Your first connection and memories of the internet.

Mid 80s I ran a BBS called the cellar in Stoke on Trent on a ringback system at my parents house.
I remember people calling up at 2am connecting and my parents going mental.
Ran it on a BBC model b with a 300 baud modem before updating to a 1200 one.

Programmed much of the system myself, these were the days before the internet, got the internet bandwagon as soon as I could, remember those huge phone bills landing on my doorstep when I first moved into my own flat.
 
Early MUD memories: Taking ages to grind my way to level 2 only for someone to suggest I try out the 'fod' command. Found out that fod stood for Finger Of Death and using the command killed me instantly. :(

Not good when Compuserve and BT charged by the minute. :p
 
My first memories of the internet consist of attempting to use eBay on dial up to place bids for my Dad while he was at work. :rolleyes:
 
-Mike- said:
X-stream took some dedication :) Was ok once connected though :)
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And you worked out how to dial in without their software, otherwise it made playing TFC impossible with their ad-bar showing through the whole time.
 
PiKe said:
And you worked out how to dial in without their software, otherwise it made playing TFC impossible with their ad-bar showing through the whole time.
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Haha yeah. I just used to end task their software to begin with... then after that realised the joy of just making a dial up connection and never used it again!

Red Hot Ant was another damn good ISP, but they were put to bed quite quickly unfortunately! Pings were very very good in the daytime (Was at college at this point so had more time off than I knew what to do with!)
 
I was on Direct Connection - still remember the dialup noises and also going "Noooooooooo!" as someone picked up the phone in the other room while I was in an MW4 clan match! :mad:

Also, terrible animated GIFs, under construction pages, Yahoo! HTML chat, IRC on EFNet, Playing various MUDs! :D

EDIT: Also, ICQ was much better than POF!
 
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AOL and using AOL chat at a mates house. Ah memories.

Then getting Freeserve internet at my own and it only being free after 6pm, so naturally the phone line became completely tied up from then onwards and no one could get through on the phone. Admittedly though, it stopped the PPI type calls dead in their tracks! :p
 
Sad thing is, once people got the internet and ICQ, CB Radios went out the window. Those were loads of fun.
 
Started with connection from an Apple IIe to University of London via acoustic coupler (300baud?), Prestel via school library, BBS on 1200/75 modem on Atari 800 then 520STFM (whatever happened to the Gnome at Home), followed by Compuserve, CIX, Demon, call charge free internet briefly on "Red Hot Ant", Home Highway at 128K using 2 x bonded channel ISDN (and the biggest bill ever), them BT Broadband using a strange green stingray looking USB ADSL modem at 512k (I think) and finally cable now with 150Mb/s.

Whole lot of things mentioned here I'd forgotten about like web rings and of course no one in the 80s witha modem could do without the Hackers handbook... God i'm old but it was an amazingly interesting time to grow up with technology and computing. :)
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I think we had some ISP (if you can call it that!) called Red Hot Ant, such amazing download speeds if I recall correctly :D It would take hours upon hours to download just a song! Then we moved to AOL which was awful, and an absolute pain to break out of the contract...

Crazy to think that actually wasn't so long ago (15+ years or so I guess), now I'm sitting here with download speeds of 160Mb/s and upload of 12Mb/s and I'm also able to use pretty fast connections on the fly with my smartphone - we've come pretty far, I wonder where we'll be in another 15 years time.
 
Compuserve I think was our first dialup ISP, then as we had a Telewest line we connected to some local ISP which made it free but with 2hr cut off, then onto Telewest broadband in Dec 1999.. not changed ISP since.
 
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