Your first internet connection experiences.

Post Reply New Topic

Sticking this in the games and video games section to be safe and because it was my initial reason to use the internet but if a mod feels it should be in some other section feel free to move it. i almost posted it to random but was worried,

can you remember any details? What about your first isp, internet capable computer, speed of modem, the kind of things you used the internet for back when it was a new thing?


It all started off with gaming for me. i got my pc for offline pc gaming and the internet capability was incidental.

i started in 1997. I was 17 and up till then i had used consoles/ early computers like spectrums, commodores, atari 2600, the original game boy, nintendo nes, mega drive, which i quickly sold to get for the snes and the beautiful games of street fight 2, zelda: a link to the past, mario 4, mario kart. Then finally after years of wanting one and reading magazines about them, i got it not long after i left school and had my first job.

i had a pentium 266 i think the numbers were. It was like 16 years ago, my memory is fuzzy on the exact details. I bought the game carmageddon before i ever had the computer to encourage me to save the money to buy it. Cost something like £650 .

The connection was the slowest thing. I had a 56k modem and the isp i had was lineone. it cost 15 quid a month and that was before you paid for the phone costs. Just to be online you had to pay the £15 a month and that was before phone costs. it made early internet use an expensive addiction. Not to mention tying up the phone line.

i would play quake 2 online sometimes, it took ages to download the crappest maps, and then you'd connect and play online in this total lagfest that seemed amazing at the time because you were fighting REAL PEOPLE. But honestly it was really crap and frustrating and you'd give up after a bit.

I remember buying cds from cd.now. i have a sticker on something i own, i see it ever now and then so i remember what it was called.

The other thing i used it for besides browsing, was internet relay chat programs.

I used some program called comic chat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat . It was one of the first ever programs i used to interact with other people. I never used the comic chat, switched it off straight away and used the program as a normal irc program.

when i first found comic chat i couldnt even believe i was talking to real people. I was asking people to prove they were real people by talking. It seemed like the most amazing thing at the time. At that time id never used a forum, or connected with any real person online i dont think, and had no one i knew with so much as an email account, so irc was something that was so amazing you would be shouting people into your room to show it.

People would sit up for hours and chat s**t. Everyone was totally addicted to it if they used it. You'd be telling the people in your house that you were talking from somewhere really far away, like America or wherever and everyone would be amazed.

I ended up moving to this if anyone remembers it. Perch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIRCH

then onto mirc later.

and also, i remember using ICQ which was awesome because u saw the persons chat window and could see as they typed/ deleted words and it made u feel really connected to the person.

cant remember anything else. Im sure there are interesting words and programs ive completely forgotten about that people will be nice enough to remind me of.


Nice, got a 52 warrior on defias brotherhood realm, sat him at a neutral quest hub and been attacked like 5 times as ive been typing this. Killed every one of my same level attackers . Go me.

I went to high school in the late 1990's. My school got internet connections for library computers and trained students in how to use web browsers.
Soon, I was learning to bypass the word filters to look at porn. I also downloaded game demos and hid them on various school computers. Once we had a Doom LAN match in the electronics workshop.

A huge, HUGE part of my life was spent making memories on online games as well as offline ones. The story of this is far too long for me to want to go into detail right now, but virtual worlds have been a huge part of my life, not that I've had a super long life yet or anything.

The sound of a thousand tormented souls, AOL dial-up...

Mine was about 1986 or 1987.

The ISP, BIX, was in Boston and I was in Houston. I would connect by dialing into a local British Telecom number in Houston and connected to BIX over their packet network. The connection itself cost a couple of dollars or so per hour. From BIX's computers, you could use telnet or ftp or gopher to connect to and explore other computers on the Internet.

I dialed in from a PDP-11/34 computer with the RSTS/E operating system. I wrote my own terminal program that I used for the connection in assembly language. The terminal program was kind of interesting in that I wrote it as what was called a "Run Time System". Under RSTS/E, a Run Time System provided the interface to allow programs to run. To start the program running, you would run $TERM which was nothing but an empty file with an attribute set that would identify the terminal Run Time System needed to execute the program whenever it was invoked. When you ran $TERM, the operating system would start the terminal program operating system. So the $TERM program either set or tied the all-time record for the smallest useful program ever written. After all, you can't write a program with a negative size.

