When I first started using the Internet.

[Argus Skyhawk]

I had heard of this internet thing often in the news media in 1994 and 1995, but I did not get to personally interact with it much until December 1996. I came back from college to spend Christmas break with my family, and there my parents introduced me to their shiny new internet connection. The computer had a state-of-the-art Windows 95 operating system and something called "Internet Explorer 3." (I later learned that this put my parents' computer in the minority; most websurfers were using Netscape at that time).

I would double-click the Explorer icon, then type in the username and password, then spend several minutes listening to the 14K dial-up modem make modemy noises. Finally, the browser popped up.

Back then, there was no Amazon, Google, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, or Twitter, but there was Yahoo. I used it to find thousands upon thousands of Star Trek-related websites, 98% of which were hosted by Geocities and had names like "David's Star Trek Home Page" and "Carly's Voyager Website." Each site typically sported white text on a starfield background, and came complete with a counter, a guestbook, some Trek photos (which took several minutes to download), a notice saying that the parts of the site were "Under Construction" (complete with a yellow man-in-a-hardhat logo), a little bit of Star Trek information that anyone surfing the net for Trek sites would already know, and a page of links to similar websites (and startrek.com).

Usenet forums were still widely used at the time, but my generation of internet users missed out on those because we were first introduced to the net through web browsers. Instead, we congregated on web-based message boards like the one at Trekweb. Message boards are still my favorite part of the Web. Some things never change.

Um, I hope you didn't think I was going somewhere important with this. I just felt like reminiscing, that's all.

 

[RoJoHen]

You seem to have had the exact same internet history as me. TrekBBS is pretty much the only thing that has remained constant.

 

[Luckyflux]

Two things for me. One was getting a "Hotmail" account. Hotmail account? What the heck was that? I remember feeling all warm and fuzzy when I registered my first hotmail account. I still use that account to this day.

The second was trying to buy something on ebay. So I bought something off of ebay like 10 years ago, then when I wanted something else I thought that ebay was getting too big to ever find what I wanted without getting over bid. That was 10 years ago. I think ebay has like a 100 million more members now than when it did back then.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

I had heard of the Internet thing around about 1996 mostly. I was aware of movie tie-in websites, wondering what all those wwws and dotcoms meant and how it could possibly fit in with my world view of C:\ prompts and Windows 3.1.whatever. At our local Star Trek club someone even showed me the first picture of the Enterprise E he had downloaded from the Internet, in glorious black and white.

I first met the Internet personally in early 1997 - a friend of my Dad's had his computer hooked up by fax modem to the hospital Intranet. I remember going on ith with that friend's son while visiting their place for dinner. We mostly visited Star Trek fan sites (back in the days of Star Trek Continuum).

Then came University, and the golden age of the Internet. Again, mostly used my surfing times for looking for Star Trek fansites, and occasional game patches. E-mail was via a University-based client, which was functional but effective.

Eventually, come about 1999, I came to a good and fun forum-based website where we could discuss Star Trek and stuff (not this one, however), while I discovered Hotmail, Google, Napster (for a while at least - it never worked for me) and got my news from The Times Online. That was fun.

I eventually acquired access to a very fast network connection to the University from my digs in 2001, and with it my browsing sped up. Videos, music (mostly my beloved mashups) and very fast browsing was right there. I still had my discussion forums of sorts.

It all came to an end after graduation, although I was able to use my laptop's modem to still connect to forums on a dial-up basis, racking up big bills in the process. Once I settled down to my own flat and then house, I switched to the cheaper monthly payment ISPs, then, once more established, home and later mobile broadband. By this time I had long joined TrekBBS, discovered YouTube and Kingdom of Loathing, was able to make purchases online from everything from Amazon to Interflora, from TheTrainLine.com to those medical supplies and equipment places. Most recently I discovered instant messaging, which has been interesting, and later still have been able to create my own forums using free websites, and even discovered how to learn the HTML language to create my own website from scratch.

And so here I am.

