When did you first use the Internet?

I don't mean through compuserve or aol either (tho feel free to share you experiences), but a true tcp/ip connection.

For me it was 92 or 93. I was in junior high school and my buddy's father taught at the local university. We had to use a terminal to dial in, then start SLIP from a unix prompt, then fire up trumpet winsock. We surfed the web with NCSA Mosaic

Man, after being a BBS fan, the Internet was AMAZING!

I got an AOL account on my work computer--didn't have one at home yet. (In those days I had the job from hell--they didn't give me any work to do and then called me lazy for doing nothing and the insane woman who ran the place had been heard to say she wouldn't give me the satisfaction of putting me on unemployment.) I long ago got rid of AOL but still use that old AOL screen name for AIM. (If anyone wants it, or my screen names for any other IM programs, PM me.)

not quite sure of the date. But my ex was working for someone who knew Steve Case and we got an early copy to try out.

I think maybe 50 or 60 people in the Washington area were on it then.

The interface was so plain, just black and white.

out GNN. They used GNN's interface as the platform for what would become AOL.

http://members.aol.com/alank/gnn_press_release.txt

D'uh. It was it's own little online community. Sorry, bout that. We were "members", you had to log in, but we didn't pay for it, IIRC.

I thought it was neat because you could log in, chat, read the news. Don't remember what all else. It certainly wasn't as elaborate as today.

I was in college in 87/88, and I remember that a few people in one of the dorms were on the AOLNet thing. Wow, I had completely forgotten.

Yikes, that's a long time ago!!

AOL was one of the last of the old proprietary services to offer Internet access, but there was a time when AOL was actually a respected provider with the #2 rated content of all of the dialup services (CompuServe was consistently #1, but they cost more).

MSN, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, and many other modern ISP's actually got their start before Joe America even knew what the Internet was. With the exceptions of AOL and MSN, all of the old proprietary providers were eventually destroyed by the Internet and have simply become brands.

Hence, my response. AOL didn't offer their own internet service until they purchased GNN in '95.

They had the community stuff, i.e. AOLNet, and were content providers prior to that, but they didn't have an interface to the web until they bought and used GNN's.

Here's the original press release from AOL/GNN announcing that they were going into the internet service business:

http://members.aol.com/alank/gnn_press_release.txt

I still have my erols dial-up account. I must have paid for two years or something. Now I use Comcast.

at work for the army (fort riley, ks)
at home with one of a million AOL disks in the mail

Was my first full experience with it. The first web site I went to was David Letterman's Late Show. They only had a list of guests and the top 10 list from the last week or two.

It was also the month I got my first email account. I remember the days of only getting 2 or 3 pieces of mail and thinking, wow busy day.

When almost all the sites were from students and profesors. And were black type on a grey background. There were hardly an¥ commercial sites then. Must have been around 1990? Or 92?

I think that was early '93.

They were acquired by, and became, AOL in '95, at which time I switched to a local ISP.

Before GNN, I was on Prodigy. Can't remember when that was, though.

moved to Oregon and my school had email for the first time.

first time on tbe web would be most likely fall of 93 at college.

94. I was a Usenet addict. Tori Amos, x-files groups mostly. Fun, fun, fun!!! :D

with an ip connection. Not much in the way of graphics and I had to learn to navigate with UNIX but I was even then awed by the potential. It was as if I had a key to every library in the world.

Back when connections were free through the local Uni, I had a 9600 baud SLIPP account (but only a 2400 baud modem) and shell account. To be honest, there wasn't much there of interest unless you were either a researcher or a hardcore compsci student, or some combination of the two.

The Internet didn't start gaining interesting content until '92 or so, when people started putting together content and newsgroups targeted at the more general interest user (and you should have HEARD the cries at the time that the Internet was being "ruined"). Prior to that, local BBS's or commercial services like CompuServe or Prodigy had FAR more useful information and user communities.

The college where I was teaching was on the Plato network, which I believe was developed by Control Data or one of the other big Minneapolis companies.

I used it to correspond with a former fellow student who was teaching at the University of Hawaii.

My first real Internet experience was while teching at another college around 1992, when I used it to correspond with the author of the textbook that I was editing part time.

MSN. Still have the same e-mail address.

as I recall there were about 100 computers on the network including our CDC 6600 super computer at Cal State University.

No "web" pages or HTML, though. It was much more bare bones in those days, and everything was done through text-only command lines. On those rare weekends when it was my turn to take the modem home for the weekend I had the incredible thrill of hooking up a portable terminal through a 110 baud (10 character per second) modem!

Back in the good old acoustic-coupler days of free telnet POPs. We were kids and just poking around...kool stuff.

The Seattle public library made it available. Only hypertext. I did some exploring, but couldn't be tempted to buy my own computer. Later with colour graphics out, I decided I'd better get a PC or be left behind. I sure wasn't going to learn at the shite job I had. The better PC's went to the non-working nepots who played solitaire all day.

I got it at home on May 21, 1999.

(It belonged to the library.)

1st online service -- Prodigy, 1990-ish.
1st actual connection to the real Internet -- 1993, Beloit College. Didn't even get Mosiac for about a year -- we had a shell account with gopher, usenet and FTP...

and only because I won a computer in a raffle.

Doing some research for a paper I was writing at the college I was attending. We went online at home in 1996.

At an university in which I was attempting to get (couldn't finish) my Master's degree.

who had this strange thing called a COMPUTER and a MODEM in his living room. The modem was this shoebox sized thing with two circles on it and he put the handset from the phone on there and it made loud squeals. He somehow had a connection from his phone line to this computer, and when he hooked it all up, he was connected to this strange thing called an "internet".

The first words I ever saw typed on a computer screen were

"Care to Chat?"

I knew I had to learn about these things called computers after that.

He was quite the character, this fellow. He was an accomplished musician with a penchant for humiliation; (I didn't go there....) he dated Princess Stephanie and had business connections to many hollywood and creative types.

then...

Also, I ran a BBS that was part of FIDONET... a precursor to the internet.