Your first connection and memories of the internet.

mattyg said:
it was a bulletin board of some sort in the 80's with a modem you put your phone headset on with a C64.

modem.jpg
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That is like something from the film 'War Games' lol!
 
A dynamode 56k external modem, followed by at the time possibly the best 56k made (supra express 56e pro).

I think a few of us had the engraged parents at the phone bill and phone line being tied up! I can't remember my first ISP, but the cd would have come from the shop where I had a Saturday job at the time.

Eventually I moved onto RedHotAnt (awesome while it lasted), freeserve and then pipex adsl! ( I also had the odd bit of X-stream iirc).I can't remember the chat rooms I discovered at that age, but when not playing CS Beta, I was on IRC, ICQ and AOL IM.
 
Ah US Robotics, Geocities, Alta Vista, Demon dial up, "free" AOL CDs with everything, double speed CD burners with proprietary interfaces to haul your downloaded gains around on. Well, those and Zip disks. :D
 
mattyg said:
it was a bulletin board of some sort in the 80's with a modem you put your phone headset on with a C64.

modem.jpg
Click to expand...

Memories.
Probably first went on the Internet around 1993 and because of BBS I didn't think the Internet would catch on.
I can't remember the company but the other day I was reminiscing when I first saw a TV advert with a web address on and I pointed it to the wife what it was.
I wish I could still remember who it was.
 
Looking back at this thread has brought back some memories. It struck me the other day whilst I was parked at a motorway service station using my phone as a 4G hotspot (watching sky in the car on my ipad), how far we've come in the last 15 years or so.

I started off on BBS's using a 9600bps modem with my Amiga in the early 90's

When I got a PC I started using the Internet with a 14.4kbps modem via Demon internet as they had a local POP (anyone else remember Turnpike), I upgraded the modem to a 28.8kbps as soon as I could afford one. I then bought a 56.6kbps US Robotics X2 modem (back then ISP's used to have two seperate dial in numbers (one for X2 & one for K56flex).

As I was starting to use services like Napster a lot (3 hours to download a single track),
I signed up for BT Openworld ADSL as soon as it became available at my exchange & was absolutley blown away by the speed increase, although Napster shut down two weeks later.

Currently got a 80/20 FTTC connection at home and a 4G capable phone, tbh that does me fine for now. I can download a multi-gigabyte ISO file in under 30 minutes, looking at my last phone bill I transferred 1.4TB last month (restoring a corrupted NAS backup)
 
My first experience of the internet was probably late 1994 when my secondary school did a huge upgrade project with 100+ PCs from RM and internet through some horrible RM portal (my IT teacher had noticed my interest in it early on and along with a couple of others had pretty much free access to the systems and allowed to use any of the IT suites after school hours).

Can't actually remember when we first got internet at home but it was about 2 years later when we bought a PC based around a Pentium 166 MMX w/ a 33.6k baud modem.

I also have the dubious distinction of being the first non-BT employee connected up in this town for both ADSL and FTTC.
 
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Late '93 at university ... Doom shareware, Pegasus mail, mosaic browser. Mailing lists to discuss things, usenet, having to unsubscribe to things over the summer break as I didn't have access at home or where I was staying at college.

At homewe eventually got dial up (33.6k followed by 56k later) after I graduated in '97. Large phone bills for what is now a woefully slow connection ... Spent ages downloading Linux software to compile. Having a second line so I could dial in to work for oncall.

Eventually ADSL at home and then when I moved out ADSL -> ADSL2 (BE) -> FTTC (BT)
 
Hmm it was a 386 with a mahhoosive 360mb hard disk which was very state of the art. AOL chat, in which I believe this nick first originated... A/s/l was the first thing anyone asked 😊. I believe I was a hermaphrodite snail lost at the bottom of a garden, which when I was 15 was hilarious.
 
Uni Netscape webcrawler Alta vista mIRC icq

Guy had a modem in my shared house spent 48h straight playing ultima online I thought he was a freak but it peaked my interest.

Three years later I got my first job, first pc , first 400 quid phone bill..... I still lived at home and my dad blew his top... lol

I remember getting the 512kb adsl Manta ray modem and suddenly becoming a god at online gaming lol and the phone bills were gone :-). Happy days
 
First got online with a 33.6K modem sometime in 1997.
When I went to uni in 1998 and had a 2mbit connection to my room in halls and thought it was amazing.

Memories of classic memes :)
 
In 1997/1998, and through an old 14.4 k modem and then went to look at a picture of a Peugeot 206 that had just come out as we had a 205 at home. It took forever to download, so we went to have a cup of tea and then came back an hour later to see that it had (mostly) loaded. Early memories are mostly internet forums and Napster.
 
Can't remember the year but I used Demon Internet, I was at primary school so must have been 1994/5. I'd asked for a 28.8k Hayes Accura modem for my birthday (the external type, connected by serial cable). The Demon dialler came on a floppy disk (dis.exe) and there was a long list of local POP numbers so you could choose to dial one that would be charged as a local call.

No web browser at first (think you had to pay for netscape) so I pretty much just accessed usenet.

A year or so later Windows 95 appeared and text-only content had lost it's appeal so I started using Compuserve and then MSN (MSN as the ISP, not the IM service).
 
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