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First time on the Internet...

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antenna:

A fun topic...

When was the first time for you?  When was the first time you connected to the Internet?  Was it fun?  :)

For me it was IBM's OS/2 operating system.   It made it super easy (i.e., a few mouse clicks) to create a account and log on to The Internet.  I'm thinking circa mid 1990's....

One of the things that amazed me at the time was how I could go from one entity (website) to another just by clicking on this thing called a "link."

Once I realized what was happening, one of the first places I visited was the Louvre in France.

I remember describing to my manager (VP, Software Technology) what I was experiencing on this newfangled thing.

Keep in mind, at this point I had been using global email for nearly twenty years, i.e., since the 70's.

But, at the time,  this concept of clicking from site to site was amazing to me.

Fun stuff.  :)

JimH:
More or less the same here.  Late in 1993.  The best site was one for paintings from the Louvre, but it belonged to an individual.  It was incredibly slow.

At the time, JRiver provided a TCP/IP stack for Windows, using the Clarkson Packet Drivers.  Microsoft didn't offer TCP/IP.  Marc Andreessen was still a college student working with a group of people who were writing Mosaic, an early browser.  It was later used to form Netscape.

Network cards cost more than $200.  A Token Ring (IBM) was $600.  No personal computers came with network interfaces.

antenna:
> No personal computers came with network interfaces.

Yup.

They came with modems.

I had a second phone line in my house because I was using modems since the late 1970's to go online (a whopping 300bps at that time).  To the point that, until I got the second phone line, my friends were giving me grief about the busy signal.

In the mid-90's I was doing development mostly at the application layer of the 7-layer model.  Earlier, in the 80's, I spent more time in the networking-oriented layers (but X.25, not TCP/IP).

Fun stuff.  :)

larryrup:
Just saw this....very humorous.

1st business PC  on my desk:  IBM (of course) with a hard drive!  Guess how big?.  I'm pretty certain 10k, that's with a "k"  lol.  That's a hard drive, not memory.

I used to have to travel with the portable Compaq.  Some might remember...5 inch green screen.  Who the heck deemed this portable?  Weighed a ton, and you could not check it with baggage.  I also remember the first cell phone I brought home.  Right out of Maxwell Smart's Shoe phone era.  All the field engineer's were emailing on the Unix servers....text only of course.  Then there was Windows 2.1,   The only apps were solitaire and a phonebook (your own) and a calendar.  I did say it will NEVER catch on. I also played with the new beta NeXT computer.  (Pop quiz....who was behind NeXT?) This person was delivering the then unreleased machines to many trading floors on Wall St. for them to kick the tires and spread the word.  Keeping with my uncanny ability to pick tech trends, this computer was really going to be the next big thing!

 If you need a visionary, I'm not your man.

Larry

RoderickGI:
My first personal computer at work was an IBM with one 5¼ inch 360KB floppy disk drive. That would have been in 1986 I think, as it was a hand-me-down from corporate somewhere. They didn't know what to do with it, so they gave it to the young guy. It was upgraded with a second 360KB drive to make it a bit more useful. I was creating Lotus 123 V1.0 spreadsheets. Then I got the big upgrade, replacing one of the floppy drives with a 10MB hard drive. Larryrup, I don't think there was ever a 10KB hard drive. It would have been the same 10MB drive I had.

I think it was an 8086 processor with an 8087 coprocessor. Later updated with an 80286 turbo board, to give me more processing power. Going from memory and with a correction from Wer.

I think that PC was standalone initially, but I was using it for international email on the corporate network by 1987.

I bought my first personal computer for home in the first half of 1987. An 80286 processor, later upgraded to an 80386? I don't recall exactly. Initially that was used via modem to access Bulletin Boards.

I can't remember exactly when I converted to "The Internet", but it was still via a dialup modem to a service provider, which connected to the internet. I guess it would have been very early 1990's. Maybe before that the service provider gave me access to Bulletin Boards via ARPANET. I certainly played with that a bit, before the WWW existed. I certainly took up Netscape as soon as it was available, in 1994.

The world was a different place back then.

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