10-07-2024, 05:06 AM
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.
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.
