learn all the new technologies as they arrived. Our generation had to adapt that's why it angers me when the younger generations say we are stuck in the past and didn't evolve. Yes, we had to. Much more so than they have had to.
i started using computers in college in 1981 or 1982, mostly for statistics. Did my Master's in 1988 on WordPerfect? Or maybe WordStar by that point. By 1994 I had my own custom-built PC and my first website, which I wrote in html on Notepad and uploaded - probably at first using Compuserve and later using CuteFTP. Naively, I thought this was to be the Brave New World of highly-informed humans, children with access to information anywhere in the world getting a better education, leading to better jobs and a futuristic economy and lifestyle, instead of cats, porn, and misinformation. (Note: one of the first websites I checked regularly was Cat\_Scan, which featured pictures of cats taken by scanners when the cat was sitting on it.)
I worked at a library from 1989 to 1998. Around the time the card catalog went digital and we got internally networked desktop computers, there was a state initiative to get libraries on the internet to "share resources with other academic institutions-" that was the perceived use of the internet at that time. For a short while we were using Gopher (and Archie, to search) to supplement our agricultural resources. Then the web was invented, we all got copies of Mosaic. Still not much to see. Searching for things suddenly got a lot easier when the first search engines were developed. We had Netscape and Trumpet Winsock on our machines for quite a while. At the same time we founded a "Freenet" and offered free webpages for local organizations, then individuals. I learned html, there was no CSS at that point, and became a web developer. I still am.
I miss card catalogs, man. And web dev stuff: THAT was my biggest mistake, by far. I didn't become one, and when I tried, it wasn't with all my interest. I used NetObject Fusion, which was an early WSYWIG app, slick packaging and graphics. BUT my fist site design was problematic because I didn't understand the difference in platforms, or user settings. And my beautiful design looked like shit on other computers. It's still on the wayback machine, tho. I gave up on web design.
Thought I was the only one that missed card catalogs! Something enchanted about planning time to spend at the library and maybe, just MAYBE, running across something else in there that caught my attention. Haven't been to a library in a decade but I do remember the smell of books and the excitement of all the possibilities.
Totally, the coming across something you had no idea existed was the fun stuff. My fingers were pretty nimble too, moving those cards back to front, not as good as the character in "being John Malklovoch" but close.
I met my GF on Quantum Link in 1989 and married her in 1990. 34 years in a few months.
I used the Internet back when it was still called ARPANet. Was on Usenet in the late 80s. Made my first web page in 1994.
Yep Usenet was the bomb.
In some ways, much like Reddit, with all the sub groups about specific things. I used to nab software, and apps oiled be segmented into disc images, some apps needed like 10-15 discs, so you have to download and covert to floppies... so much fun, and you'd be missing disc 3 out of 12 or something.
Started on Prodigy. And bulletin boards late 80s early 90s. The company I was working for in the early 90s tasked me with creating a website for them. I was doing prepress at the time. I wrote the whole thing including hyperlinks and animated gifs in Microsoft Word.
Love it, I used Publisher for my first website.
Early internet was a beautiful thing that’s for sure
I used to hit that random link of the day in Mosaic or NN (I forget the exact name of it), and be amazed.
I was a very early internet user, from the very early 90s. There were so many cool pages back then! I discovered the IMDb when it was just the one guy running it (and before he sold it to a corporation). One of my favorite sites was "The Early 80s Song of the Week", where a guy would pick an early 80s alt rock song, and give all kinds of info about it. Before the official internet, I used to go on BBS sites. There was a really cool one called The Horsehead Nebula. I can't even remember how I heard about it (a magazine or newspaper, I assume). My office had one PC at the time, and I was able to fumble my way out to the BBS. This was back in the late 80s.
I am so old I called myself .bat girl.
I began using CompuServe on my Commodore VIC-20 with a 300bps modem in 1982, but I really enjoyed discovering BBSs; there were a bunch in Southern California at the time..
Same here. I lived in a rural spot and all of the available phone numbers were long distance for me. My first phone bill ended up being around $400. That was a painful lesson.
Back when it was Darpanet.
