your internet story

I first went online to BBS' rather than the internet. This was via a 9600 modem and using my Amiga 500+
I then moved onto my PC with the same modem and using an ISP called "Dungeon Internet" I had the username & email address of [email protected]

Happy days.
 
Must have been late nineties with a US Robotics Sportster vi 14.4 fax modem. I remember one quarter my parents went ballistic as I racked up £200+ on dialup bulletin boards.

Ahh, ICQ, I can remember when they used to offer the free texting facility!

movingtables said:
although the internet filled a void in my life i can't help but look back
and feel it consumed me.
I actualy believe i am addicted to the internet, but am i?
the net is a way of life now and maybe i have just embraced it?
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I don't think I would say it filled a void in my life but it certainly utilises a massive amount of my time, more than I would like. I had so little time before the internet came along so goodness knows what I gave up to make room for it! Probably reading and catching up with friends, sadly.

I would like to think I could just quit forums/social media/online shopping anytime but I actually don't know if I could, especially forums and Amazon.

It's amazing how far the internet has moved on in even the last ~20 years I've been online. Amazing (and scary) to think what the next 20 years will bring.
 
1995. Had Compuserve on my PC at work. Hung around on the music forums all day. Eventually became a mod for the Oasis section :) Didn't even know what the "internet" was, but heard it was a scary place so was happy in my cozy Compuserve land. Then Compuserve moved to the web in late '95 or early '96 and everybody jumped ship.

Spent next 2 years watching low-res porn render line-by-line.

Got into Quake II on-line in early '98, and that was my life for 3 years. Was a 56k HPB most of the time, but finally got 512k cable in 2000.

Met future wife (on-line, natch...) in late 2002. We played EQ2 and LoTRO together after we met.

Slowly played games on-line less and less due to "real life" stuff, and had our first baby in 2011. No more marathon MMORPG sessions for us :)
 
My first family computer was one of those chunky BBC things that connected to a monitor and a massive daisy wheel printer.

After that I remember a laptop that had connectivity via Banana net or something. I was still quite young then, so I never used that. The first time properly online was when the family PC came from Time, and it had 56k internet. That internet wasn't so different from what we have now, so I don't really remember the internet from before.
 
Ahh, the first Pentium/PC topic from yesterday, and now today our internet histories. Another good thread :D

My parents had Compuserve in 1995, then moved to AOL in 1996. They were very restrictive, and only in 1998 they allowed me to surf the net for 30 minutes per week on their PC aged 19. (My computer was still a BBC Micro then).

Late 1998, went to uni and used their computers for internet. Now aged 20. Got my own PC in 1999, hooked onto the halls of residence connection which was a dual-T1. Niiiiiice speeds. Pop-up adverts were infuriating though. I got addicted to bulletin boards like montypython.com, thesite.org boards, OcUK, Ukrides and so on. Browser-wise, I used Netscape, IE and AOL but always ended up going back to Netscape. Mozilla came out in 2002, and that was the next natural choice for me and it had pop-up blocker! No turning back from Mozilla, then just moved onto Mozilla Firefox in 2006 when version 2 came out.

Online gaming - I did a bit on Age of Empires II in year 2000, mostly all-night LANs (FTW!) but a do bit via MSN Gaming Zone as well with randoms. I played vanilla WoW solidly throughout 2006, had BWL on farm and had most of the tier 2 warlock set. Was working on the 5th boss in AQ40 then the expansion came out. Still played a lot in 2007 but less and less as the game became more casual.

Social networking - this all kicked off around 2007 as well, but I decided to stick with forums like here. People actually respond to posts in forums to provide something a bit personal, a experience that you don't get on FB etc as all they're interested in is taking pictures of what they're eating and updating their status throughout the day.

One-to-one comms - I still stick with good ol' fashioned email or pick up the phone (and occasionally forum PMs). Again, it's for the personal touch.

Internet speeds - as said before, had T1 in the uni halls. Disappointed I was when I discovered how slow 56gay was when back at my old folks between semesters! Gladly, that was short-lived, as I left home in 2002 and broadband was largely available by then. NTL @ 600kbit. Then it became 720kbit, then 1.5mbit, 4mbit, 10mbit and 20mbit as of 2014.
 
Started in around 2001-2000 ish. Loved the hell out of Kazza and then limewire.

