Do you remember your first time when you went online?

I?ve tried to trace back the story the other day, well all I could draw out of my memory was handling the basics of IE way back in 95-97 when studying at college.

The IPs were terrible numbers separated with dots way back then. Some addresses were rather messy multilevel swearing not those nice and easy www.bbc.co.uk or www.sr.se or www.ru.

Ooh? Things have changed.

In 95-97 I was definitely using 'English' domain names rather than dotted IP addresses....

First time out would have been in the early to mid 1980s, Bulletin Boards, Prestel, etc.

First Internet exposure would have been mid-1980s onwards vis the WELL in the US - the USENET newsgroups. Probably something very geeky!

Joe

Thank you JP,

well I also was already using those full domain names then, but there were some really weird ones aside. Scary and fantastic, looks like as taken from some dodgy sci-fi.

But generally I refer here to Internet of its present state and appearance, not those artefacts you have mentioned.

And there was something called, excuse my language ;), FIDOnet, that I was fortunate enough to witness. Pictures made from computer symbols are the most impressive thing to stay in mind since then.

FIDONet is still going strong if you can find a local node. :)

ASCII art is also still around if you fancy seeing some more of those pictures.

My first experience of the internet was in 1996 on a home PC, but at the same time at school in 1996.

My first experience was probably at my brother's flat back when he was a student up in Sunderland about 12 years ago.

Then I started going to this Internet cafe in Town, think it was on one of those side roads off West St.

Originally posted by HxTim
FIDONet is still going strong if you can find a local node. :)

ASCII art is also still around if you fancy seeing some more of those pictures.


Thanks,
good to hear fido is still doing well. Though it makes me curious what moves people who are into it at thie time of big things...
And yes -- it's called ASCII art...

RPG, please correct me, I left the 'm' letter in the word 'remember' it the header.:huh:

Ta.

Fidonet echoes and FrontDoor BBS setups were my first exposure to computer networking in about 89, 90 I think. I doubt I was even dimly aware of the internet. People would have a computer connected to 1,2,or sometimes 3 telephone lines, and then run BBS software that would allow people to phone in, upload and download stuff, and send echoes.

Each node would then cascade new echoes onto the next and the whole FIDONET bbs would gradually be refreshed.

Downloading was done using a theorhetical max downspeed of 9600 baud, but typically, using zmodem protocols, was more like 2400-3500 (from home at any rate)

By 92, I was at college and dutifully typing the following into the NCSA telnet client

pad to>bham.acsis

via janet - and they were kind enough to let you use their Gopher service to access a mine of pre-web information.

Found gopher to be a real treasure, especially after people started archiving usenet to gopher, made searching usenet a snap.

anyone ever get *any*results from ARCHIE?

Also started using Surfers MUD (chat not Dungeon) in about 93 - IIRC it was telnet> open src.ic.ac.uk:7777 where (amongst many other talkers based on Simon Marsh's Ew Too server) we coined the word SPAM to mean unsolicited waste of bandwidth. (or at leats I like to think so :) )


Then NCSA mosaic came along and we were all flabbergasted by hyperlinking, instead of having to come all the way back up the gopher tree to go somewhere else.

By 94/95 the web was in full swing and we were making hypertext documents in 314. English and Computing and people were laughing at us for suggesting that websites would be advertised on TV.

Phanerothyme, have looked at your 'wireless camera' thread and the page itself. You've gone such a long way from echoes.

:thumbsup: to you and your enterprise!

1993 was my first time. I went to this crappy page which was blue with plain text all over it, something to do with meatloaf, it was rubbish! - 14k

In 1994 i got my first download... a picture of Jennifer aniston. -28k

In 1996 i was playing duke nukem 3d on wireplay.. they were the days! - 56k

97 - command an conquer! -still 56k

99 - 2001 web design. - still 56k

Then came cable and adsl! ahhhh!!!

My first experience was with Demon Internet in about 95 with their stupid all in one WWW, Email, Telnet etc package Turnpike, it really was rubbish! I even bough a kind of yellow pages for the Internet as I didn't know how else I would find anything. Still got that book and it makes me laugh every time I see it, at how daft an idea it was!

Originally posted by Vovakr
Thank you JP,

well I also was already using those full domain names then, but there were some really weird ones aside. Scary and fantastic, looks like as taken from some dodgy sci-fi.

But generally I refer here to Internet of its present state and appearance, not those artefacts you have mentioned.

And there was something called, excuse my language ;), FIDOnet, that I was fortunate enough to witness. Pictures made from computer symbols are the most impressive thing to stay in mind since then.

Oh I remember the e-mail addresses where you had to supply the routing with lots of ! symbols. Not nice!

I suppose my first contact with the Internet, if you mean TCP/IP linked networks, would be via The Well or via a dial in gateway offered by Imperial College London in the late 1980s. It was all command line stuff - when connecting via the IC gateway or The Well I dialled in and used terminal software to talk to the Internet based machines over teh phone line. I also used the USENET gateway offered by CIX.

I wasn't running a TCP/IP stack locally - that came in the early 1990s when I ran a DOS based stack with various DOS programs providing access to e-mail, gopher, telnet, etc. This was over a dialup connection supplied by Demon.

Then when the Web started I got a command line, text only browser called Lynx, and by 1995, I think, I was running Mosaic over Trumpet Winsock under Windows 3.1. I used Pegasus e-mail, with some Windows versions of WAIS, Gopher, etc.

I avoided the WWW for quite a while - wasn't too keen on it at first but kept an eye on it. The days when you could visit most web sites on the Internet in a weekend didn't last long....:-)

Joe

you all sound like proper pro's

what about signing up somehow with freeserve or someone
not once, but maybe half a dozen times, and every time forgetting some logon details.
what were all these modem settings you need as well?

still don't know where i am.

nothing as amazingly nerdish as some :lol:

tried supanet, got huge phone bill, switched to AOL then got telewest broadband and realised what a crock of %&#@ AOL was after I'd left them

Originally posted by JoePritchard
... over Trumpet Winsock under Windows 3.1. ...

Joe

GAH! I had completely forgotten about that.

Now those awful recurring nightmares will be back.

<bangs head against desk>

And yet we are still in the stone age of computers - and tinternet - where will they take us?

Originally posted by mikosavi
you all sound like proper pro's

what about signing up somehow with freeserve or someone
not once, but maybe half a dozen times, and every time forgetting some logon details.
what were all these modem settings you need as well?

still don't know where i am.

Done that a few times....I belong to so many online forums where I've forgotten my login name that it's ridiculous.

And I also had this annoying habit of creating dial up accounts, setting them up to automatically enter the password and then....not write the password down anywhere. This was fine until I needed to re-install stuff on a new PC....

Ho hum....:-)