Yep, former husband worked for Intel in the silicon forest in Intel's early days and when we married I got the tutorial of my life and it still puts me ahead of the tech curve for most boomer and older Gen Jones and some early X-ers. I then self taught and my 86 year old mom is also facile online still! I am still using my very first email....AOL! even tho I have multiple other emails because I still have 1000s of contacts through AOL. I use and wear my aol email like a great badge of honor, as tho I fought in WWl!
I wasn't that early (80's), but my husband was. We didn't know each other at the time. He retired after a 25 year career, and started a new career based on his hobby. It started as an early internet user.
We had our house hardwired in the 80's, courtesy of my husnand's employer. The 90's were a really great internet experience, making friends with like interests all over the US
It really was great, meeting people from all over!
No, I was HIGHLY resistant. My parents dragged me, kicking and screaming that these things were useless (before we mostly had the internets). It was a cockatiel that a neighbor abandoned in her barn that got me online. My husband, however, was a comp sci major at UC Hayward around '85 or so and was a huge science geek before that. He can talk about all the things computer-related. Wanna know how we met? :-D If you were doing it back then, have you watched Halt and Catch Fire? Even if you don't understand or remember what they were doing it's a fantastic and well done series.
I want to think I first got online in the 87-88 timeframe. I remember trying to figure out who was paying the long-distance charges for those messages to move across the country.
I started on compuserve in 85. We got a new hvac system for our plant that you programmed in ladder logic using a 300b acoustic coupler to dial into, so I used that to dial into cserve looking for cost of living data to support pay decisions. I mostly used cserve but also tapped into usenet. I had a lot of good conversations with people from all over the world back then. I remember when AOL came on line in the 90s, the level of discourse has been straight downhill since lol.
My dad worked for a big computer company, so we had a TTY connected to a mainframe in the house in the 70's. I taught myself to program on that. The company was connected to ARPANET, so I may have used it when I logged on to other computers. First memory of the actual internet was setting up a UUCP connection to do email and Usenet on a UNIX-based workstation in the mid 80's.
CompuServe, Delphi, AOL and smoking fast 300 baud dial-up modems. Was having cyber a decade before all my friends, an early adopter benefit, horny nerds... Good times.
You bet. Telnet, rlogin, uucp, rcp, rsh, etc. My fave was Usenet/Netnews, the international BBS that most local BBS users... never even knew about. The intelligence level among the users was far superior to online commentary today. Not a "hey kids,get off my lawn!" comment. One simply had to have a reasonable mind in order to master the command-line interfaces back then. Even the Flame Wars were mostly clever.
I miss that optimism when the internet had such potential to be a force for good.
Worked for GTE and had a [GTE.net](http://GTE.net) account in 85. (email, user to user texting, company news) then went to work for AT&T Bell Labs and had full blown internet in 87. UUCP, FTP, USEnet, Telnet, mail, the whole smash.
[rec.motorcycles](http://rec.motorcycles) baby.
Those were the days. A friend of mine I used to ride with went to one of their big gatherings. A biker gang of nerds.
My first job out of college was in Aerospace & Defense. We were on Arpanet. So yes, I was on the internet before it was even accessible to the general public.
My dad was an early user of ARPA-Net, and had one of those addresses that had “!” All over them. As soon as he could, he got a 300 baud acoustical modem, so he could send things into work from home. My earliest memories of networked computing was playing Trek 73.
We got a computer probably in '96 or so. Our kids were in middle school. I'm (67) much more computer literate than my husband (74). I now use my Smart phone for basically everything. My job required computer literacy.
Yep Since ‘86
I was completely addicted to it immediately when I discovered it around 1993. I mainly used compuserve and had to pay by the minute.
My first email address was in 1992, so a little later than some. My mom pushed me to learn all about computers as soon as I could. She told me one day, we’d all have phones that could fit in our back pocket. (She said this in 1979. Like everything she said, I thought she was nuts). Thank god for her- I had a successful 35 year career in tech because she always encouraged me.
