What year did you get your first home internet connection?

[MackemX]

most of us should have it so when did you first ever get onto the internet at home?

note this is not at work and there is an option at the bottom for work only

I think I started in late 1999 with AOL on 56k . Those were the days of waiting for pages to load and files just took forever . It was £14.99 for the pleasure and I had no problems with AOL at all with cutoffs/downtime etc 8). I moved onto 512K Broadband (U/L downloads) in April 2002 (or was it 2001?) with Pipex for £23.44. I'm still paying the same price but I was upgraded to 2MB this year (but it only runs at 1MB probably due to line quality ). I know I can get it cheaper now but I've had no problems in my time with Pipex and my download speed is always max whenever I need it 8)

[offline]

1995, using Lynx on a unix shell. Prior to that on BBS's - you know.. ymodem/zmodem

[MackemX]

1995, using Lynx on a unix shell. Prior to that on BBS's - you know.. ymodem/zmodem

how much did it cost back in those days?

p.s. 1995 , so can we can blame you for the mess the internet is in now :P

[Faustus]

94 to 95 ish.

[offline]

Only about $90 AUD each just for the link. It was enough to club together and setup a 486 server joined via a half empty modem rack to AARnet at a blistering 9600 async.

No www at first though. Just news, gopher and email.

so can we can blame you for the mess the internet is in now

No mate. That was the day AOL 1st came on line. That was a bad day indeed. Within a month the net was full of f**ktards and **ckheads and to make matters worse, speeds dived to a snail's pace

[MackemX]

so can we can blame you for the mess the internet is in now

No mate. That was the day AOL came on line. That was a bad day indeed. Within a month the net was full of f**ktards and **ckheads and to make matters worse, speeds dived to a snail's pace

AOL, you say?

[offline]

AOL, you say?

- not you

Before AOL the net was fast and "pure". It was only us geeks, academics and scientists. Then came the hoard of Barbarians. They typed in capitals, misspelled simple words, hijacked every topic and started stupid flame wars about how fast their computer could load up MS Word - you were not a man unless your PC could do it in less than 8 seconds, apparently

[offline]

94 to 95 ish.

You could not get a 'home' link in 94.

[SquirrelDip]

Used to use a few BBS's back to about '86... I recall about '94 that I moved from Toronto to Vancouver and was trying to get used to email to communicate with friends - things evolved very quickly from that point.

[reboot]

1985. 300 baud long-distance dialup to Compuserve, with an accoustic modem on RS232 port of an Osborne 1, running CP/M.
Later, an IBM 1 and Tandy1000 at 1200 baud.
Plenty of local BBS's.

[SquirrelDip]

1985. 300 baud long-distance dialup to Compuserve, with an accoustic modem on RS232 port of an Osborne 1, running CP/M.
Later, an IBM 1 and Tandy1000 at 1200 baud.
Plenty of local BBS's.

300 baud... That was my first - manual dial too... Nice thing about the 300 baud was that it was a comfortable speed for reading text.

[Faustus]

94 to 95 ish.

You could not get a 'home' link in 94.

Your likely right. It should have been very early 1995 then because I was still using windows 3.1 and thats about the time (Jan 1995) internet america started and they were my ISP back then.

Win '95 was just a twinkle in my eye.

[e404pnf]

My 2004 vote is looking pretty poor in such distinguished company

In 2004 I got 56k pay-as-you-go dial up with Tiscali and about 6 months ago 1MB broadband at home. This was only because NTL had it on offer at £9.99/mo, about what I was paying on phone charges.

I've been very luck though. Since 1996 I've been either studying at or working for Universities with HUGE bandwidth at my disposal. Unless you get caught (or do as I did, become friends with the departmental computer officer) there are no restrictions. All I needed was a ZIP drive to take everything home with me (in the early "pre-UBS keys/CD-RW days" it was the only way)

[offline]

300 baud... That was my first - manual dial too... Nice thing about the 300 baud was that it was a comfortable speed for reading text.

At 40 columns display, 300 baud was a sentence every second. I think you were connecting at async 150 or maybe 175 baud. Unless you were, of course, a fast reader

It should have been very early 1995 then because I was still using windows 3.1 and thats about the time (Jan 1995) internet america started and they were my ISP back then.

Sounds right. Some say they were home users before 1995 which is impossible. The true internet (dissolving of ARPANET) occured April 30, 1995. I wanted to join X.25 (Compuserve et. al.) which was perhaps the biggest pre-internet service, but my parents said no due to the cost.

[SquirrelDip]

@ offline : You may be right on the async 150 - this was 20 years ago...

