Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[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.

[larryrup]

I stand corrected.  I must have been confused with the whopping 128KB of RAM.  I do remember the dual 5 1/4" Floppy machines with no hard drive.  Hard drives were over rated!   Lotus and Word Perfect, and Multi-mate all came on floppy.....and you could save your work to the other floppy drive.  Life was sweet.
I must have had the XT....In retrospect, a 10 MB hard drive, considering we were coming from no hard drive, seems rather big.  The year was 1986.  I took a new job in a completely different industry.  I broke by ankle.  I moved my family with the cast still on, and the Mets won the World Series.  Life was sweet.  Not too sweet for tech as things moved along...how did Netscape ultimately go so wrong?  Or Blackberry for that matter.

You too young to have used those acoustic modem things you literally stuck the phone handset into it?  Now we got connection speeds of a gig up and down....at home!  Golly.  The exact term I used when 1st calling my wife with that shoe box cell phone on a walk home from work.

Larry

[wer]

This is a fun question.

For me it was the mid-80s.  Back then, there was no Windows, and there was no Web.

At that time you could dial in (literally dial, using an acoustic coupler modem, the kind where you put the handset in the cradle) to Telenet or TYMNET, and get access to the internet through some host you had access to.  Dow Jones News Retrieval and Compuserve were also portals in those days.

Since there was no web, a lot of the connections between hosts were intermittent, provided by UUCP.  You could access Usenet (remember newsgroups?) and then there were BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) some of which were UUCP enabled and some were not.  FTP sites were the main way to access data, aside from Usenet.

The first web servers didn't come until years later.  In the early days of "the web" things weren't even graphical. You could use programs like Lynx for HTTP access, or there was also Gopher.  IBM used to operate a great Gopher server. HP had one of the first really useful web sites. No marketing crap, all just useful info.

You guys better not get smart about those floppy drives.  I used to have a job aligning those with an oscilloscope.  You didn't throw away a floppy drive then as it cost about $400.

Rod, your coprocessor would have been the 8087, and it would have been paired with the 8086.  The 8088 didn't have a math coprocessor, as I recall.  But your work really splashed out, going for the 360k drives.  Those were the double density ones!

Those were the waning days of CP/M.  I was doing a lot of CP/M programming back then, for 8080 and Z80.  DOS was beginning to achieve popularity.

I remember back then seeing an ad in Byte when someone came out with a 1-Megabyte memory chip, which at that time was a f-ing lot!  A thousand dollars it cost.  A thousand dollars a meg for memory.  You didn't even have 10-baseT networking then, we were all using coax.

By the time Windows 3 came out I was mostly doing Unix admin. Desqview/X came out around the same time, and that seemed cooler to us, because it integrated better with the unix machines.  It was a real pain back then getting Windows to network properly.  There was no built in TCP/IP support, so you would have to load DOS-based networking stacks, either from Novell or KA9Q or later Clarkson.  And by that point there was the twisted pair 10baseT ethernet standard, so networking because easier...

Things were more fun then it seemed. The internet was more like the wild west, and there weren't many idiots on it.  It seemed that everyone on the internet back in those early days had business being there and knew what they were doing for the most part. Now the whole world's on. Amazing.

[jmone]

Ahhh the memories

Early 80's for me was the Sharp MZ700 (Z80a) with Tape Drive & a 4 Colour Plotter built in (only 40chrs wide however).


Mid 80's was an XT clone with with the "Turbo" button so you could drop down from 8 to 4.77mhz else the space invaders would win in a blink of an eye!  Also had an Hi Res Hercules GPU and Amber Screen.   

 

[wer]

I never liked those newfangled amber screens.  Everyone knows green was the proper color. 

They actually used to sell transparent plastic overlays, so that if you were cursed with a black and white monitor, you could put a green or amber plastic sheet over it and magically have a green or amber monitor.

[RoderickGI]

You are probably correct Wer. I updated my post. I do remember the 80286 Turbo board that improved the speed of my PC. Plus that the 10MB disk drive plus the 80286 Turbo board effectively upgraded what was originally an IBM PC to an IBM XT/AT.

My first home computer was more powerful than my work PC! I actually used that PC above at work until 1994, with hard drive, memory and networking updates, mainly for Wordperfect, email (mainframe based, via a VT emulator for some time), and Lotus spreadsheets. We had moved to a Novell network by then. Colleagues were using IBM ATs in a small form factor by then, but my PC worked as well, so it stayed.

I only once ever used an acoustic modem Larryrup, and that was at work. Crazy concept! My home modem was a proper modem, plugged into the phone line.

But as to the actual question the thread posed, I was on the www as soon as it was available at home, in Australia. Which was pretty early on.

[jmone]

You could access Usenet (remember newsgroups?) and then there were BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) some of which were UUCP enabled and some were not.  FTP sites were the main way to access data, aside from Usenet

The first rule of Usenet is: You do not talk about Usenet....

[KingSparta]

My First Computer Was A Commodore Vic-20 It Had 3K Of memory.
I had about 10 Atari Computers Once
Upgraded to A PC, it was 25Mhz (Very Slow)
I use to run A BBS System Called The "Center City BBS" you can still find BBS lists with my BBS listed on it.
my first modem was A Hayes 300 Baud Modem (Very Slow)

My dad was a radio repair and then a Computer repairer back in the '50s and '60s their computers had tubes in it about 5 feet tall. to program it you had to use IBMcards using Binary code. He is now 88 and has Alzheimer's.

I have been using Media Center since Version 6 Of Media Jukebox (A Prior Name Of The Software)

I was more active years ago, and I have slowed down, But I still love music and normally have my headphones on most of the day, I am now retired. I am also a retired military Forward And Aero Observer for the field artillery. also a Disabled Veteran from two wars I served in.

[larryrup]

One more piece of nostalgia.

When all this tech stuff was taking off, I worked building trading floors.  When I started, every thing was hardware based.  All circuit boards, frames and racks.  We did video switching, on  green screens.  Miles and miles of coax.  All the hardware was in a computer room, and just video and keyboard switching at the desk.  Theft of service for the most part did not come into play.  One port one screen.  Then came digital.  To add a server, you had to Tap the ethernet, then a thick yellow cable that snaked around all the racks.  One false tap and the network was kaput!  BTW, those first digital servers gave all services to all people at a trading desk.  Forgot a system to control access.  Oops.  They built them pretty quickly.

Larry

[antenna]

My first personal computer at work was an IBM with one 5¼ inch 360KB floppy disk drive....

For me it was an IMSAI 8080, paper tape reader, 64KB of memory, circa 1976 or so. 

I didn't have persistent storage I could boot from, so each time I booted the system I had to enter a 100-step boot program via the front panel switches, one 8-bit instruction at a time.  That boot program would then read the "monitor" from paper tape and allow me to use the system.

 

[wer]

The question was first time being on the internet, not first time using a computer. 

[KingSparta]

The question was first time being on the internet, not first time using a computer. 

It morphed.

I remember when the internet was just text, someone showed it to me, I did not think it was all that good.

then people made browsers to surf the net.

[antenna]

The question was first time being on the internet, not first time using a computer. 

Define internet. 

I used that IMSAI 8080 with a 300 baud modem to connect to a world-wide network of hosts, though they used X.25 and not TCP/IP.