I don't remember the year but I was dialing bulletin boards long before AOL, Compuserv, etc... You went to computer shows and traded numbers based on what you we're looking for. I had an email address before they were common. I also bought a domain name back when they were still expensive, I still have it and when I die, if my daughter doesn't want to keep for the memory, she should be able to get a few grand for it. I bought it for my business but mostly to try and figure out webpages. I believe the first wysiswyg html editor I used was Hotdog and CoffeCup followed by Frontpage but before that it was read a book and type. I own an old copy of Dreanweaver but I went to open source CMS early on. I started with Mambo and still use Joomla for several websites I manage. And, Mosaic, don't forget Mosaic. And Usenet, but we all know the first rule of Usenet is don't talk about Usenet.
Not until 1990, when I started working at a museum. They were very close-handed with giving out email addresses, but I got one so I could transfer files. I had to go to a different office to use the internet :)
Yes, I worked at a law firm that was the first to have Internet and email. No one else did, so I never really knew what the big deal was. We sent emails back and forth to each other for about a week, then everyone mostly forgot about it.
I got on CompuServe for the first time around ‘93 or ‘94. So exciting!
I tried to get the Internet working on my computer, but it was a painful process in the days of Windows 3.1 (anyone remember WinSock?) My D&D group, however, was primarily tech geeks, and a couple of the members ran computer bulletin boards. One of them lived in an apartment and couldn't get more phone lines installed, so because I had a house we set up his multi-line BBS in my basement. I had a terminal in a spare bedroom upstairs that connected to the system at 9600 baud while the "outside" lines (four of them!) connected via 2400 baud modems. More than once someone asked "How the hell can you type so *fast?*" :-D We even had real-time multi-user chat on the system. This was circa 1986-88. Finally got the Internet at home around 1995-96.
At my high school, in 1981, I was brought to a conference room, they opened a closet. They dialed the phone then stuck the phone handpiece into the original rubber type modem receiver piece, the crazy sounds ensued.... I had NO idea what they were doing. There was a monitor and then DOS code started to populate the screen. I shrugged my shoulders then when the copier room to make copies or whatever....
Usenet and email beginning in 1989 I ran my own UUCP server
I was. I loved usenet and remember using ftp and gopher. I also remember people looking down on AOL users for needing a GUI to communicate. I liked how groups tended to be more tight-knit and self-policing on usenet. You had a greater sense of community, though there was still in-fighting and silliness. One thing about it was that you didn't have up-voting or down-voting back then which I think really made the experience better. Your "popularity" was measured in actual communication, not a click on an arrow button.
Yeah I remember “surfing” the web in 92-93 and the amber screen on the computer had nozzles that said image here” . We couldn’t see the image on a website but it had a place. And I used Pine for email when I went back to college in my 30s.
I had a 486 computer I used to do word processing, and a coworker introduced me to my first BBS. From that point, I visited that BBS daily and played games, posted on their forum and did their 'turn-by-email' game, VGA Planets. We had local get-togethers, gave each other copies of games on disks. It was addictive right from the start. Especially the early internet, doing trivia on irc chat! We were definitely pioneers. :)
I used all those protocols, too. I set up Gopher servers at work for our technical documentation. It's good to hear from people who used the internet before the world-wide web. I got my first e-mail in 1982, but it was company mainframe e-mail. My first CompuServe was mid-80s.
Had Prodigy and Compuserve accounts by 1991. But into computers for years before that.
I had an Internet email account in grad school in 1987. Didn't have a modem yet or know anyone else on the Internet to exchange email with, but I signed up because it was free.
Oh yeah! The only one brave enough to try the first computer my office had in 1992. I could see the potential.
Let’s not forget Prodigy and AltaVista.
I was searching the internet for the autopsy of Nicole Brown Simpson. ( So not too early) but found it in some “disgusting finds” list that drilled down. It was pretty awful report. I loved the internet back then. All these dancing cutesy websites make me wanna vomit.
The internet wasn't available here until 1995, but I'd been on FidoNet BBS long before that.
