1st Online Experience?

[FlyingClayDisk]

Do you remember your first online experience?

I first started messing around with personal computers back in about 1979.  I bought my first PC around the same time.  I bought (3) of them in rapid succession (quickly realizing my mistakes after each one).  Even though people would talk about the "Internet" back in those days, it wasn't really a thing.  I remember in about 1987 asking this neighbor of mine..."What is the Internet anyway, like can you explain it to me?".  He gave me some crazy explanation which sounded like utopia (he was kind of koo-koo anyway).  His explanation was enough to tell me I wasn't really interested. But I kept hearing about these things called "modems" and one day someone gave me one, but I had no idea what to do with it.

Several years went by and one day I was looking in the back of this computer magazine (PC Magazine, I think) and I saw this tiny advertisement for a Bulletin Board Service (BBS).  I forget now what the subject matter of the BBS was, but it was interesting to me at the time so I hooked up my 'mystery-modem' to my PC, typed in the phone number of the BBS, and VOILA'!...I was online for the very first time.  I want to say this was about 1989-90.

Everything was slow back then, but I eventually figured out my way around this one site.  I felt like I was exploring the Moon at the time.  After a day or so I got enough guts up to "post" a message.  Of course, there was no reply, so I wondered what all the hype about the "Internet" was all about.  There were no ISP's then, you had to dial in to every site.  The World Wide Web wasn't even a mainstream thing then.  One day, several week later, I dialed back into that same BBS and low & behold...there was a "reply" to my message!  Holy shit!...this internet thing really works!  The message basically said "Hello" and that there was a very important file attached.  I clicked on the attachment, and in the lightning fast span of about 15 minutes the attachment began to materialize, line by line, on my monitor.  Clearly this was going to take a while, so I went and made a sandwich.  I came back a while later and my "download" was complete.  WOW!  COOL!  At first I couldn't make out what the image was.  After analyzing the image for quite a while I determined it was a very low resolution image of someone's butt on a xerox machine.

My first experience in the "Internet" and my first "download"...I'd been mooned by the Internet!  (It wasn't really the Internet, but I didn't know that then).

Not long afterwards we got a "Local Area Network" connection in the office.  No one had any idea what it was or how to use it, but they said we had an "E" mail address.  (?????)  I had one of the first laptops by then, and a colleague told me about this "on line" service which had the answer to any question I could ever dream up.  He called it "CompuServe", and for a few bucks you could sign up.  He said it would let you explore the whole Internet.  (In my mind, I pictured entire filing cabinets chocked full of pictures of people's butts sitting on xerox machines).

After downloading some files from CompuServe, I installed their application and, by golly, it actually worked!  To make an already too long story a little shorter, after some 'navigating' around, I saw a little icon which said "World Wide Web" on it.  I clicked on it, and a blank screen showed up.  Progress!  Now what?  My same friend (he was pretty smart, that guy) told me this was where you typed in a "website".  After numerous failed attempts to get anything, he told me I needed to use a "Search engine".  (No idea!)  He told me to type in "www.dogpile.com".  I did, and to my amazement, the dogpile search engine website showed up.  He said I could type anything I could think of into it and, if it was anywhere on the Internet, dogpile would find it.  Wow!  The entire universe was now at my fingertips!  Hmmmmm...what should I search for?  So, I started typing...

"B U T T S   O N   X E R O X   M A C H I N E S"

The rest is history.

[ArMaP]

I only remember it was in 1995, but I don't remember what it was, probably some site I had seen an UK magazine I used to buy at the time.

[Maxmars]

I started a bit earlier than most... because I'm so damned old.  I'll spare you the tales of an 8-bit wonderland and 8 1/2 inch floppies... or machines using audio (cassette) tape to transfer programs that ran strictly one at a time... or having to frontload chunks of your operating system tasks with each boot-up.

Anyway, most folks don't consider it on-line unless it's Internet... but there was a time when it wasn't even considered "networking" as it was pretty much point-to-point between users.

My actual first online access came earlier than most...  (an accident of career choice)... well before "laser" discs were being distributed willie-nilly like grocery store junk mail.
But the use was mundane and of a "testing 1 2 3" nature for the most part... nothing fun.  We called it 'live electronic messaging.'   ZERO graphical interface... pretty ugly.