Got introduced to a certain game called counter strike. How I wish I had never started! haha.

Bought some stuff of OCUK back in 2005 ish.
 
BBS in the 80s with an Atari ST then on a PC around 1988.
When the internet first came out for the people it was rubbish with no search engines so it was back to BBS.
Internet got a bit better and there were lots of hacks & cracks for different providers but after a while I ended up paying for a provider called Zetnet but you still had to pay around 1p/minute after 6pm and nearly 4p/minute before 6pm so during the day I only went on it if it was important.
As soon as Cable & Wireless started broadband I was on it - super speeds of 1/2 meg/sec (! I never get those numbers right but it was slow compared to nowadays but very fast compared to dial up).
 
I started out in school really. year 1999 roughly when WWF was at its best and in the school it lessons we used to trawl wwf website looking for whatever

My Dads first pc was a p75 over clocked to 100 hz, used to make a tea while it booted lol.

Managed to get my first pc from a computer fair in luton in 2000 I think, cerleron 633 52meg ram, 40 gb drive.

MSN, Chat rooms, ICQ, Napster then limewire? 56k on ntlworld which used to cut of every two hours, remember waking up in the middle of the night to reconnect to the net to hope that my single song would have downloaded lol.

Anyway back then I think unreal smashed it, its all I played loved that game.

Ah memory's, I waste a lot of time on the internet, but its also given a lot of pleasure I suppose.



Edit, I would love to try a old pc on 56k again, man they must have been tough times. trying to look at p*** pictures as a 15 year old were terrible as it loaded very slowly, lol. If you were lucky on a download client you may of got a 15 second video.
 
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I first went online in 1987.

VT100 terminal and a VAX mainframe. Connection speed was configurable - you had a choice of 300 both ways or 1200 down and 75 up. That's in bits per second. No joke. It really was that slow and that was the best you could get. Needless to say, everything was text only.

No websites, of course - the web hadn't been invented yet. I had a little booklet of IP addresses and port numbers. Search engine? Nope, hadn't been invented yet.

But I could access a computer that wasn't even in the same country! I could talk to people who were...whoa, I didn't even know where they were! Awesome! And multiplayer games! Text-only simple MUDs, obviously (and who nowadays even recognises 'MUD'?) but multi-player!

At home, my first access was with a 9600 dialup modem and an account with a small ISP I've since forgotten. That was in the early days of the web and that was about as awesome as going online in the first place. Such speed! Such ease of use! A search engine! Pornographic pictures! Actual pictures, not ASCII porn.
 
My internet began with the Dreamcast, would spend more time on the net with it than actually playing games, which then led to me building my first PC back in 2000 with a 56k modem & netscape & the introduction to the seedy world of internet porn ie The Hun :P, would spend many a night going blind in front of my 14" CTX monitor.

Then in 2001 or 2 decided to splash the cash and get Telewest Broadband 512k, which at the time felt super fast compared to 56k, no longer was just limited to the hun & pictures lol, I amounted a vast collection of movies until the girlfriend at the time found them i had to deleted them all. :(.
 
First time must have been around '96/'97. Was AOL but pay-per-minute, didn't know the rate. We were only allowed 30 minutes of Internet at any one time. :o I think I spent most of it on WWF trying to watch wrestling into videos on 56K. It wasn't until 2003 when I finally got unlimited dial-up. Was Freeserve with their annoying 2-hour cut off limit. 500-600ms ping in online games, I dunno how I managed to have fun playing C&C Renegade while yo-yoing all over the place.

Then in 2005 ADSL finally came to our area and I was one of the first to sign up. 512Kb/s with 30-40ms ping. I played AvP2 MP all night. :D
 
I got myself a 9,600 modem in the late 80's because I'd been told you could access mucky pictures with it via bulletin boards. At the time I didn't have the patience I do now and so it was easier just to pop to the shop for a magazine.
 
My dad got our first Windows PC in 1995. I remember him saying it had a modem so we could "be on the world wide web!!!!". He showed the internet to me at some point, wasn't impressed as I was 5 and it didn't involve Worms blowing up. When I went to secondary school i used it to MSN Messenger 5.0 my friends on dialup and I remember being able to illegally download songs by pressing guide on WMP. Can't imagine that would go down well today!
 
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