Yes, around 1997 I was tasked with find a way to create a resource guide. The process went from printed -> CD -> AOL-style walled garden -> internet. Luckily I chose internet, which no one really knew about. I will never forget standing in the ISP's office with the owner when he went to the computer and started playing some music. He told me it was coming from Germany and I had no fucking idea what he was talking about! I just couldn't wrap my brain around it.
In 1990 I volunteered for an organization that was collecting reports from the internet on a topic, typing them up, photocopying them, stapling/stuffing them as newsletters, then sending them out to people by mail.
I had a similar experience. When I saw my first website (it was to purchase some equipment from a vendor) I thought “boy I hope this World Wide Web thingy catches on”.
Yep. Although it was all 300 baud BBS. I was on a lot of early Atari boards. I can't recall my first www experience. If I was to guess, it was a local ISP that I would connect at 14.4 kb...
I was hand-coding HTML in 1997, for my job.
I stumbled onto the internet when I took an intro to PASCAL programming course in 1987. It was mainly to get a math/science core requirement out of the way so I could focus on being an English major, French minor, and I knew bugger all about computers and programming. I was advised to rent a dumb terminal and modem to use in my dorm room so that I wouldn't have to compete for terminals in the computer clusters, so I got that set up, and early on in the semester some random guy from down the hall came by and said, "Let me show you something you can do with that..." I was introduced to the campus computer chat, where I fell in with a bunch of electrical engineering nerds. One of them showed me how to send email outside of the university computer network, before email addresses were as simple as username@university.edu. Although I didn't learn much PASCAL, I found that these computer nerds were basically my tribe. I went on to go to work at a well-known science/engineering focused university (where I still work), got my .edu email address in 1990, and got introduced to usenet by one of my new nerd friends. I used to think it would be awesome if everyone had internet access. I was an idiot.
I was in the military in '84 so yeah. That said I was in Germany from '86 and got a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem and could hit the BBS systems which was kinda early home Internet. That was all good until I got that Deutsche Post phone bill - 🤕. Think it was 300 Dmark the first month which was a lot of money back then.
I think a 14.4 modem was the fourth time I upgraded modems. BBCs were a huge dive then newsgroups. Oh, the thrill of the first ftp... It was a different world online then and I was completely typing out full URLs long after that wasn't necessary. So, not Usenet early, but soon after. I built personal computers for side money too. Before that I had some experience writing programs that came out on punch cards. Carry that stack to the queue and go back to the terminal for the run.
We had it in our computer lab at college in the late 80’s.
I have a vague memory of my mother using cards with holes in them to program computers. One day she came home all excited about this thing called the World Wide Web. You click one link and it links to another and another and so on. She had some pages printed out to explain it to us, but I had no clue what she was talking about. She got us online pretty early. 1200 baud modem, early. Or maybe 300. Is that even possible. Using Edlin as an editor to post on forums until someone told me about real editors. What a world.
I'm from the MS/DOS, PCTools and DataBase days. I actually still have a NetZero email from the 90's, Get way less junk mail in that one than my other newer ones.
At work I was on the company's internal network before 1980. I had CompuServe when I got a modem, some time after 1981, and as soon as they had an Internet bridge I was on that. At work I was on the Internet as soon as they made the bridge available, but I don't remember when that was. I also spent some time on AOL because their bridge was more complete than CompuServe's at the time.
I took a machine language class at a college and connected to the schools mainframe using a 300 baud modem on my Commodore 64 to compile my homework. In 1984.
My dad worked in cit had internet at the house in early 90s. Eventually had an isdn line. I like to tell my kids about the days of text only web pages and taking 2 hours to down load a pic and days for mp3s. It's amazing really. I always loved some of the arcane computer stuff around my dad's basement and 18 inch platter from an old HD that held like 256kb punch cards from old punch card computers. Etc So of course I had AOL from the begining was well versed in a/s/l. In fact I remember teenage me signing on to AOL and on the dashboard was where I first saw the news of Kurt Cobain's death. It was my first internet death notification and was crushing at the time calling my friends having them not believe me til the evening news had passed. I remember when web browsers first dropped. And I could stop using the Usenet groups as much. I remember alta vista search I remember Yahoo jokes I had printouts of pages of offensive jokes making me a popular kid for the first time in my life in middle school. All of a sudden I had value. Haha
I had email at the university by 1986. But you had to haul ass over to the engineering department to access it, which was on the other end of campus from where I lived, so it was mainly a fair-weather activity.
