When did you start using the internet?

[KCMax]

Was just talking about this the other day, but it seems kinda weird to think there was a day when we didn't use the internet at all, and it wasn't all that long ago.

When I was a kid, my dad was a computer programmer, so we had some sort of primitive internet, but it wasn't user friendly and I didn't use it. When I was in middle school we had "Prodigy" which I thought was amazing because I could access baseball stats whenever I wanted instead of waiting for the Sunday Star. But that was about all I found it good for.

I got my first email address when I went to college in 1996. That was the first time I started surfing "the web." We had a 56 baud dial up modem, and the university would only let you on 30 minutes at a time, and during peak hours (most of the day) you couldn't get on at all. There was no Google or Yahoo (I don't think?) so I remember searching with Netscape. I think the only site I really visited was ESPN.com. And porn was pretty frustrating in those days because it took about 5 minutes for a picture to download, then you'd figure out it was a doctored photo of Jennifer Love Hewitt. It was pretty much not worth the effort.

Anyway, just wondering when you began using the internet.

[kcmetro]

August 2000

[phna]

around the time of gophernet

[PumpkinStalker]

The day Al Gore invented it.

[chrizow]

this topic is awesome.

i too recall "Prodigy," but we didn't have it at my house because we didn't have a computer.  my uncle had Prodigy at his business and i remember wasting several hours trying to play some really complicated baseball game and failing.  

my brother bought the household a computer in 1995 or so.  i think i was in 8th or 9th grade.  we had internet access through the KC Public Library.  i had an email address that was something like REZNOR@KCPL.NIC.LOL or something.  (yes, reznor).  i never accessed the email, however, because everything could only be accessed through a "DOS"-esque prompt system which i did not understand.  the KC Library internet was something like $20 for a year.  we received notice that the service was not going to be carried forward after the first year, but we still connected to the internet via the library for at least two more years, without paying a dime.  

i remember spending most of my time looking at rave related sites like Hyperreal.  i read all kinds of discussion forums of house music.  i also remember finding some sort of alt. discussion group where people described their psychedelic drug experiences and i thought it was fascinating and rebellious.  i looked at a lot of adult content, but as Max says it was really frustrating.  

at some point we got more "legit" 56k dial-up service through various free trial CD's - KMart's "Blue Light" system, JUNO, AOL, etc.  most of my internet surfing was done at friend's houses, who had AOL.  we pretty much spent all our time in AOL chat rooms being ridiculous until we got reported and kicked off.  i remember "crashing" peoples' private chat rooms by guessing the "secret" title of their room, which was so awesome.  ("HEY GUYS, WHAT ARE YOU UP TO IN HERE?!")

when i got to college, however, i truly learned the awesomeness of the internet through the campus high-speed network.  Napster, Audiogalaxy, dorm networks full of movies/porn/music/etc.  it seems like around that time the internet really exploded and became quite a time drain for me.

[kcdcchef]

i got my first email address with the hay adams hotel in 1997, and that was the first time i ever used the internet, then started using it ( with an old dos system ) to do my online ordering, and discovered yahoo and fell in love. but realy put the internet down in 1998 because the next job didnt have computers, and in 2000, picked it back up at home by buying a computer. then in mid 2000, i was online from then forward.

[LenexatoKCMO]

1995 - undergrad.  We actually had pretty advanced service for a very small, religious college.  I had been exposed to it a few times earlier on but that was the first I really ever actively used it. 

[KCMax]

at some point we got more "legit" 56k dial-up service through various free trial CD's - KMart's "Blue Light" system, JUNO, AOL, etc.  most of my internet surfing was done at friend's houses, who had AOL.  we pretty much spent all our time in AOL chat rooms being ridiculous until we got reported and kicked off.  i remember "crashing" peoples' private chat rooms by guessing the "secret" title of their room, which was so awesome.  ("HEY GUYS, WHAT ARE YOU UP TO IN HERE?!")

Oh yea, we got those free AOL CDs all the time. We'd sign up in our dorm for a month at a time since that's what you got for free, then just terrorize chat rooms or eventually get banned. We even found a guy in our dorm online and told him we were a girl on campus and wanted to meet up sometime. We howled in laughter as we watched him leave to go meet her. We were pretty mean.

[loftguy]

1992, or 1993. 

Wish I could spend an hour in front of that process, again.  I really can't remember the details of the internet, but I so remember hating dos and the people who had that language memorized.  I was so freaking dependent on them.................what was that code again, slower this time?

[AJoD]

1992, maybe?

My first memory is high school, learning to use Dialog which was billed as sort of an electronic card catalog where you could not only look stuff up, but print out articles for research papers.  We also all got email addresses through Creighton's network, all done through UNIX...maybe a program called gopher out of U of Minnesota?

I had an uncle with Prodigy and Compuserv, though I don't remember spending much time with it, if at all.  I don't even think we had a computer at home (though I took an old Macintosh with me to college)...I know I was typing high school papers on typewriter, though we finally got an "Adam."  I had a Buck Rodgers video game on cassette tape.  Weird.