[FlyingClayDisk]

I started a bit earlier than most... because I'm so damned old.  I'll spare you the tales of an 8-bit wonderland and 8 1/2 inch floppies... or machines using audio (cassette) tape to transfer programs that ran strictly one at a time... or having to frontload chunks of your operating system tasks with each boot-up.

Anyway, most folks don't consider it on-line unless it's Internet... but there was a time when it wasn't even considered "networking" as it was pretty much point-to-point between users.

My actual first online access came earlier than most...  (an accident of career choice)... well before "laser" discs were being distributed willie-nilly like grocery store junk mail.
But the use was mundane and of a "testing 1 2 3" nature for the most part... nothing fun.  We called it 'live electronic messaging.'   ZERO graphical interface... pretty ugly.

Oh, I went through all that too...on an old Trash-80 complete with cassette backup, but I wasn't online.  Heck, my first computer experiences were on an old DEC mainframe (want to say it was a 3270 terminal).  Writing out BASIC code.  But yes, had to load the DOS (pre-MS)  on the old PC's from a floppy at every boot up.  GAH!

[Maxmars]

Oh, I went through all that too...on an old Trash-80 complete with cassette backup, but I wasn't online.  Heck, my first computer experiences were on an old DEC mainframe (want to say it was a 3270 terminal).  Writing out BASIC code.  But yes, had to load the DOS (pre-MS) from a floppy at every boot up.  GAH!

I remember playing with the idea of buying a TRS80... (ugh! Radio Shack... gone but not forgotten) but opted to wait for the Apple II (+) once I started to look into the 6502... design.

Those were the old days... not so good, but at least I was in control of the machine... not the OS manufacturer.

[UltraBudgie]

yagh zooks here get all the 'memberberries out your system
https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipb...talog.html

[FlyingClayDisk]

My first real PC (if you could call it that) was a Tandy 1000 (PC XT Clone).  Grew up in a small town and all we had was a Radio Shack (we were pretty lucky to have that even).  Had dozens of feed stores, but no tech stores.  Heck, I was 16 before we got our first McDonald's (and that was the first and only fast food joint in town for years).  Had a bunch of Chinese joints which served Kung Pow Kitty and Won Ton Woof-Woof though.

[Maxmars]

yagh zooks here get all the 'memberberries out your system
https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipb...talog.html

Color... COLOR?

Green screen was all there was... "orange" was a cool "NEW" thing.

I remember being so impressed with the development of 'multiple' colors (with that "Cyan" color which I had never even heard of as a legitimate color...)

And then I walked 6 miles through the snow to school ... both ways... after which my parents beat me and sent me to the coal mines.!

[putnam6]

Great thread idea, one of the companies my father represented had us set up a stockroom where we could sell, invoice, and ship merchandise. Circa 1987-88 I think, they sent us  IBM computer DOS program with a hard drive that was as wide as an album and 2-3 inches thick, anyway, we had a local guy set it up and help with maintenance. Later he sold us an early Apple Macintosh II that we used for bookwork, I loved messing around with it did a lot of our bookkeeping, set up a customer database, did all of our business forms etc.

A year or 2 later my parents bought me a Mac II for Christmas and that's when I got a modem after the tech told me about Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL. I signed up and was on message boards on all of them fairly soon thereafter, but AOL was the best option had more topics, a better interface, etc.

I can remember discussing the Desert Shield and Desert Storm on the old AOL board football. Discussed the war a lot back then too.  

LOL, I recall a sound byte from Jurassic Park was leaked online in late 1992 it was the famous scene where the T-Rex escaped it took hours to download the sound clip from when the lawyer left the kids to when the TRex broke through the fence and roared. Then the tech told me about Napster

We still get business emails on our AOL email addresses, we all have other addresses too, but this was the first one I set up for Dad and he was adamant about not changing his over the years. We reply to all of his emails and below it lists our new emails, but a lot of the old timers use it from muscle memory

[ArMaP]

I started a bit earlier than most... because I'm so damned old.  I'll spare you the tales of an 8-bit wonderland and 8 1/2 inch floppies... or machines using audio (cassette) tape to transfer programs that ran strictly one at a time... or having to frontload chunks of your operating system tasks with each boot-up.

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum my parents gave me on Christmas 1983. It had a problem a couple of years later and was replace by a new one.
One month ago or so I tried to turn it on and it still works, although the image is not that good. I suppose I have to replace some capacitors to get a good image.

And see if all my tapes are still good.