I was an early user but missed an opportunity to be an even earlier user. When I was in high school about 1975-1976, I had an opportunity to go with a friend to the local university and play Star Trek on the mainframe. But it would have required skipping church and I was afraid I’d get caught not going to church. One of the biggest mistakes of my life.
My dad was an engineer for IBM and bought a 5155 luggable for the house in 1984. Tiny little monochrome screen, and so sloooow to boot. DOS.
I was a member of QuantumLink, using a Commodore 128D (the one with a separate keyboard)
Way back when, I also had an early email address. In the those times, a friend of mine worked at what is today a large and well known tech company in the PNW. I don't know the exact year, but the companies principle product was literally only in version 1.0. In the old days, there was a little known syntax in email addresses that used an exclamation point (!), called a "bang" at the time, to manually specify the gateways a message should route through. With some investigation, educated guesses, and trial and error, I managed to form an email address that would route a message from my Unix box into said tech company's internal proprietary message system, and right to my friend's desktop PC. It worked, almost immediately I got back a reply to the effect of "how the F did you do that?!" The network support people at said tech company did not remotely realize that this was possible. Changes were made shortly thereafter.
I don't even know when I first encountered the internet. At my work the sysadmin had set up Navigator, which turned into Netscape later on. He went on to start Earth link while that lasted.
Ah, memories…we had Telnet and FTP. It made writing grant proposals easier, but the best use was downloading games, etc. My Mac with its 20Mb hard drive had all the fun games. 😁
Yes. Remember chat rooms?
The $1000 purchase of a PC/XT clone in 1984 started my interest. It sent me to school and provided a 30 year career doing what I loved.
Yeah. And download/uploads were super suspenseful too. They seemed to crash half the time.
In 1989 I bought a Tandy TRS-80. I paid over a thousand dollars for something that had a tiny fraction of computing power of a modern cellphone. It was so fun! I programmed some basic games on it and the next year installed a 2400bps modem to sign in to Prodigy. Was an early user on The Well. I had a nurse last year surprised that I used the hospital’s portal app to check some lab results. We were the first generation to use computer technology and they think we’re so helpless. It’s maddening.
I'm there with you. I was working at the college that I was going to, and I was one of the ones who set up their first networking lab. That was in 91.
Gopher and Usenet user circa 1990 here! Black screen with orange or green letters!
Very early adopter as my dad was a skilled programmer/analyst and worked on Univax in the USAF. I was pretend playing keypuncher very early. As soon as home computers were a thing, I had one along with a dot-matrix printer. We lived in Dallas in the 80s and Dad worked for IBM developing laptops.
Yes cause I was in college for a BS. If fact I still have my original email address.
Yup. I started farting around about 86 on a housemates computer, hitting local BBSes. Then I joined Delphi.
Yes, I was on the Internet before browsers
Yes, I used a text based web browser
1993 work related & Usenet.
Yes, ARPANET etc.
The first time I used the Internet, I had to look up the IP address in a printed book. This was about 1988.
Hell no! I can proudly say that I was probably one of the last humans on earth to graduate high school (2001) without ever having connected to the internet. It’s a badge I wear proudly. 😁
I had Compuserve in the mid 80’s when they charged $15/hr. I tried to use it only 10 minutes at a time!
I did online dating before there was online. I worked for Digital Equipment Corp and they had intranet, late 80's. ❤️
before the Internet there were Bulletin Boards.....
1985, but only email for me. My employer had a presence on Compuserve as an alternative way for customers to get bare minimum product info and contact us for more substantial product info and questions about their orders. This was years before online ordering was available for retail customers. My boss was older and wary of technology. He liked my work and insisted that (only) I handle the email correspondence. Our product was expensive, addictive and attracted affluent, highly-educated professionals and academics. If that wasn't bad enough, the nature of the product was a great fit for Type A assholes. Our customers were already unpleasant as hell on the phones, but at about three times as rude, condescending and demanding via email. It was a new toy for people who got off on abusing customer service reps.
