What did you first use?

We had a Mac SE and my dad had a program/service/thingy called RedRyder with which he emailed, but I don't know who in the world he was emailing. I think his modem was about 1200 baud, which made our eventual 14.4 seem absolutely 100% BITCHIN'.

You remember your first day online? Wow.

Goodness, I was young, and computer memoriess blur a bit. I was on computers in elementary school: lots of Mac boxes, some green+black, some color. I remember Win 3.1, and using DOS a good bit for some older (at that time) games. I remember having a 486 that made Ultima [x] FLY - the little boat would cross the ocean in no time flat! I went to a friend's parent's office, and I saw someone running a beta of Windows 95, which I thought looked silly (for some reason, I can't recall).

As for getting online ... I think I was on AOL first, then we left the walled garden for The Internet. Our 486 processor was the chokepoint in online access, not our modem (I don't remember how we found that out, but that was weird - we went from having the fastest computer amongst my friends, to being too slow to load webpages).

Then there was our Pentium box from Gateway, with it's 3 gig harddrive. Three GIGABYTES? That's HUGE! We can never fill that! Oh, but two highschool boys found The Internet was full of things to download. I think it was mostly shareware at that time, circa 1994, and 3GB wasn't enough (or did we upgrade to a 3GB HDD?). Eventually we found warez, then MP3s on websites and private FTPs. I remember listening to Prodigy's Breathe on repeat, because that was the only MP3 I had at the time. Otherwise, I had hours of MOD files, but they weren't the same.

I remember thinking a friend and I could pitch in and buy a $700 CD burner together, to archive our harddrives, so full of random junk. That was for a 1x burner, and I don't even remember how much blank media cost.

Yes, I have a lot of fond computer memories. Thanks for reminding me =)

I don't even remember when I first used the 'net, but it must have been about 20 years ago, I guess. I remember buying my own first PC, which came with a 486 processor and a free upgrade to a 1GB HDD (from 500 MB), which seemed staggeringly huge at the time and it came with a massive 15" screen.

I also remember (earlier) being excited about the release of MS DOS 5 with all it's wonderful new functions, none of which I can remember now. I'll never forget the entire weekend I spent upgrading all the classroom computers where I worked to the latest version of MS Office using (IIRC) 32 floppy disks.

I remember my first interaction with computers being in 1978 in my last year of high school when we had to mark a stack of punch cards with a program that got sent off to the University of Queensland and some weeks later we got back a print-out of the results, mostly containing error messages.

I remember buying my own first PC, which came with a 486 processor and a free upgrade to a 1GB HDD (from 500 MB)

Are you sure it was 1GB? I'm hardly an expert, but I don't remember 1GB drives coming onto the scene until well into the Pentium era.

My first PC (well, family PC) was a 486 and we have must got it only a year or so before the Pentium came out. I think it had a 200MB drive. I'm pretty sure I didn't get a 1GB drive until p2p music sharing took off around 1999-2000.

In '94 (maybe late '93) I got a nice gateway machine. A 486 DX/2 66Mhz processor with two 360Mb drives. I got internet at home that year or maybe the year before. But it was strictly character mode stuff like email and usenet news. It wasn't till '95 that I bought (bought!) a copy of Netscape.

I was intimidated by the Internet. I was told it was only for serious researchers. That kept me off it until 1987 or so when I used it at work. By 1988 I had a personal account on The Big Electric Cat. By 1989 I was starting my own ISP in my basement in Park Slope. I originally wanted to name it "Brooklynk" but Brooklyn wasn't cool then so my partner rejected it. Then I suggested "PANYC," standing for Public Access NYC. We finally settled on "PA*NIX." (AT&T owned the copyright on the name Unix so people were calling it *nix in those days to get around the restriction.)

We ran on a Mac SE and later an FX. For various reasons, some of them internal Apple politics, we migrated to a Sun SPARC. We connected to the Internet for mail and usenet by dial up to NYU's cmcl2 on an expensive 19.2K baud modem.

Are you sure it was 1GB? I'm hardly an expert, but I don't remember 1GB drives coming onto the scene until well into the Pentium era.
It's possible - I had thought it was a 486 DX/2, but it may have been an early Pentium I guess. I know it was when the 1GB drives were brand-new.

The only reason I know the exact date is because earlier this week I was going through some archived stuff and found my first ever email. I save all my email.

My first access was via some term program I can no longer remember the name of running on
Winsock on Win 3.01 on a Cyrix powered box with a 2400 baud modem. It had a monster 20MB drive! A few years later 40MB drives would finally drop below $250. Today I saw an ad for a 2TB portable drive for $79. At that time there was no WWW yet.

Stupid me along with my friends started Canada's first commercial internet company a bit later. Our 56K fractional fibre backbone link was $9,500 per month plus $2000 per month for the local loop. Yep, almost $12K a month for 56K access. We sold dial-up for $36 for 12 hours and $3.50 each additional hour. After 3 months we moved to 128K and before the first year was out we were at T1.

May 15, 1999 and I met the future mister in a chatroom shortly after that. It was an eMachine and I quickly upgraded it with a 12mg video card and to 256 of RAM so I could play Quake2.

FLT: I think it's easier to remember "when" when you're older when it happened; I was 33 years old. I wish it had been sooner, but that was when I could finally afford it.