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

I first got online around 1995 via my colleges server using my roommates computer. It was a shared server with four different portals so you were competing with the entire school to get on-line. Sometimes you would sit there for half an hour repeatedly logging in to try and get on. The e-mail and newsgroup program was Unix based. Simple white text on an all-black background. I remember figuring out how to download porn from the newsgroups. You had to download it to your computer, switch to a different program and decode it. I even learned how to de-mosaic porn from Japan. I often think if every computer program had something to do with porn I'd be a computer genius by now. In 96 I got my own computer and of course signed up for the month's free of Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL and the evolution began.

 

[tharpdevenport]

I had never heard of the internet until my sister introduced it to me by setting me up an e-mai laccount. That was '94 as I recall. I have never been "hip" or "with it"; even though cellphones had been around since the mid 80's, it was until the late 90's I realized just how common they were. I didn't even have a cellphone until a few years ago (and I currently don't have one). I do, however, still have the same e-mail, but now I have two (one for regular, one for junk).

I had no idea the scope or ability, or knowledge one could attain from it. I didn't even know about internet porn.

Once I started to realize the potential of the internet and how people were using/abusing it, I thought it had so much potential. Over a decade now, I see -- especially in places like TNZ -- it brings out the worst in many people. In fact, there are so many sites with false, purposefully misleading, or inaccurate information, I think the internet has done more harm than good.

Well, today I stand at four frequented website (TrekBBS one of those), many bookmarked sites I visited for updates, two e-mail addresses, about five or six self-created websites (this being the "fresh"est one: tvscores.150m.com), and have met some nice people. The internet lead me to interviews with famous composers in Hollywood (the last was David Shire, and two upcoming ones [taking questions, by the way] with: Jay Chattaway, and Jerrold Immel) and e-mails with directors and producers on films. There's so much welth in knowledge on the web. It's really quite amazing.


Yeah, bakc then it was a slow computer, with huge monitor, and phone modem. No matter how hard I cursed, information lost when an incoming phone call/or receiver picked up cut the line ... it never came back. ;-)
Thank GOODNESS for high speed.

 

[trekkiedane]

It took a while for me to discover the internet, but I did have a lot of fun logging on to strange servers and exchanging jokes and funny little programs back in the late seventies.

Yeah, I was one of those geeks that gathered after school hours to play around with the terminal (which was a teletype thing that was able to store data as holes in ribbons of paper!) which was connected with a computer somewhere else by phone (the modem was the size of a 'desktop' computer as we have them today and connected to the phone with two big rubber suction cup thingies the 'reciever' fit snugly into). I had to take a twenty minute bus ride to get to a school that had a terminal though.

My first PC ran DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 (IIRC) but wasn't hooked up to anything.

But I frequently acted as babysitter for my nephew, and my sister was on THE NET - Best thing ever was the Pathfinder mission:

It took forever to DL these gif's, but DARN it was worth every half hour of it!

I had a big stack of 1.44 floppy's home with me every time and spent many hours actually reading the stuff I had DL'ed at my sisters place afterwards...

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

It took a while for me to discover the internet, but I did have a lot of fun logging on to strange servers and exchanging jokes and funny little programs back in the late seventies.

Yeah, I was one of those geeks that gathered after school hours to play around with the terminal (which was a teletype thing that was able to store data as holes in ribbons of paper!) which was connected with a computer somewhere else by phone (the modem was the size of a 'desktop' computer as we have them today and connected to the phone with two big rubber suction cup thingies the 'reciever' fit snugly into). I had to take a twenty minute bus ride to get to a school that had a terminal though.

My first PC ran DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 (IIRC) but wasn't hooked up to anything.

But I frequently acted as babysitter for my nephew, and my sister was on THE NET - Best thing ever was the Pathfinder mission:

It took forever to DL these gif's, but DARN it was worth every half hour of it!

I had a big stack of 1.44 floppy's home with me every time and spent many hours actually reading the stuff I had DL'ed at my sisters place afterwards...

My elementary school had one computer that was a lot like that. This was around 1980-81. You had to call up a special number on the phone and then when you heard the tone you'd put the receiver down on the huge pad with two big holes for the phone. I think it only connected to a computer down at school district headquarters that had a few educational programs on it. The monitor looked like a big blue plastic box.