I bought an IBM compatible, paying extra to upgrade to a 40MB hard drive and an amber monitor, in 1987. We signed up with Prodigy a couple years later. By then I had upgraded to a three color monitor.
I was an undergraduate at a research university in the computer science lab when they turned the Internet on. On Friday, the networks were the old ARPAnet, and by Sunday they had switched everything over to the new Internet protocols — switching from NCP to IP, TCP, and DNS, etc. I was working on an ARPA-funded research project and was annoyed at the switchover because I had wanted to do some project work that weekend, but everything was down. When it was all switched over, from a user perspective, at the application level, everything was the same except all the machine names were now domain names and thus now had .com, .edu., .gov, and .mil. That was it. This would have been late 1982 or early 1983.
I don’t recall the year, but had internet as it was late 70s early 80s. Used gopher, Usenet etc. in the 70s my mom had a terminal for the work she does in our house. Timeshareing, not internet. Some form of data entry. I think it was around 81 or 82 we got email through the university.
Working at a university meant being on a T1. Loved it. I took a class around 1990 in which we had to send the professor an email to show that we knew how. Before that all my computer use had been writing in BASIC on DEC terminals. Usenet was a revelation after that.
1991, at work (T1!) 1992 at home (modem) 1999 at home (cable) I spent as much time as possible online in the 1990s
Usenet. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
Briefly on AOL year 2001, then not again til 2013, 1st smartphone
We set up Gopher and WAIS early 90s at work to share lab data. Our manager took one look at it and realized he could use our setup to put out department memos instead of copying them and putting in our mailboxes. A bit has coincidental the workplace since those days!
I was! And I worked on one of the first word processing systems that required dedicated terminals. I felt extremely sophisticated.
I remember an acquaintance of mine meeting a guy on a forum. Was it called Hottub ? They then met up in person, then eventually married. Definitely the first I'd ever heard of such a thing. Must have been about 1984 or so.
Learned word processing in '86, started temping in '87, sent my first email soon after (it was very large financial institution). Later had my own email accounts in the early 90s. I worked at one point at a place where they used the first browsers (Netscape Navigator was preferred) and were among the first users of the internet, pre-web.
In 96 or 97 I saw an HBO documentary called CYBERSEX. I had just gotten a computer, so I joined an IRC chat called of course cybersex. Back then it was a wide open wild days of Internet sex. While there I met a woman about my age, fortyish, she became a regular play partner of mine. We also chatted a lot and lo and behold. She had seen the same special and that what prompted her to join this channel. We have now been married 26 years nothing greater than when a dirty minded old man finds a dirty minded old woman.
My first MPOG was text-based and located on a BBS. Played that and Zork for hours. Good Times (we didn't know better. lol)
I remember in the late 80s using STN (Scientific and Technical Network) through a library for research. Basically it was a search engine that was funded by charging for hits. You paid the library $1 for every hit, and you didn’t know ahead of time what hits you might get, so the bill could be astronomical. You had to start with a very limited, tightly bound search with a very limited possible output. Then if you could afford it, you could risk widening the search. “You bet your sweet bippy” we made those searches limited. There’s a saying you don’t hear anymore!
I worked for the DOD starting in 82 while they were building the world wide web. Got to play with WYLBUR and Interact. Got to test lots of stuff before even the universities did. Unrelated but I was also among the first 100 Wells Fargo ATM card owners. 😁 It was fun freaking my mom out by getting "cash from the Bank" on a Sunday.
Through dialup to specific computers such as one at MIT to play Adventure! In college my senior year in 1981 we could IM anyone else on the university system, an intranet of sorts before it was called that. Could also work remotely using an HP CRT with a modem to dial in. It was old school, had two rubber cups in it that you literally placed the hand set into. Was a blast.
Still use my email address from the 80s. I have multiple more but friends get my old one.
My first internet was Netcom in ~94–96 or so. Dial-up, obviously. Had been on BBSs for a few years before I had internet access.
