your internet story

  • I was 18 and bought a dreamcast + using BT internet paying by the minute.
  • Talking to people in dreamarena chat and browsing blue websites was about he only things worth doing on the internet back then.
  • Stalked some woman 6 years older than me in dreamarena chat.
  • Got her phone number one night when she was drunk.
  • She bought a pc and started chatting on a different website not part of dreamarena that didn't work in it's limited browser.
  • I bought a pc and followed her.
  • I had my 19th birthday
  • We started talking on the phone for 4-5 hours each day in the evenings if not more.
  • 6 months later she came to visit me at my parents for the weekend with her 7 year old son
  • I went back with her to her house to stay for 2 weeks.
  • 3 weeks later my parents were bringing my belongings to me in a van.
  • My parents got their quarterly phone bill and it was over £1200 :O
  • She got her quarterly phone bill and it was £900 :O
  • We got married and split up 11 years later.
 
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A school friend gave me a 28.8K ISA modem for use with some pants 486 I had, it's safe to say nobody could get through on the telephone for a couple of years.
 
[FnG]magnolia;25793005 said:
Well, I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar - that much is true.
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Ah 300/1200 baud dial-up.

The good old days of Colossal Cave Adventure, Super Star Trek. :D
 
Only remember snippets of the early days...

Started out with a Pentium 2 with a built in 28.8 kbit/s modem and remember buying magasines with CDs attached with ISP offers from the likes of AOL and Compuserve. Then I upgraded to the beast that was the Elsa Microlink 56k Fun. I recall many attempts to download mp3s using Napster either because the internet would disconnect after an hour or due to incoming phone calls.

Had trouble getting the serial port joystick that came with the PC to work. PC was bought from Time Computers.

Some time after I built my first PC based on the XP1700+ and I think it was housed in the Coolercase Tornado from Overclockers. Gawd that thing was loud.

Few years later at uni, I was super excited when I first used MSN messenger and wasted a lot of time on that as well evboard.com. Then I discovered this forum and since have been posting every so often in between my long lurking periods.

Memorable upgrades since my first build include Voodoo 2, GeForce 3 Ti200, and Windows 2000 Pro. Gaming wise, many hours were spent on the original Unreal Tournament and plenty of laughs had at my noobness when I challenged people online. Was lucky that my late father's employee lived with us for a few years and played on his consoles which included Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, Panasonic 3DO and N64 with Doctor V64.

So a total of 6 builds since my first computer back in '97 I think leads me to present day.
 
I was 15, it was 1997, had just started clubbing, and Cape Town had a very bustling online community for clubbers, mainly using IRC.

Only had dial-up, so the next 4 years were limited to IRC, porn jpegs and spending hours downloading 128kbps mp3s.

Moved to the UK in 2002, got broadband, signed up to a few clubbing forums, and the rest is history.
 
Who remembers...

unlimited redhotant 56k accounts...and hacking them with sub7 and other tools
efnet.demon.co.uk #warezstoke
botserve channels on quakenet and dalnet dishing out mp3s, movies and games....if you didnt mind being in a queue and disconnecting after 2hrs on 56k lol.
under construction gifs on websites, html frames and <marquee> tags
the annoying ICQ sounds
netscape navigator 3 onwards
dungeon keeper, champ manager 97, age of empires over ipx with ya mates
the release of 128/256/512k broadband via telewest and ntl
IGN and Gamespy

I loved the mid/late 90's and then early 2000's even though we had 56k or ISDN, exciting times learning new things and seeing technology move forward.

Now it's just....meh...reddit and trolling on LoL or dayz
 
It was 1998 and I was 15.

While reading an issue of PCG I found an article about a strange game called "Ultima Online".

A couple of weeks later, while browsing the PC games bargain bin at my local MVC, I found a slightly battered purple box with the words "Ultima Online, The Second Age" written on it, for £6.

Since that was the price of the monthly sub, and you got a month free with a new account, I figured why not.

I went home, dug out one of the "Freeserve Unlimited" CDs I'd previously been using as a coaster, found my mum and said "if I pay you £21 a month (£14.99 for unlimited net, £6 for UO), can you sort out this internet and pay my game subscription for me?" (I had a rather lucrative saturday job as a pharmacy assistant).

Stupidly she agreed, and that was that.

Played UO until AoS came out, which basically screwed the game up completely. Around the same time, a friend mentioned to me a new cyberpunk MMO called Neocron. I decided to give it a go, and got hooked.

During these dial-up days, there was the constant "fun" of:

a) Family members picking up the phone to make a phonecall, and my connection dying, resulting in in-game death and lots of swearing.
b) Having to hang up and redial every 2 hours

After about 6 months of struggling through on a pretty low spec PC, and a 56k modem, a friend introduced me to OcUK, where I bought my first proper gaming PC, and a week later, my stepdad decided to get this fancy new internet service called "ADSL", at an eye-wateringly fast 512K!! My pings dropped from 300ms to 30ms overnight, and my FPS went from ~15-20 to 62. Suddenly I was able to run rings around people!

After that, there weren't any real jumps; as tech moved on we upgraded to 1Mb, 2Mb, 4Mb etc. Moved out, got Pipex's 20Mb (before they were bought by Tiscali and turned ****!) changed ISP a few times, and that's pretty much been it.

