In 1991, however, I got interested in setting up menus for gopher at the university. It was also the year I discovered a german mud called Nightfall. At the time, I was taking a class in German and thought it would be a great way to practice the language and boost my grades.

/me falls out of the chair laughing at how naive -that- was

Long story short, I became addicted to mudding and chatting online. I set up a list of library search things (as well as a hidden page of muds and things) and, with the help of a similarly addicted professor, convinced the college to allow people to dial up use gopher to anonymously do the library searches without logging in because system time was rationed according to classes and everyone had a hard limit to how long they could be logged in. Gopher was the only program you could use anonymously, but it had the proper permissions to launch telnet sessions I then purchased a modem for my trusty Amiga 1000 and procdeded to trash my GPA.

Then came IRC, gopher, and usenet. I spent A LOT of time on IRC (also to practice German, which I actually did learn) and learned a lot through usenet. I wasn't too into computers then - I had tried to use it as a tool to find women on other campuses and that didn't work out too well, so I went back to more reliable methods (beer bashes, parties, the dorm laundry room).

All of this IRC, usenet, etc. was done on a smoking 486 Packard Bell with a 2400 baud modem. I remember how amazed I was when I spent the $100 and got a 14,4 - it didn't refresh line by line anymore! That was cool.

The second semester I remember the secretary of the German dept. showed me this neat little program called Mosaic. Spring 1994. It was fun, but got boring kind of quickly. You would just sit and wait and wait and wait. Gopher was a lot faster.

Next semester came (Fall 94) and the web was A BIG DEAL. And although I still prefer to write email through a nice unix terminal using pine, the Web kind of was like the part in The Wizard of OZ where everything goes from black and white to color. Suddenly, the Internet was all the rage on campus.

When I think back to all of this, I now realize that the Internet has replaced television in my life. After the time I started spending time on usenet and IRC, I completely stopped watching television, a nightly pastime as a child. When I did graduate, I didn't have a TV for years (and only use it now to watch yoga videos - I don't even know the channels) but easily spend 2 hours a day "surfing".

Looking back, I see how much has changed - me and the Internet.

First time I used the internet was sometime mid-1996. My neighbor had gotten a new computer for her birthday and I'd walk over every day just to chat and watch her surf the net. The irc server we sometimes went on had some online games, like ThinkFast, where you'd get a topic & letter [like "h" & "a greeting"] and you'd have to type a word to fit [like "Hey"]. Whoever typed it most quickly would win 5 points or so. Then you got points for funny ones. So we'd sit there and play that every day. I immediately asked for a computer of my own at that point.

December that same year my parents gave my sister & me our own computer: a pentium 133mhz, 32mb ram, 1.2gb hard drive running Win95. It was a good computer at the time. (: It was christened Bob II [Later ended up as Bob V after several upgrades]. We somehow managed to set it up, although none of us had much experience, and our neighbor helped us out with irc and everything. I believe that was December 22 of that year, the first time I went online myself without someone else sitting there.

So yeah, every day since I've been going online. Eventually the irc server I stayed on was shut down, so I discovered others existed. That was originally the only reason I got a computer, but I've found more reasons to keep it. (: Although I still can't quite brush that irc addiction.. Don't think I want to, anyway, hehe.

Anyway, that computer went through several upgrades [ram, hard drive, OS] but it ended up dying anyhow. All salvagable parts were put into a new computer which we got from the university.

I've ended up with 2 computers of my own since then, & I'm planning a major upgrade within the next 2 weeks, which I'm about to write a new forum post on. :D

I still have a couple of floppy discs at home with copies of Netscape-Mosaic 0.9 and Netscape 0.96 on them (yes, Netscape fitted on a 1.44M disc with space to spare!)

Persuaded my employer to get connected and start using internal e-mail in early '95, thus acquired my first postmaster@ and my home e-mail address which I still have today (the company changed names, and I took it on as my own). Made heavy use of Usenet. Mid '95 met (on-line) the lady that I later married (though at this stage this was one of several newsgroup & e-mail friendships). Mid '96 got connected from home for the first time (I was on a tight budget). Late '96 arranged round-world flights (Korea on business, then across the Pacific and back to the UK by the "scenic" route) mostly using on-line tools. On this journey, met up face-to-face with many friends from the net, including future wife.

Early '97 got a newsgroup newgrouped, friendship with wife-to-be became serious romance. For immigration reasons the romance was conducted approximately as 6 months living together, 6 months apart, 6 months together... Pretty much dropped out of sight from Usenet, made heavy use of e-mail (long-distance relationships are like that).

Married in spring of 1999 (not on-line, but much of the arrangements made via e-mail). Now living happily ever after and still using E-mail to stay in touch with stateside family and friends.

Slightly regretting not having pushed the company harder to make more use of the net in 1995/6. It would have done them good (not that I care now, I'm long gone) and would have given me *such* marketable skills.

First used a computer? 1980? 81?. Used (OK played with more than used) an Apple of some kind at school (then the much more exciting Research Machines RM380Z). Built my own Sinclair ZX81 from a kit. Learned a bit of Z80 machine code because the ZX81 only had 1k of memory and using its interpreted basic this wasn't enough to produce an interesting game.

About this time the school ran a course in computing for the first time as the examination boards had just agreed on a nationally recognised "O-Level" (16 year old) qualification in computing. Me and my friends sat at the back reading "Programming the Z80" by Rodnay Zaks. We were ignoring the teacher (who was at the how-to-find-the-on-switch stage). We got thrown out.
--
Iain-F
Metals Geek

That was the first term in 90. Second term I was in with the library and we had a Mac lab (no net connections) and Sperry PCs (8088 machines I believe). We still dialed up to the modem pool to get to the mainframe for the card catalog, but we also had access to our VAX/VMS accounts, from which we could telnet.

