Your very first internet experience....

[Slingblade61]

I am a huge gadget guy.
The computer , to me, is the ultimate gadget.
I remember very well reading the sunday circulars showcasing personal computers I could not afford....early to mid 90's I think.

My sister gave me my very first computer. I was an apple classic II. Pre internet, floppy disk drive and a 7 (ish) inch b&w screen.....the hours of bliss, playing battle zone are cherished memories.

My next comp was a handmedown as well....4mb hard drive, internet capable, apple thingy.

4mb.....damn, I was able to figure out a way to upgrade it to 10mb.
Then I went online. What a disappointing experience....slower than whale shit.
I had a compuserve account and could only manage chat rooms at the time, of course back then there wasn't much else.

Compuserve had these different chat rooms and I got hooked on trivia....I knew the answers but my connection was so slow and my typing skills were such that I could never win in the time allotted.

Then, one day, I was able to afford (lie to the wife is more accurate I suppose) my own PC.........what bliss.

I am a WW2 history junkie and I love games....very soon after I got the new comp, I spotted Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator.....more bliss.

I played the game offline for about 2 weeks, never realizing there was an online community trying to kill each other in the virtual skies. When I figured it out.....It was a feeling I will never forget.....dozens of other real people flying combat.....what a rush it was!

I talked about the experience to anyone who would listen. It blew my mind.
Not long after, I joined my first 'clan', Combat Flight Simulator Group a site that I assist in maintaining to this day.

Eventually, I moved on to other things and here I am today, what's your story?

 

[VtDivot]

First internet experience for me was with Gopher in 1993.

As far as computers go, I've been around pretty much everything from late 80's (Apple IIe, Tandy, C64) to early 8086 machines with a 10 clock speed and little to know memory to speak of, to the multi million dollar production servers I deal with at present... I currently have 2 home PC's and 2 work PC's and admin our development rack which houses about a dozen machines. I'd be lost without a PC and especially the internet now, our whole industry depends on it.

I owe my livelyhood to the internet, as I am a software engineer that works on a development team that writes electronic online hospital practice management software.

Funny until 6 years ago I was a schoolteacher living in NS. I decided one day to just take a leave of absence and take a chance hoping I'd get enough education to find a job. It was a tough decision and a risky one, but it has payed off.

 

[ezra76]

I got a hand-me-down laptop my uncle gave me. It was a Pentium 1, 133. I had Earthlink dial up. I checked out ESPN.com, Ebay and then straight for the "free porn". :laugh:

 

[TheWOAT]

high school 1995.. checking out nba.com. they had video of past dunk contests.

A year later, a freind of mine got his hands (stolen) on some Mac SEs, and I bought it off him for 50 bucks. I used that to type papers, and evetually to retreive data from "bad" floppy disks. Overall that computer sucked, but brickles was cool from time to time.

In 1999, I purchased a Mac Blue N white tower and started to spend way too much time on the internet. I had it fully customized, and down to about a crash every 2 months. Installing OS X (beta) two years later was cool and after that I think it crashed 1 time in the next 3 years.

In 05, I pieced together a PC, and now I dont like computers as much. My next computer purchase WILL be a Mac for sure. Over the years Ive belonged mostly to this one hiphop message board, and now this one. Its funny how I trust whats written on message boards more than on a newspaper. I had to figure out how to get my girlfreind into this country and did so using a visa messageboard. Ive also wasted way too much time on the net, to the detriment of my grades. I probably should have spent more time off the computer and into my schooling.

 

[wirehair]

Early 80's I had what was one of the 1st PC's. 300 baud modem connected to BBS systems. Later they starte hooking some of the Fido BBS's together to form Fidonet. It was very underground with "secret" phone numbers. I bet those other guys are all bazillionaires now.

First real internet was about '93 when I got a copy of Mosiac and a CompuServ account. My first website went up in about '96.

VT - I went the completely different direction. I was a CPA & consultant putting accounting systems together. I'm now a teacher.

 

[VtDivot]

VT - I went the completely different direction. I was a CPA & consultant putting accounting systems together. I'm now a teacher.

and you can afford tour camerons because you have a rich uncle willy who loves you

 

[Sandy]

Any Brits on here over 30 years of age will probably remember these two with a lot of affection!

Ah, the joys of writing tiny programs in BASIC, and spending 15 minutes trying to load games onto them via a cassette recorder only to find they crash the minute the tape finishes!

 

[Bravo]

My first connection with a desktop computer was when I was employed by IBM and they introduced the IBM PC. I recall the day vividly. They showed the floppy disk and the system could be equipped with a 10MB hard drive. I think it was 1981.

IBM 5150 Personal Computer

Remember Visicalc? The first electronic spreadsheet? I started to play with that some but couldn't find much practicality in it other than trying to balance your checkbook.

The first portable PC I remember was the Osborne. Much less elegant than the one Sandy showed in his photo. It used the CPM operating system.

Osborne 1 computer

I got into the Internet in 1994 when I bought my first home PC. My brother was on Compuserve and I proudly researched and signed up with AOL. My next door neighbor was an attorney and home PC buff and he helped me along...

I an not a techy despite the fact that I have worked for IT firms my entire career. I know just enough about the technical side to talk about it with business prospects. I can do simple hardware upgrades and that is about it.

Those of you (such as VTDivot) who have made the move into software development are very wise. We pay our guys $90,000 per year and they are worth every penny. Two of them started with us while they were in college at the University of California - Heyward. We helped pay their last two years of school while they worked for us 30 hours per week. Then we hired them full time when they graduated. Their U of California System educations are superb and the code they write is high quality and functions well... One of them had been a dogcatcher for a local PD, before going back to college.