 

[jkladis]

My first experience was with Prodigy c.1992 when Ross Perot dropped out of the presidential race. First thing I saw was that headline. Even though I was using Prodigy's interface (no browser per se) I think they did everything over IP, perhaps SLIP.

Otherwise I joined the rest of the world for the AOL boom of '94/95. Found porn by '96, Star Trek by '98. Circle was complete, etc.

 

[trekkiedane]

/.../

My elementary school had one computer that was a lot like that. This was around 1980-81. You had to call up a special number on the phone and then when you heard the tone you'd put the receiver down on the huge pad with two big holes for the phone. I think it only connected to a computer down at school district headquarters that had a few educational programs on it. The monitor looked like a big blue plastic box.

Monitor -WOW that was state-of-the-art tech!

Ours was a BIIIG noisy machine that printed the characters on a roll of paper

 

[K'Ehleyr]

When I first joined I had an AOL account and when I logged on I would get a lovely voice telling me 'you've got mail'. I used to get so excited.
Then I realised that AOL was just a little village and it was hard to escape...
Still miss that voice thou ~ and getting mail

 

[tehfunz0rz]

A lot of these stories resonate with me.

The first time I'd heard of the Internet was in early 1995, when our family bought our first computer, a boxy beige Dell with Windows 3.1 installed, complete with 14K dial-up modem. However, it would not be until 1999 that I browsed the web at our local library, since we never bothered to use the built-in dial-up modem. At the time, we thought ourselves lucky, imagining the Internet as a vast network of viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and certain death if one were to log on. Although now I realize it was more an effort to console ourselves for being cheap, we really had this simplified image of the Web in our minds.

 

[Mallory]

Compuserve with a 300 baud acoustic coupler back in 1981.

 

[Philo]

I remember very clearly that the first thing I ever did, upon first encountering the internet (or www, to be precise) back around 1993-4, was to type the words "Star Trek" into a search engine.

That was the beginning of a new world.

 

[FrontLine]

Otherwise I joined the rest of the world for the AOL boom of '94/95. Found porn by '96, Star Trek by '98. Circle was complete, etc.

Indeed, we were the pioneers.

My first exposure to the Net and Web (I do remember that they are 2 different things) was in 93. I was working in Network Ops for IBM and we had just got some brand new PS/2s running OS/2 V3 in conjunction to putting IP over the network along side the SNA. Anyways we had a wall sized poster of all the sites on the net and we started visiting. Then eventually over the next couple of years came Yahoo. Then we discovered our first porn site (Persian Kitty) and the news groups. It was all down hill from there.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I was on BBSes and CompuServe from junior high, all through highschool and college, and even a few years after that. I didn't start using the Net proper, until about '96.

 

[Philo]

My first exposure to the Net and Web (I do remember that they are 2 different things) was in 93. I was working in Network Ops for IBM and we had just got some brand new PS/2s running OS/2 V3 in conjunction to putting IP over the network along side the SNA. Anyways we had a wall sized poster of all the sites on the net and we started visiting. Then eventually over the next couple of years came Yahoo. Then we discovered our first porn site (Persian Kitty) and the news groups. It was all down hill from there.

Holy shit, Persian Kitty! I had totally forgotten about that! Let's all keep in mind that I was under 13 at the time as well. That was a whole new world opened up too.

 

[Agent Richard07]

When I first joined I had an AOL account and when I logged on I would get a lovely voice telling me 'you've got mail'. I used to get so excited.
Then I realised that AOL was just a little village and it was hard to escape...
Still miss that voice thou ~ and getting mail

I use that as my email sound.

 

[trekkiedane]

Mine says: "You've got male"!

 

[K'Ehleyr]

When I first joined I had an AOL account and when I logged on I would get a lovely voice telling me 'you've got mail'. I used to get so excited.
Then I realised that AOL was just a little village and it was hard to escape...
Still miss that voice thou ~ and getting mail

I use that as my email sound.

Oh oh how can I do that

Mine says: "You've got male"!

Or that