My first computer (1980?) :


My second computer (1985?) :

[MackemX]

I knew I should have just put 1995 instead of pre 1996 but I wasn't sure when the mainstream internet started

[reboot]

300 baud... That was my first - manual dial too... Nice thing about the 300 baud was that it was a comfortable speed for reading text.

The fun part, was listening on the reciever, and slamming it into the foam cups at just the right second, otherwise you had to hang up and redial.

[offline]

I wonder if they are worth anything? I still have my old acoustic coupler in the shed somewhere - similar to the top pic. Maybe if I write X-BOX 360 on it I can flog it on e-bay for $10,000

[SquirrelDip]

The fun part, was listening on the reciever, and slamming it into the foam cups at just the right second, otherwise you had to hang up and redial.

I had one of them fancy modern ones - it had a switch on it. (never used an acoustic coupler)

[Epicurus8a]

'81 with an Apple II+ and a 300 baud modem. But it wasn't until the 90's that things started to get good, IMO.

[VideoTechMan]

I started with the Internet back in early 95, before I graduated high school....my first ISP I remembered was Prodigy, and had the IBM 286SX PS/2 and connected with a 2400bps modem. I think I remembered something called Promenade too...lol. Mann the memories!

Great topic!

VTM

[Faustus]

Sounds right. Some say they were home users before 1995 which is impossible. The true internet (dissolving of ARPANET) occured April 30, 1995. I wanted to join X.25 (Compuserve et. al.) which was perhaps the biggest pre-internet service, but my parents said no due to the cost.

The odd part is I had a book back in like 1993 that was ABOUT the internet and I could swear it had companies listed in the back that offer slip accounts.

[Shadowmistress]

It would be around Christmas '95 for me. My little brother got a computer and got me addicted to internet gaming. His friend from school "shared" his dialup account for a while before all the versions of Freeweb did the rounds. I didn't get high speed until about summer of '99.

[lordsmurf]

In 1993. That was the year the first modern web browser came out, NCSA Mosaic. I still have a copy. Prior to that, there really was no Internet (or rather WWW) as we understand it today.

Things have really changed over the years. I remember the first browser, first WWW search engine, first streaming video, old IRC, old newsgroups ... even things long forgotten like Archie, Jughead and Veronica (gopher, I believe, which used to have a LOT of good academic documents). Nothing is like it used to be. But that's really not a bad thing.

Prior to that, you were basically a BBS user, part of an academic network, or part of a private network like AOL or CompuServ.

Every now and then I find somebody that started around the same time as I did, and we usually get into some great nostalgic conversations.

Things really were not all that slow back then, as your pages were mostly just text. You were super fancy if you used a picture. It wasn't until the late 90s that dial-up got slow, because people tried to put too much crap on their pages when bandwidth really was not mature enough for that sort of thing, not yet.

In the earliest days, I remember having hand-written lists of IP addresses, as not everybody was using DNS back then.

[Bodyslide]

1997....Dialup on AOHell.......

[Faustus]

In 1993. That was the year the first modern web browser came out, NCSA Mosaic. I still have a copy. Prior to that, there really was no Internet (or rather WWW) as we understand it today.

Sounds right, because the bookin question talked about Gopher and Telnet and Email and even MUDS but I think the only thing about web was tiny and in the back. Wish I still had that book.

[sacajaweeda]

I remember how cool it was to be able to get in a channel and moof all the 9600 baud users on the boards I'd telnet into with my big bad 14.4kbps modem. Sysops just loved me

(just kidding....I only did that a few times)

Anyone here ever run a board?
Galacticomm?
Wildcat?

Which was your favorite client? I was kinda fond of good ol' Telix. None of that fancy schmancy stuff for me.

Any favorite haunts?

The Ivory Tower
Emerald City
Mad BBS

Dang.....this thread is a ride in the way back machine.


ATH

NO CARRIER

[Faustus]

Never ran my own but had alot of experiance customizing Renegade.

[offline]

Sounds right. Some say they were home users before 1995 which is impossible. The true internet (dissolving of ARPANET) occured April 30, 1995. I wanted to join X.25 (Compuserve et. al.) which was perhaps the biggest pre-internet service, but my parents said no due to the cost.

The odd part is I had a book back in like 1993 that was ABOUT the internet and I could swear it had companies listed in the back that offer slip accounts.

Sure, there was BITNET, CSNET and UUCP (which had slipp/shell) which many wrongly refer to as the early internet. In fact the first "ISP" started in 1989 (UUCP) which advertised itself as a "internet" but was smaller than Fidonet and had few of the features of the modern internet and none of the reach via universities world wide.

The fact that UUCP stayed for a very short time as part of the real internet before being quickly replaced with NNTP, does not make it the internet itself imo.

[pchan]

Netscape was still the king of browser when I first have access to internet in 1996. Msoft took a few crakes before IE detrone Netscape.