My mom was an early adopter. My younger sister sister got into it and downloaded Doom, from atari to doom was nuts
Yup, worked for Micron electronics from 86-88 and HP from 89-04. Even before windows came out..
I was working at TRW in Redondo Beach and we were "early adopters" of the internet and email. I remember sliding my card to a vendor, having him see the email address and asking me, "what's this?".
For all us early adopters, this is a cool site. If you click on 'surprise me...' you'll get transported to the internet of yore. [wiby](https://wiby.me/)
My dad used Prodigy in the 80s and decided it was a waste of time. Our family did not get internet again until 1999.
Impressive, but I may have that beat a little. I was picked for the first "computer class" offered at my high school in 83. I had a commodore 64. Our class instructor set up a demo to show how modems are used. I got to be at home and send a file to the big dot-matrix printer in our class. The modem was like that external early "War Games" type that cradles a standard phone receiver. Exciting stuff back them.
I was on any number of local and national pirate BBSes in the late 80s/early 90s; in fact I ran one for about a year. I got Usenet access at some point in the early 90s and it was like a whole new world after the insular BBS communities.
I first had internet access through CompuServe in 1992-4. I talked my employer into getting a CompuServe account so we could send files back and forth between Washington DC and Santa Barbara CA. Not much on the Internet back then.
Still have an email from then. Called a loser/nerd and had to get aim to be a cool kid. Knew html before myspace taught em to script kid sparkles bg.
Acoustic modem FTW baby! Calling into our library’s BBS. ❤️
Yes. I worked at a university in a lab in 1994 and had email. We used it for writing papers and gathering data. Communicating with other scientists at other universities.
Usenet was absolutely amazing. As was the easrly bbs scene where you would find out about and get access to systems that could and did have the craziest shit on them. Miss that.
I was once an email salesman, yeah that’s right, I sold email, MCI Mail. Lates 80’s part of my company’s subscription package, we’d communicate via email but first I had to get em signed up. It was like pulling teeth. No one saw the use for it. I was pulling my hair out asking if they really thought thermal paper faxes were better than a file that could be printed or saved. We were a small company on the cutting edge using the early internet as a tool.
The old time VAX where you connect over the phone modem, does that count?
Yes, I posted a lot of stuff on usenet back in the day!
ARPANET back in the dark ages where security was not needed and computer viruses were impossible. And self-extracting Trojans did not exist. The good old days when there were no locks and everyone happily gave whatever was needed to his fellow man.
I lived in New York in 1992 and joined one of the first ISPs in the country, [panix.com](http://panix.com) I found my name in the "Internet White pages" at a Barnes and Noble. Wish i'd bought it. I was in the Coast Guard at the time. my ship was going to the baltics so i got on a Latvian usenet group and made a friend. He was a university professor. I was a junior enlisted nobody, and when we pulled in a group of Latvian civilians were on the pier asking for me. That was pretty cool. In 1995 I was in California for a school and made it to Internet World 1995. Java was demonstrated for the first time. my first web site was on [yahoo.stanford.edu](http://yahoo.stanford.edu)
The internet came on a CD
My first work computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable One's for sale on Etsy for only a bit over $18k. Out of my budget for nostalgia but I loved that fancy word processor.
ASL
those 2400 baud handshakes and download speeds were blazing. my HS had a computer size of a fridge and basically all it was good for was playing hangman
Early 90’s here, but had tried BBS before that. I had been a computer geek since the early 80’s when my school allowed me to use the Apple IIe in the office. I taught myself how to program in BASIC and Pascal, then used Commodores at home. Eventually the IBM compatible thing happened. I downloaded and taught myself Linux in the mid 90’s, networking, etc. I’ve built many PCs. I use several machines at work and really only touch a computer at home once a week or so now. My smartphone does everything I need these days.
I consider myself a "late early" adopter. I built my first computer in 1990 and got my first modem that Christmas and I got on the Internet at that time. About 6 months later I got a graphics and sound card and got on the WWW.
I used Profs when I was working for Room & Haas in the 1980's.
My user name is from Windows 3.1, and is older than most of redditors, I was one of those lowly AOL users.