The internet sucked back then. It wasn't cool until '92 or '93 when I first started using it.

I can't remember dates for the life of me unless they are burned into my memory. I remember not having enough memory to get on the actual internet on a powerbook. Oh how I loved that powerbook, the name, the mah jong. We never got a modem before then, despite having Apple products all along thanks to my father's gadgety ways.

My parents had a Prodigy account in the early 90's.

The fist internet experience I had was logging onto the local Police Benevolence Society BBS on a laptop that could barely run a text editor. The only reason I logged on was the laptop, second-hand, was set up to do it. Anything else was WAY beyond my skill level. Some years later, I would agonize over exactly how the whole internet thing worked. I just couldn't wrap my head around "browser" and how i "got to" the internet until my very little brother explained it to me. God! I feel old.

My first time was about 19 years ago when I worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our regional office had been networked for email and document sharing. All I remember now about those days before Netscape are the terms "Archie" and "Gopher".

Growing up Dad had a Commodore 64 but no online access. I didn't get on the internet until I went to college in 96 with my first computer (which was my high school graduation gift). But my dorm didn't get internet access until spring semester 97. As soon as I left for college, my parents proceeded to get a computer and AOL. It was rather reminiscent of my dad going off to boot camp and his parents finally getting a color tv.

Obscure Reference - Holy cow, you were Pan*ix? I remember that! I also remember:

Dad telnetting into the weather underground and getting the weather in Fiji
The BBS handle of the older friend who had all the best Apple ][ stuff, and two floppy drives to make me copies.
As an Apple ][+ kid, seeing a Mac for the first time at Billy Parry's house - and using a mouse for the first time on MacPaint
Downloading "Real Genius" sound clips from AOL at 2400 baud. Waiting all night to hear "Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes."
Dragging the System Disk into the Trash on a beta-test Mac II - and wedging the hardware so badly it had to go back to Cupertino.
Steve Jobs giving the class convocation when I started college - he had just started NeXT, and the school had a half dozen of them - 4 slabs and 2 cubes.
Getting my first real unix box - an old Sun 4/150 with a QIC drive and 21" CRT
Getting my first Linux shell account - not as cool as my Sun box.
A friend getting a 1 GB HDD - circa 1995 or so.
Driving an hour to get blank CDR media - at $10 a disc.
Watching a box do a POST through 1 GIG of memory.
Electronic Arts "hacking" a server I had built to announce The Sims.

For me, it was probably January 1991, when I started going to a college where you could get a Unix terminal account.

Long before I got to the Internet I had used BBSs via my trusty Commodore 64. I wish I still had that machine.

I started at university in 96, and had fiddled around on the net a little before then, but I finally started to see the point when I got to college. I could get an email account! And email my old friends who were at different universities, and my new ones at this one! It was very exciting.

I moved to France in 99 and persuaded the computer tech in the school I worked at (who was very attractive - I so should have asked him out) to let me use one of the networked PCs in the computer room. I proceeded to telnet into my university email account, and he looked at me as though I were working magic. Computer tech wasn't very advanced in that school.

September 1995 for me, and I can't remember if I hit the 'net from the first second-hand computer we owned or from the computer labs at college. I have very fond memories from that era of the people I met online whom I'm still in contact with in various ways.

The oddest story is that someone I knew from the anime fanfic mailing list lead me to meet my current boyfriend. FULL CIRCLE!

Commodore 64, 300 baud and Quantum Link for me. Also Compuserve. Around 1982.

Triode: "two floppy drives to make me copies"

Wow man, it's like you where living in the future!

Man, I don't remember exactly, but it was some sort of email system at UMass. Would have been, like, 1996. We had to hike all the way across campus to the engineering building to use the computers.

I first used shared VAX terminals, and went out on the net via lynx (was able to sneak onto IRC without anyone else at work really knowing what that was).

Then Mosaic came along, then Netscape, and that was great.

Maybe 1992-3 was the first real internet stuff I did.

I had a rejected (by others) Digital Rainbow, with an OS that used the dot prompt. But only used that for dBase II. The first dBase class I went to we got a 5 1/4 floppy disk with our stuff on it, and when I slotted it, one of the options was "format floppy," which seemed like a good idea at the time but then I had a hard time finding my data. :-)

(The first PC I had on my desk had a 40 MB hard drive and 4MB of memory. This was ancient by the time I got it, but I had a boss who said that is all anyone would ever need.)

Oh gawd. Punch cards at the computer building. There were probably 15 stations where we could type out the cards. This would have been around 1980 and I would have been mucking around with SPSS and logging into wherever it was that actually had the computing program. It's been too many dying brain cells ago... I found one of those punch cards over the weekend. It was a placeholder in a cookbook.

Our first personal computer was one Tom built - a zenith heathkit using long forgotten dos prompts to run either a word processor or number crunching program. Dialup into the main frame at the university. I is old.

Oh, god, Zenith heathkits. We had one, but it wasn't connected to anything. Mom started the Heath Users Group in our town. It did ok for a while, but as the IBM clones started coming out, everyone kind of splintered.

I guess it was '87 or so that we got the Epson, which couldn't connect up to anything. In '88 we got on Compuserv, but man that was a pain. AOhell was worse.

I didn't really get into it until I went to university and got on the VAX to "phone" random people at other universities. Chatroulette before it was IRC. That was in '88 or so.