My second connection was at a company where I worked. The connection went through a major oil company that had an amazing one megabit per second internet connection that cost them about $10,000 per month.

When I was a teenager back in 1994 or so, I would use AOL and it's chat-rooms sometimes on my friend's new Macintosh. I remember they had one chat-room for Star Trek fans which was kinda fun. It seemed like almost nobody used the internet back then at least that I personally knew.

It would have been around 2002 and I had a Lineone pay-by-minute dial-up package and a 56K modem.
Broadband hadn't been invented yet, and the internet was just generally a lot more streamlined because of that.

1988, Military use. It was a backup redundancy for digital radio. We got into a couple conversations with civilians but was not impressed. All that trouble and effort to see a sentence of text appear on a monitor seemed pointless when we could send large text files via radio instantly.

No internet again till 96 i think? 14k then 28k then 56,k then DSL then cable then fiber. What's next? For the average home user I cant see where anymore speed is really necessary. My games play hiccup free, my movies and tv streams instantly, I dont know what more speed would do.

something like:

"NEEEEYAHHHHH BING BING HISSSSSSSSS"

(dial-up)

Mid 90s on my Amiga 1200 which I still have, the first modem I had was 14k and the first connection I tried was to a bulletin board number which didnt connect but then the fellas Mum called back my number on the telephone to ask why I had called her number and sent a funny noise to her ear.
After that I signed up with Demon as they seemed to be the only ISP that would support Amiga, (or so I was told).

I remember my mom use to have AOL. The first I used, was Roadrunner sometime in the 2000's.

I tried browsing the internet for the first time in december 1997, at the age of 9. My dad had installed a dial-up modem in 1996. After he bought a cable modem in 2002, I played 4x4 Evolution on the internet a lot (this game allowed both PC, MAC and Dreamcast gamers to play against each other), but apart from that, I've never been that fond of multiplayer gaming on the internet.

It was AOL for me. I dont remember what year it was but it was the early days of the Net.... this was long before cable modems and such. Everything was 56k, with the honking and squealing noises when logging in and everything.

And AOL itself..... ahhh, it was crappy alot of the time, but there's some definite nostalgia there. Didnt have a gazillion different browsers or "always on" internet.... AOL was an entire seperate program, and you had to be in it to be on the Net at all, and it ran only it's own dedicated browser from inside. It had alot of side functions too, and lots of stuff to download in various categories. If you closed the program, which you generally did if you werent directly using it at the time, the connection closed as well.


I also though remember that later on I got into Everquest.... the first MMO I played. This was back in it's very early days, just after the very first expansion came out. Ahhhh.... they just dont make MMOs quite like that one anymore. Though it is nice that that one still is around!

My first online experience was in junior high school, when the computer literacy class I took had me searching Netscape for free clip art. Its hard to believe its been 17 years since then.

My first home Internet connection was around 2003, with AO-Hell dialup that took a whopping 45 minutes to load one page! I'm so glad that stuff doesn't happen anymore.

I know we got our first real PC around 97, was a P150...don't remember exactly when we got Internet, but it was AOL over a 56k. I don't think we ever paid for it, we'd always do the free trial, and every time we tried to cancel, they'd give us another free trial. This continued until broadband.

Never really did very much gaming online...during the 56k days, it was way too laggy to really enjoy much...and by the time we got broadband, most of my friends had moved onto MMOs and stuff. Did some Quake, some DOOM, some Sven Coop...

I really miss Net Zero. Was great to get up early before anyone else and have some Internet in my bedroom, instead of having to wait for my turn to use the family computer. They had a little banner ad that you could hide outside of it outside of your screen, but other than that, it was completely free. You'd think they'd be able to bring free phone line Internet now that nobody wants it, but I guess not...

24Kbps