 

[ualtim]

1982 - Commodore 64. No internet, but BASIC programming. word processing, and gaming.

1988 - AT&T 286 1200 baud modem. Linked into what is now known as the internet and e-mail without even realising it. My link was through the college I was attending's VAX VMS main frame system.

1994 - AST Pentium. Prodigy On line service. After about six months of learning about the online world through Prodigy I ended up on a local ISP and my life has gone down hill since.:laugh:

Since the AST, I have own a few more desk tops and a couple of lap tops tranistioning from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98, to Windows ME, to Windows XP, and now working with Vista. I probably spend more hours on the internet per day than anything else that I do (can not work with out the internet, the majority of my work relies on internet based or internet fead applications.) Its gotten to the point where I look forward to having a few hours a day away from the internet.:laugh:

 

[EnglishGolfer]

All lifted from Wiki:

The Acorn Atom was a home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd from 1980 to 1981 when it was replaced by the BBC Micro (originally Proton) and later the Acorn Electron.
The Atom was a progression of the MOS Technology 6502 based machines that the company had been making from 1979. The Atom was a cut-down Acorn System 3 without a disk drive but with an integral keyboard and cassette tape interface, sold in either kit or complete form. In 1980 it was priced between £120 in kit form, £170 ready assembled, to over £200 for the fully expanded version with 12 KB of RAM and the floating point extension ROM.
The minimum Atom had 2 KB of RAM and 8 KB of ROM, with a fully loaded machine having 12 KB of each. An additional floating point ROM was also available. The 12 KB of RAM was divided between 5 KB available for programs, 1 KB for the page zero and 6 KB for the high resolution graphics. The page zero memory (a.k.a. zero page memory) was used by the CPU for stack storage, by the OS, and by the Atom BASIC for variable storage of the 27 variables. If high resolution graphics were not required then 5 1/2 KB of the upper memory could be used for program storage.
It had a MC6847 VDG video chip (Video Display Generator), allowing for text or two-colour graphics modes. It could be connected to a TV or modified to output to a video monitor. Basic video memory was 1 KB but could be expanded to 6 KB. A PAL colour card was also available. Six video modes were available, with resolutions from 64×64 in 4 colours, up to 256×192 in monochrome. At the time 256×192 was considered to be high resolution.
It had built-in BASIC (Atom BASIC), a fast but idiosyncratic version, which included indirection operators (similar to PEEK and POKE) for bytes and words (4 bytes). Assembly code could be included within a BASIC program, because the BASIC interpreter also contained an Assembler for the 6502 assembly language which assembled the inline code during program execution and then executed it. This was a very unusual, but also very useful, function.



No wonder I binned it and didn't touch a computer from the age of 9 until 18. I still don't know anything about them but I can type pretty quickly according to my typist wife.

 

[Sean]

Wow. My first internet experience was actually pre-internet.

My buddy had a fat-ass IBM (for the times it was a MONSTER personal computer) and we split the cost of a Compuserve account neither of us could afford, something like $40 for the service and a few cents per minute. The real kicker was that everything went out as a phone call, you dialed other computers and connected to BBS'.

Spent most of our time waiting for grainy porno to download, one pixel line at a time. Could that be a nipple? Wait five more minutes to be sure!

Then we found out we could sneak in to the UMass-Amherst library and computer labs and log those computers on. We'd sneak to the furthest back lab, pull the shades, lock the door and game with our friends on entirely text-based games called MUDs... Styx and Tsunami being our favorites. Spent a LOT of hours (A LOT of hours) in those labs killing Swedes)

Then I got an AOL account and started downloading porn at dial-up and then movies at broadband. Still do, too.

I'm a cigar lover so I joined at cigaraficionado online and we all moved to Habanocigarforum.com later on. Still my home site for all intents and purposes. Met MANY folks from tha tboard and have broadened my horizons because of it. Really amazing this internet!

 

[goatster]

my first exp. with computers was in highschool when i took comp. programing basic.we worked on Commador 64`s.i think they had 1 Tandy for the advanced class.

i first internet exp. was about 10-12 yrs ago when my grandfather bought a comp so i could balance his check book as he was getting paranoid that people were stealing his money.i got it hooked up to the net and played alot of spades and chess online.

 

[JEFF4i]

My first computer was some old HP that I got when I was a wee laddy. My first internet experience was checking out baseball stuff under 2 hours with the free AOL.

 

[warbirdlover]

I got involved in computers when working for Rockwell International in Asheville, NC in 1983. It was a brand new state-of-the-art factory just built with all the latest "Japanese type" technology which meant computers. I just got sucked into them and even though I was a metalurgist I was in charge of backing up the whole companies computer system every night (second shift). I had a huge "basic" metallurgy program that I put into the system after converting about 80 pages of basic language into fortran. I knew neither when I started but both when I was done! Then I moved back up north and computers had taken over up here by then. I was doing my "metallurgy" thing in mfg engineering and had to learn CadCam and AutoCad. Designed hobbing fixtures and tooling and programmed CNC machines. Of course the internet came in and back then there was little "security". This gorgeous young babe and I would surf the porn sites together every lunch hour. I won't get into that but I was in a constant state of "readiness". I also never cheated with her so I can have a clear conscience but wow the fantasies that went through my mind. Then I wized up and didn't surf that crap anymore. Much. As Sling said I got into flight simulation and started designing and animating those on my computer (which of course I now had) and met Sling at Sim-Outhouse - Combat Flight Center - Sim-Outhouse. I've designed many freeware planes for combat flight simulator and flight simulator and now get my mad money for golf hoing from selling those planes.

 

[VoteWhitey4Prez]

First computer was an old 75 MHz Mac, connecting to the internet with 56k. It was glorious.