What about word processing?  I remember learning Bank Street Writer, though not sure how old I was, elementary school/mid to late 80s anyway.

[lock+load]

AOL in 1994, the real internet a year or so later.  AOL at the time only allowed 5 hours of usage a month for the regular service charge.  Imagine only 5 hours a month online today!

[drumatix]

1990-1991 on BBS sites. Strange that I can't remember when I actually started using the internet in the form closer to what it resembles today... 1994, maybe? I think there were a few years when I kind of constantly skipped back and forth between the old tried & true BBS systems & the internet before quitting the BBS stuff completely.

[grovester]

prodigy in 94-95, zpmw91a@prodigy.net, my personalized email account!

[ignatius]

I think I may be the earliest cyberpunk so far.  My first true Internet account was on genco and then tyrell.net (the first true internet ISPs in KC) around 1986 or so - maybe 1988.  Tyrell was named for Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner. Was on GEnie and Compuserve before that, which were private services but tied into the early incarnations of the internet.  The internet hit mainstream once the visual browser came out around 1992, though there were text-based ones before that.  Anyone use Mosaic?  It morphed into Netscape and then Firefox.

[staubio]

I believe it was 1993 for me. My friend and I dialed in to Compuserv long distance from our small town AND paid per minute rates while we were connected. I remember one of my first experiences of connecting, downloading the full text of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail and then disconnecting and printing it on the dot matrix printer. It took awhile.

I remember the internet then being just text with graphical bullet points. It was mostly just universities and government agencies that were online at the time.

By the way, the printer was a Panasonic KXP1124. I have no idea why I have never forgotten that model number.

My first e-mail account was on Juno. At the time, it was a stand alone application. When you want to send and receive, it would dial in (again, long distance for me) and do the fetch. I just thought I was cool having an address.

The next year, I had my very own Geocities website.

[kclofter]

Electronic transmission of a medical record via modem with an Apple IIe back in 1984 or so. Then dial up BBS.  Didn't start internet connection until early 90's (Prodigy, CompuServe, then Unicom ISP based in Overland Park; Unicom's other business was mediation - always thought that was an odd combination of businesses).

[bobbyhawks]

Somewhere between '93 and '94 on Prodigy.  I remember that if you accidentally clicked on the wrong thing, my dad was billed a bunch of money.  Webcrawler was king, along with AOL a few years later, and some dude at my school was buying huge shipments of Oakley sunglasses with credit card numbers that didn't exist and selling them for very little.

[phuqueue]

We started with AOL in the mid-90s.  Memory is foggy now, but I believe we were on version 2.6, so a quick Google search places that sometime in 1995.  I had used the internet before that, as my dad had an AOL account that he used for work, but we didn't have a computer at home (or rather, we had an old Compaq from the early 80s that nobody used and was only good for word processing), so we didn't have internet at home.  My dad had a work-issued laptop, so I could only get online when he'd bring that home and dial in for me.

We eventually got a home computer (in 95, as I said) and for a while, I just used his AOL account.  Sometime late 96/early 97, I discovered that AOL gave you extra (I think up to five, but maybe five came later) screennames for free with your account, so that's when I created my own name (and got my own E-mail address) for the first time.  Spent most of my early AOL days terrorizing chat rooms and frequenting all of the videogame websites and AOL channels.  In fact, aside from using it on one or two occasions for school work, I can't remember doing anything but videogame stuff for the first several years that I was online.  The Internet was really slow (probably not by ignatius's standards, starting with it in the mid-80s...wow) and I'd generally lose interest in talking/reading about videogames pretty quickly and then just go play them instead, so I didn't use it too much.  I did start hanging around on AOL forums a lot more in 97 and then in early 98 came upon one where an actual community began to develop.  Actually still in touch with some of those people to this very day.

Started using NetZero (when it actually was free and the name made sense) in late 98/early 99 to connect instead of AOL's own dial-in numbers, since it was typically faster.  1999 brought Napster and, to the best of my memory, my first real branching out from videogame stuff.  That same summer is also when I discovered downloading full episodes of TV shows for the first time (in little 12 MB Real Media files that were, in retrospect, almost unwatchable).  Suddenly my six gig hard drive was seeming very small, but in 2000 there was a new computer with a 30 gig hard drive that I was sure I would never fill (and here we are in 2009; this afternoon I ordered a new 1TB drive because the two terabytes I currently have are nearly full).  In 2001, got Sprint's short-lived (but actually really cool) ION service, which was canceled in late 01 or early 02.  Got Road Runner a few months later and have not used AOL in years now, although I'm pretty sure my parents actually still have that same old account (and nobody, themselves included, actually uses it -- seems like a waste of money).  And so concludes a brief recap of my Internet career.

[KCPowercat]

Do BBS's count?

[KCPowercat]

I remember using this type of interface in the dorms...I have no idea what the actual program was called or how we even used it.