I've been on the board for twelve and a half. Not sure of when I joined the Admirals' Lounge but I've been there long enough to remember when some of our more legendary, beloved and long-gone posters were still active and we had multiple pages' worth of threads on any given day. Good times.
Sometimes I feel like I've been here forever... time is fluid... but when it comes down to it... I'm just a new member of the community... been here nine years sometime in January... that's almost a fifth of my life...
Back then a dial-up connection meant having an operator connect you to the Interwebs after you deposited a dime in a slot. I kid. But not by much.
First modem (yeah, it was in the days before routers, so sue me!) I had was bigger than a desktop (remember those?) computer... and it had two rubber suction-cups to hold on to the handset of the rotary-dial phones used in the day
And then the dinosaurs came. But they got too big and fat. So they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came, and they bought Mercedes-Benzes!
You were a Flaptain with me in 2001 but you post much faster than I do. I'd estimate you joined the Admirals some time around the middle of 2002. As for age: my first PC was a Commodore PET2001. Discettes were not invented yet - it used audio tapes as storage medium. Nobody dared to dream of a RAM larger than a few kilobyte and we used to program in BASIC. Soon after, we started experimenting with something we called "packet radio": computer signals sent piggyback on HAM radio signals. From that rather primitive first step first the arpanet and finally the internet evolved within a decade. And viruses and spam had not been invented either. Ah! Those were the days! =) Oh, btw, the old PET still runs perfectly
Anyone remember that whole starfish gif thing in the early days of the board? You ever get involved in HAM radio tv, or APARS?