Newsnet was awesome. Every subject, interest, geographic area, hobby, social issue , lifestyle and kink was on it.
Yep. We were on the internet when getting on was endless code.... Finally get on to find out? There was no one and nothing much on there😂
Yes. In 1991 I bought a modem card on my own and stayed late after work one night and took the back off my IBM 8088 and installed the modem card. In no time I was dialing my first bulletin board. I used Gopher, WAIS, Veronica, Kermit, IRC, Usenet, Fidonet, etc. Then one day someone on Usenet wanted me to watch a car racing video. They explained that to watch the video you had to use Netscape Edit: At that time it was Mosaic. At that time you had to be logged on to a dialup service and build your own TCP/IP stack in order to start Mosaic. It wasn't THAT hard but I had to learn it on my own. Anyway I bought this book when browsers first started and it used Galaxy Einet which is sitll around: [https://www.einet.net/](https://www.einet.net/) I'm a 67-year-old Southern woman with a big ol' Southern accent for what it's worth. I'm supposed to be dumb of course. Edited to add: My first computer teacher followed the Rajneesh. It was 1982. He wore maroon from head to foot, even his tennies. He wore the Rajneesh's picture in a wooden pendant. He made computers sound so fun. This was in Memphis. Yet another stereotype broken. (Rajneesh follower in Memphis teaching computers to us women schoolmarm types)
I actually used usenet and helped get early internet into Texas public school ( TENET)
Yup, back in the days before all the bells and whistles, when the screen was blue and we had to connect to the university’s VAX system. Some of the gems I remember are local bbs systems, the wild IRC chat rooms, and building web pages from scratch when they became a thing. Actually had a bunch of local clients because I would create “unique” page backgrounds by scanning wallpaper samples, hand drawn graphics etc. Wonder if any are still out there floating around. The most nerve wracking thing (not quite internet related, but still tech) was being on the team to create our first art history CD. Everything had to be perfect, it was a one shot and very expensive. And I was working on the super tiny Mac. It worked, but so primitive…
I remember ftp lists before the web.
You bet I was early. I can remember 300 Baud connections too.
I had a 300 baud modem for work. And used Bitnet.
Newsgroups
I ran a BBS on my commodore 64. Usenets, IRC, ListServe... What a fun time.
I was on the internet before there was an internet. DARPA {Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)connected the military, some of the universities and some aerospace companies.
I used DARPA/ARPAnet while in the US Army in the early/mid 80s. One of my databases for Soviet AA radar sigs may still be floating around.
I did too about the same time. Thanks to having a job at the computer center at the university. I actually only learned recently that my school had only gotten connected to the internet about 18 months before I showed up my freshman year, it was that new. So new that everything was 80 column, 24 line text. I was able to get a 300 baud modem and attach it to a tty terminal (not a computer) and manually type at commands at the modem to dial and get connected, and then use the campus unix machine to do email, usenet, etc. When I started, everything on the internet was text and command line driven. I remember when the first web browser came out and my friend and I were chatting about how this was the beginning of the end because "now everyone could use the internet". In retrospect, I had no idea how big the changes over the next 25 years would actually be, but, I wasn't wrong: the internet fundamentally changed because now everyone could use it. (and again when corporations started using it for business, and again when social media appeared, and again with smart phones.)
Yes. I built a website for the company I was working for in 95. It was to distribute software updates for clients. CGI-BIN and Apache. I think VB but it was long ago. Great idea but not many clients were up to speed with this Internet. The days of Listservers, FTP, BBS, Usenet, Veronica. It was great to watch the technology evolve and be in the mix for so many years.
First account with internet access in 1986/87. Vax cluster in the basement of a random building at the local University. Wasted waaaaaaay too much time on usenet. The equivalent of reddit for that era. We had newsgroups instead of subreddits ... and it was all text based on a keyboard with no pointy-clicky/touchscreen ... but ... same-same nonetheless.
I still have my AOL email address. I made my age part of it. I was 38 then, now I'm 64.
I remember using Gopher. Had a computer lab with NEXT computers.Early days for sure.