Interwebs 💻 How long have you been on line

[giff57]

Since we all seem to be geeky computer types...how long have you been doing this kind of thing.

 

[NHPlanner]

Online since 1991

Yep...Lynx, VAX VMS for e-mail...I remember those days....actually...I vaguely remember those days since I was occasionally in an inebrieated state, walking into the 24 hour computer labs after hitting the bars at good ol' BSU....

 

[el Guapo]

Set the wayback machine for 1980!

Computers I have owned (and loved):

HP 82
Altair
Heathkit
TRS 80
Timex Sinclair
Commadore 64
Amstrad - with CPM II & Logo
8088
386dx66 with 8megs of Ram - I was a GOD for about 6 months.
486
Pentium 1
Pentium 2
Pentium 3

I orginally though the internet was BS and was over hyped. I went online in 1992 at the Univerity using Unix and Lynx.

What could possilby replace a text base unix driven BBS at 1200 baud?

 

[Tranplanner]

I jumped from a TI 94 to a Mac Plus when I first went on-line. I had 1MB of RAM and a 20MB external hard drive with a 2400 baud modem...used it to play games from a local BBS. I wasn't a computer geek so I didn't get into programming or anything. In university I used ftp and gopher sites for research, and actually upgraded to a 14.4k modem (with an addtional 1MB RAM installed on the Plus)...can you say "screaming fast"?

Although I've been "on-line" for the better part of 10 years, I didn't really start surfing until about 5 years ago...when I finally got a job with internet access

 

[Dan]

Old school, baby. BITNET since 1987, Internet since 1990, with only a three month gap when I wasn't online. I remember "Gopher crawling," Usenet before spam, text-based MUDs, and quality late '80s porn on the alt.binaries groups. I never spent that much time with IRC, although I played with BITNET chat in the late '80s. Yup, more than once I stumbled into the 24 hour lab drunk, fixated on the VT220 because I couldn't sleep otherwise.

First computer was an Atari 400. I graduated to an Atari 1040ST (UniTerm -- best terminal emulation program ever!), then an Apple Power Macintosh 5200, and finally homemade Intel boxen. My second computer, which I still have to network to schadenfreude (the 1200 MHz AMD WinXP box in the Lian Li case), is zeitgeist - a NeXTStation Turbo Color box, circa 1992, all original. I'd love to add an old Amiga to the museum, but the next computer that will grace my household will probably either be a surplused out old Intel box running Linux, or a G4 Mac running OS X.

Cyburbia got its start on a hacked-open 25 MHz Sun Sparcstation 1.

 

[Catrin]

I went on line around 1992 with Unix and Lynx. There are some things that I miss. University extensions were predominant and easy to find. I learned how to grow nearly everything in my garden that year. The first retail that I remember finding on the www was Celestial Seasons out of Boulder....go Mo!

 

[mike gurnee]

I knew some people who studied Fortran in college, but they all had slide rules on their belts, had pocket protecters, and called themselves 'triangles'. I played a couple of games of Pong in 1983...not only did I lose, but the machine was not grounded and I got a shock each time I touched the controls. I got an office PC in 1994, and learned how to turn it on about 6 months later. A good friend and co-worker intorduced me to minesweeper, which I got to under 130 seconds (Kathy, where are you now?)

 

[Chet]

This will put a date stamp on me

My first PC ran on CPM-80 (not DOS!). It didnt have a hard drive. It had two 5 1/4" floppies. You had to insert the operating system disk in one drive and your program disk in the other, then swap out the program disk with a data disk to save. OK, punch cards it ain't, but wow, we've come a long way since the days of cuffed draw string pants and flipped up shirt collars....

 

[Cardinal]

I was first introduced to an Apple IIe in 1985. It took eight years to get online - 1993. I still have my slide rulers, waiting for the lights to go dark....

 

[Tranplanner]

I'm shocked that no one here is claiming to have invented the internet. Guess Al Gore isn't a registered user at Cyburbia.

 

[Cardinal]

Not the Internet itself, but I did invent the "."

 

[Dharmster]

Online

I've had a e-mail account from since I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Maryland in 1990. I've used the WWW sometime in 1993. Did my first webpage while in graduate school in 1996.

 

[el Guapo]

The internet wayback machine.

For those people that like ehistory.

http://www.archive.org/index.html

Enjoy

 

[NHPlanner]

Re: The internet wayback machine.

El Guapo wrote:
For those people that like ehistory.

http://www.archive.org/index.html

Enjoy

I love that site....not only for nostalgia purposes...but it helped me update our website after we changed service providers and the old website info wasn't retained.

I especially like looking at the evolution of some of the major websites...we've come a long way in design since the early 90's.