As you can see, my internet use has mainly been driven by MMOs :p
 
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Started out in '98 on my dads 200 MMX. Don't remember who my first ISP was, but it was dial-up naturally. Luckily I was still living at home when cable internet kicked in and we were amongst the first wave to get it in the country.

My early days were spent on chat rooms, ICQ and waiting for pictures to load. Oh and AoE 2 and Quake!
 
Ken said:
...
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So glad I kept something from my first PC...

LPXFxME.jpg


Love the aesthetics...for some reason makes me think of Terminator 2 :)
 
Started in 2000 with a newly bought PC which included a 56k modem. Started downloading stuff and played No One Lives Forever and RTCW and somehow managed with >200ms pings.

It was several years until xDSL became available to me so had a year or so on ISDN. Was playing America's Army 1 and 2 around this time.

As I've moved about a bit I have experienced several speeds of ADSL and ADSL2, 512k, 1Mbit, 3Mbit, 4Mbit, 8Mbit and 22Mbit.

Still waiting on VDSL.
 
Our house used to always have a family pc, rarely used except for maybe one or two homeworks in primary school. When i was in p7 my dad gave me my first game, delta force and from there i started gaming. Got my first pc of my own when i was 12 i think
 
They got a dial up modem at my college in 1995 and as I was studying IT me and a couple of mates were offered the chance to "Surf the web" one lunchtime. This session was supervised by a tutor and consisted of the 3 of us sharing one PC. We would each open our own Netscape Navigator window and then used the Google of its day "Webcrawler" to do a search. While the page was loading for the last person you could start your search. You could usually visit 2-3 webpages each during a session.

I think back now and this is like your Granddad telling you about the first TV or something, but at the time we were totally cutting edge.

The college later rolled it out access to the network and on a Thursday evening you could spend time on the net. I would bring a box of floppy discs to save Star wars and x-files pictures to take home. I was also into making music at the time using a DOS program called FastTracker2 and I would download .wav file samples of drum loops and film audio and stuff. I remember some wav files from Full Metal Jacket got coppied over and over around my class, people thought it was hilarious you could play the snippets of the drill sargent swearing at the click of a mouse....in the age of YouTube this seems so basic now.

In 1997 I got a new PC with a 33.3k modem and finally got internet access at home initially on AOL, the rest as they say is history.
 
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I started off with a PC with a 56Kbps modem in it and connected through Freeserve back in 1998, I ran an extension cable from the living room to my bedroom to connect to the net for two hours a day (disconnected after two hours).

I then spent many hours clicking re-connect after two hours to try and get back on.

I spent a good time playing TFC & HL TDM on this modem with a ping of approx. 150Ms.

I then started playing Quake 3 Arena (again with my ping of 150Ms) when that came out and posted on quake3world.

A short while later we upgraded to 512K on NTL, I then became the dredded LPB amongst the pack and enjoyed owning it up over my HPB friends on Q3A/TFC & HL TDM. It was a good time and I was the envy of everyone.

We were then upgraded onto 600K when it came around.

I then moved out and was without internet for a while, my next connection was with TalkTalk (worked for CPW) so had a free 2Mbps connection.

After moving house back to Stratford I got an 8Mbps SKY connection which was great for playing xbox Live on back in 2007, we moved house yet again and I got 50Mbps Virgin and it was amazing, got upgraded to 100Mbps and the service went down hill massively with all the STM polices and I am now on a 50Mbps BT Infinity connection which is great and stable and not managed in anyway.

I also used to use ICQ all those years ago to chat to my friends, and also find local females to chat randomly to, lol. Also used to go on MiRC a lot back in the day.
 
I remember my dad telling me about the internet back in 1994. It sounded completely boring and I had no interest in it whatsover.

First sites I visited were Hotmail and rotten dot com back in 1998 I think. I can't remember using much more than that then.

I seriously started to get into the internet in 2001 on my housemate's 56k computer. Many nights spent playing Spades on Pogo.com, smoking Marlboro Reds, eating Oreas and listening to Depeche Mode. It was then I realised that this internet thing could be a seriously good way of spending time not with other people.

Im 2003 I got into Quake 1 like the OP and would spend all my day on it. I would get up at 1pm and go to sleep at 4am playing Quake every day and searching out new music. It was amazing.
 
I started out using dial-up BBS with my Commodore 64 in the late 80s. Used it for grabbing graphics and music demos etc.
When I moved to the Amiga in the early 90s I continued using BBS for getting MODs and other demos from people like Red Sector, TSL, and Scoopex.
Gradually the demo sites started to link in to Aminet which was my first taste of a true network rather than point to point.
When I went to university, I was introduced to the Internet that we know today. Been using it ever since.

I remember in around 1997, seeing a website address at the end of a product advert on TV. I turned to my mate and said "It's mainstream now, this is going to be big".
 
Started off at University in late '93 with mailing lists, usenet and other bits and bobs. Didn't get internet at home though until '97. That was 33.3 dial up (with Demon), which eventually went to 56.6 and then to 2mbps ADSL with Pipex.

When I moved in 2003 I initially had 2mbps ADSL from Pipex and then ~18mbps ADSL2 from Be*. Now I've gone to Infinity2 from BT.

Never really got into any online chat programs or games.
 
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