Remember your very first time online?
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Do you remember your first computer? I first laid my hands on a keyboard aged 12… We owned a Commodore 64 at a time where computers were luxury items…
Our faithful Commodore had a black and white screen, a keyboard without accents (not convenient when you’re trying to type something in French), a pre-historic version of Word, as well as the computer game Pac Man with funky joysticks!
Now, do you remember the first time you went online?
I think I first went online circa 1996… The Commodore had sadly passed away and we had moved onto a much better (colour) machine!
We had a PAYG (pay as you go) AOL dial-up connection which was terribly expensive and slow! I don’t remember browsing the net but the home page was an AOL chatroom and I used to spend ages chatting to some English and Italian dudes to improve my linguistic skills. I would never have thought back then that I would play with the Internet for a living!
We’re always talking about new technologies, but I’d like to hear about your computer and Internet stories from back in the day… Over to you guys!
Idea for this post courtesy of The Next Web
| Print article | This entry was posted by Lolly on 06/08/2008 at 10:44 am, and is filed under Web & Technology. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 3 years ago
i remember getting my first 14.4kb modem back in the late 90′s and paying through my teeth to afford to beable to go online. I used demon service providers, which was £30 a month, then a penny a minute in the evenings to make the landline call, madness.
My memories are roughly the same, AOL chatrooms, but i spent a lot of time on IRC and used ICQ for years as well, i was a script kid for a few months as well when i got my ISDN line put in, well ‘L33T’
i just found my first form membership as well, join date? May 1999 – total madness, nearly a decade in the social media, if only i knew then what all this would become and that i’d also get paid to tinker with it! Hopefully no one i know these days will find out what my old online alias was and look up my old posts, some are truely terrible…
about 3 years ago
So you fell for my Italian accent?
about 3 years ago
Ok — now I feel old.
My first time online was on a 300 Baud (!) modem on an Apple ][e. I would log in to a chat room and BBS on a service called PeopleLink. (CompuServe was the other service at the time).
about 3 years ago
I think it was Commodore first – but just for games. Later I used IRC to communicate btw Hungary and Poland. First time on-line – no idea…What a question;)!
I do remember starting blogging and why I did it, but browsing – no idea:/
about 3 years ago
Back in 1989, our first pc was a IBM, 286 with 2Mo of memory! Add to this an amazing 16color Olivetti monitor. My first time on the internet must be around 1994. Good ol’ times
about 3 years ago
I believe first time I was online was 1998. It was on a dial-up connection. My first PC was 386 if I remember correctly. I was reading about people having a flat rate 1 Mbps connection and I was thinking that I would get rich in the matter of months if I had such a connection. Today I’ve got 2 Mbps flat rate DSL connection and it’s cheaper then anything I’ve ever had in past. It costs me € 20 (including the telephone).
about 3 years ago
I went online first with a Atari ST the same year as you did. It was slow, but surprisingly the HTML interpreter could handle it adequately. You needed a hard disk, as loading the browser off disk took forever!
about 3 years ago
Thank you all for your comments! Hope you enjoyed the trip down Memory Lane!
about 3 years ago
I used to play on a friend’s vic 20 then commodor 64. my first machine was an Atari ST 520 – because it could handle both PC and Apple files… way ahead of its time!
I used to run a bulletin board system through my home phone number… until my parents got upset with the fact modems were calling our home all day and tying up the lines!
BBS dialup boards were the precursors to forums… which were really precursors to social media. What is old will eventually become new again… but with fancier names
about 3 years ago
We all had Commodores!
about 3 years ago
You must remember the Minitel though! We were seriously pioneering in France back in the day! i consider that was my first time online – sneaking around in the dead of night (because it cost something like 50p/min or something) at home to connect and chat with random people or play stupid games… Good times!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
about 3 years ago
Yay Minitel! I used to do the same thing. Mum would tell me off as 3615 was sooooooo expensive
about 3 years ago
You must remember the Minitel though.
about 3 years ago
My first was a Vic 20. The Commodore’s earlier version… It was called a 20 because there were 20 characters across the screen. I logged in from my telephone to the university’s site and my friend from class, who was also on the system about 25 miles away, came on my computer and typed something on it. I’ll never forget that feeling.
Chris
about 3 years ago
I went on-line first time on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem. I connected with various BBS’s but also tried a service called Q-Link (I think that’s what it was called, it’s been a long time).
I loved my Commodore. Miss it greatly.