I started an ISP at the end of 1993. For a 56K fibre backbone connection we paid $12,000 a month. Prices have dropped a bit.

Yeah, it has been a rough ten years, hasn't it....?

I remember getting my very first modem (a 33.6) in about 1995 or so and agonising about whether I should shell out something like $40 a month for Internet access when I could hardly imagine what I would use it for.

I was lucky that way; my first ISP was the free Greater Detroit Freenet. They had meetups and all kinds of stuff. The predominate features of the web then were Usenet and Chat. I remember someone teaching me about alt.binaries, how to download the text files and convert them to pictures. =)

My first intarweb? 1200 baud modem, dialing into I think AOL version 2.0. Fortunately, I was too poor to afford the fscking service and discovered the joy of BBSes a week later. Been an internet dweeb ever since.

My first view of the internet was at a terminal at my local state school c. '92-93. It was an open terminal at the library, displaying a gopher site devoted to libraries.

As lame as that was, I still found it fascinating. I got my first 2400K account for $25 a month in the winter of 1993-1994 and have been online with some interruptions here and there since.

The first time I experienced tha Intarnat was watching a friend IRC over a 2400 baud modem from the cheapass computer me and my roommate had just bought. This was 1995, I believe. Unfortunately, I was unable at that time to do PPP from there, so my first experience with full-blown graphical websites was when I visited a friend at a nearby college, and I hung out in their computer lab for awhile. The lab had a broadband net connection, so I was in awe of how fast stuff loaded on their machines.

And it was really cool to see interlaced GIFs at work. You'd see this blocky-but-somewhat-recognizable pic, and it would rapidly increase its resolution until it looked like it was supposed to.

Well, I thought it was cool.

Watch it drezdn... My company still uses terminals and telnet. Less than one quarter of the people in our office has a PC. I'm one of them, but whatever. I started on AOL in '93 (I was ten, alright) and actually still have my first username - I use it on AIM.

I was BBSing around '82 or so, basically locally where we had choices countable on one hand's fingers. There was an (ultimately expensive) flirtation with Compuserve, where I got (and lost) my first programming job. My first internet experience was on a Unix place that had a USENET feed, but they didn't go live for at least a year after I joined. I actually compiled TCP/IP tools for a company I worked for to get 'em online in a half-assed way, before the web broke (then that project got taken out of my hands and given to higher-ups).

I remember all of us sitting around in the help desk passing around the first WIRED. It was mine. It went away ... alas.

Anybody remember The Source?

I couldn't afford a computer back in 1995 but I desperately wanted to see this world wide web thing so I got a Philips Screenphone that had a 14.4 modem. No graphics capabilities, no audio and the damned thing crashed every five minutes but I was on the web. Later that year I bought something called WebTV, a device you hooked up to your television and a phone line. It had a 28.8 modem so it felt like a speed demon to me. The following year I bought a used PC with 24 megs of memory and an 820 meg hard drive. The BUS speed was 100! Ha! I remember upgrading the modem to 56k and bragging about how fast pages were loading.

I didn't get online until '97; 33 kbps dial-up, of course. It would have been earlier, but we were in the process of moving to Greece, and waited 'til we got settled here to subscribe. Still, we were pretty much the only people we knew with a computer (much less internet) at home. My very first post (to a haiku forum) is still out there embarrassing me. But I remember the wonder of it... Wow, people actually out there talking about this stuff. Wow.

I started on Compuserve in the early 90's, and because of that I didn't feel any need to move on to the internet until well after I should have.

I guess I finally got going with proper internet access in 96 or 97. I can't believe that was only 10 years ago.

May 15, 1999 was my first foray into the internet. I had just bought my first computer, an eMachine, the weekend before. I can't remember my first ISP, but I remember one of the first things I did was join an MSN chat room (#newbies). I met the mister in that chat room a few weeks later.

I still have a 2400 baud modem in my garage. Used it in 1994, then got a screaming 14,400. Other than work stuff, first chatted on html chat programs with Lynx, then I discoverd Mosaic, which became Netscape very soon after I started.

Did anyone every use POWWOW? That was an awesome program.

I think we got an internet connection around 1995 - I remember using Netscape Navigator and ICQ. I liked to hang out in the Yahoo chat rooms. I had a geocities page for awhile. I mostly used the internet to keep in touch with friends from summer camp - my mom didn't want me to have my own email address, but I got a yahoo address anyway.

Interestingly enough, my family had owned computers for a long time before that - my dad worked in that business at the time, so we had lots of company prototypes laying around. We had these old Fujitsu "pocket computers" (about the size of a legal envelope, as thick as a paperback novel) that we could "network" with our home computer.