What Do You Remember from the Early Internet?

[Tsal]

10 print" Girls Girls Girls"
20 goto 10
Run
I doubt having a Commodore 64 in 1983 is considered internet. Lol

[Ruffinogold]

I owned thetobacconist.com back in 90 something or other . Had it up a couple years and no one was really on much so I blew it off . I was a bit too early with the website and wasntt into the internet in general and still aren't . I like it but I think it sucks more than it does good . Id gladly go back to pre internet days

[Bamarick]

A 286 with a 1200 Baud Modem on Dial-Up. The Computer was built by my nephew and cost me a whopping $1800.00 for which I had to float a loan from the Credit Union. We had a local board which was used mostly to trade programs. If I remember right the board had a trunk we could link to that had email & some other stuff. Thing is, there wasn't anyone that I knew to send an email to

[Peacock]

I remember having a modem that I had to hang a phone handset on, I think it was 2400 baud. I remember dialing into bulletin board services (BBS) and playing text based games. I remember dialing into my local ISP, which was a command-line only VAX/VMS system(which is where I started to learn UNIX), and manually sending emails by interacting with the SMTP server directly.. EHLO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO.. and so on. I also had to use the text based "links" to surf the "web". I remember ordering Slackware 3, which was the first release on CD-ROM. That said, I wish the internet had never developed past that point. I think the world was probably a better place without 99% of what it brought.

The bad the bad, I get it - I really do. But what about the 1% you can't do without? Tell me more...

[Peacock]

I remember watching tv as a young lad and seeing commercials for aol that is getting ready to come out. Dad stated “that will never fly”.

Classic Dad-quote! I'm sure he was in the large majority when people first heard about an Internet Service Provider. Who thought they'd one day be regulated as utilities just like electricity, water and gas?

[Peacock]

"You've got mail!"

Spam was still meat in a tin.

My wife is from Kauai, HI and she'd argue that SPAM was, and still is, very much so meat in a tin. I do have to say, I can cook up a killer SPAM musubi. They've become my summertime go-to for get-togethers

[Peacock]

I started with a 286 and a 1200 baud modem or something. I remember you would log into tymnet (sp?) at a local bank after hours and then telnet into Delphi to read rec.moto and check email. I did play Doom back in the day when it was on a 3.5 floppy. I had an email account with grad school back in the late 80's, and played with linux even back in the 90's when SuSE came on CD's. By the mid-90's we had cable internet, and everything was different. I never went through a 386 and Windows 3.11 phase. I went from DOS to Windows '95 on a 486.

rec.moto? Enlighten me.

It's great to hear everyone's early computer/internet stories. Who'd have known a pipe smoking community would be full of a bunch of technophiles? Man, my early post about working in a 'digital' industry seems more and more pretentious every day...

[Peacock]

You were born in 1987??? LOL, That year I wa stationed in Alaska and I carried a computer around on my back which, literally, had a self destruct sequence built into it, and a cannon around my neck! I remember that "computer," if you put in the "self destruct" code it would say, "self destruct initiated, do you wish to proceed? y/n" If you chose "Y" it would say, "are you certain? y/n" then it would go to, and I'm not kidding, "are you really certain? y/n" Then it would give you a countdown, during which you could abort. Being as it was made to destroy the thing in case the "7th Russian Horde" was overrunning us, I always thought, man, by the time I get this thing to actually destroy itself, they will have it and have completely ripped it down, and be making copies!
It was the M23 Mortar Ballistic Computer (MBC) and, really, it was nothing more than a glorified scientific calculator. I'm pretty sure I can get an app on my phone today to do what it did back then! LOL
When I was a kid though, I had a Comodore 64, complete with a 5 1/4 inch floppy "B" drive. My motehr got it for me for Christmas one year and expected me to "do things with it." She just did not get that you had to have this stuff called "software" for it. I tried to explain it to her by using her VCR for an example, without tapes, the VCR is kinda useless...

This is a fantastic story, thank you for sharing. I guess they figured you'd just be smashing the 'Y' button furiously as the enemy approached... How much did that pack weigh? That sounds like a honker.

On the parents side, it's occasionally comical how different generations interact with machines. I was lucky enough to have a nerdy dad that loved computers and video games so I was constantly exposed to the newest and greatest (I mean, within our lower middle-class tax bracket, that meant tech that was 2-3 years old...)

[Houtenziel]

I remember having a modem that I had to hang a phone handset on, I think it was 2400 baud. I remember dialing into bulletin board services (BBS) and playing text based games. I remember dialing into my local ISP, which was a command-line only VAX/VMS system(which is where I started to learn UNIX), and manually sending emails by interacting with the SMTP server directly.. EHLO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO.. and so on. I also had to use the text based "links" to surf the "web". I remember ordering Slackware 3, which was the first release on CD-ROM. That said, I wish the internet had never developed past that point. I think the world was probably a better place without 99% of what it brought.

The bad the bad, I get it - I really do. But what about the 1% you can't do without? Tell me more...

Getting to meet cool people that you might not have met otherwise and share ideas. Pretty much a slightly expanded public version of what ARPANET was originally designed for. Beyond that, especially after working in technology for most of my adult life, I find our growing reliance(or perhaps addiction) on technology to be killing our culture and diminishing our souls. Every time I go out into public, I find myself wishing that the sun would throw out a coronal mass ejection and take us back to square one, and maybe it would teach us all what is really important.

[Fr_Tom]

rec.moto? Enlighten me.

These were the old Usenet groups.

rec.moto is at least partially on google these days.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.motorcycles

I used to keep up with the Fidonet bounce as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/co ... g_it_back/

Ah - the old days...

FWIW, I was Microsoft and Novell certified in the late 90's. I have always had an interest in the tech side of things - sometimes professional.