So, in the second half of 90 and first half of 91 I had email and was telnetting into some bbses I could find (Skynet was one which has since long ago died).

I remember when Shadow BBS came up too, sometime in 92 or 93, and it was initially a fun bbs. I think I was user 312 or something.

Got my first x86 in 89. BBS-ing shortly afterward. My parents got prodigy, so I was on that thing for a little while. My 1200 modem was instantly replaced with a hayes 2400...we could only dream of 9600, just out of financial reach.

Didn't actually stary "browsing" until I got to college in '93. Mosaic! Woo.

Hanging at CERN with Berners-Lee? Woof.

There was a time when there was no public Internet, only DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Net.� I remember hearing about it.� The really big thing for me was when Usenet News started being carried by some machines which were on the Internet backbone and had FAST connections.� Your posting could go from one end of the country to the other in an hour instead of a couple of days as it sometimes took by modem.� That started a trend that hasn't even paused to catch its breath.

The first multi-user computer I used didn't have an e-mail system.� Computers were thought to be for computing, not communicating.� How things have changed.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Iain-F:
At the university we used 486 windows PCs to connect to the UNIX servers and run Mosaic in an X-Windows session (the PCs had no browsers). Within a couple of months Mosaic (then Netscape-Mosaic, then Netscape) were installed on the PCs and Computer Services pulled our UNIX accounts.

---

This was the only way to fly when I started doing this in 1996. Netscape on Windows was pretty slow and sooo unreliable. Netscape on Unix wasn't perfect either (I once deleted my entire home directory when I thought I was purging my cache). But at least if it dumped core it didn't require rebooting.

My first internet stuff was Usenet, using Notes as the newsreader. I ended up being the notesadmin for our branch (IIRC, I had one leaf below me), so I got a chance to play around on misc.consumers.houses, rec.music.synthesizers, and alt.support.diet. This must have been in 1991. We had Mosaic, but I don't think we used it much, until Netscape came out.

At least through 1993, I could get into a work machine then on to the net (text only) using my trusty 286 and a 2400 baud modem. Late '93 I went to 14.4K and Winders and never looked back.

quote:

---

Hanging at CERN with Berners-Lee? Woof.

---

I just asked my father about our first time online and he wrote back:

We began before 1984 when the Mac came out.

We probably began around 1980 ... By that time I had gotten the university to purchase a Micom Word Processor.

Our first home computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 [model I].

The university was using a Dec PDP-11/70 in those days.

The first modem we used was a handset 300 baud modem (we still have it).

So, 1980 would be much later than I had calculated. I would have been 14 years old at that time. I know my interest in electronics predates that by a fair bit. Dad was always scavanging for junk and had a little workroom with an army surplus oscilloscope and miscellaneous parts sorted into egg cartons everywhere. (I learned to read resistor and capacitor markings and helped him sort stuff that he stripped from discarded equipment.)

--
SynrG

My first experience with computers was playing games like Number Munchers in 1st grade. Man I loved that game.

I'm a senior now, so that must have been about 12 years ago. Most of my experience with computers was, however, at my uncle's house. He always had fairly new hardware, and I played games like Oslo and Commander Keen. I also played some text mode games on my cousin's computer.

My father is very anti-technology, so I didn't get a computer for many years. (He never misses a chance to threaten to throw my computers in the trash, to tell me that computers are just a fad, or to berate me for 'wasting my life in front of a computer screen'.) The first computer I owned was a Z-80 based Epson QX-10. Quite a nice computer, that. According to legend, it was one of the last computers to use the CP/M operating system. It was given to me by my ex-girlfriend's mother. It was falling apart when I got it, and I really new nothing about computers then, so it's a miracle I got it working. In fact, I couldn't get it working for the first few days I had it. Luckily, I had been an electronics geek for years already, so I had the skills to fix the hardware problems it had. My first programming experience was on the QX-10. Amoung the piles of disks and books that came with the computer, I had discovered dBASE II. I practically inhaled the manual and a tutorial on dBASE, and while I don't recall ever doing anything useful with it, I had a lot of fun. I had just decided to try to write an Adventure-type text mode game in dBASE when the QX-10 finally died beyond all my powers to resurrect it. I had been using parts from the right hand floppy drive to keep the left hand floppy going, and I was replacing defective system ram by swapping it with chips from the video board. You can only keep a machine running for so long by cannibalizing non-essential systems.

After the Epson died, my uncle sent me a 486 computer, and on that I learned QBASIC and C. Later he sent me the parts to upgrade to a pentium 150.

It wasn't until about a year ago that my father agreed to get the internet. I had used the net at school before. I had to not only set up the computer for net access, but also wire up a second phone line for it.

quote:

---

Also, wieviele Leute hier sprechen das Deutsch? Wieviele sprechen es so schlecht als ich? (So, how many people here speak German? How many speak it as badly as I do?)

---

Connecting to other machines was different. Rather than telnetting to another host you had to issue a "dial" command. At a certain prompt (I forget what the exact program was) you would issue a command "dial (ip)". I spent most of my time attempting to dial and log into the quest accounts of machines whose ips I picked randomly out of thin air. I most have spent hours doing that. ~sigh~

The golden age of the net.

First time I used a computer is a slightly different question and there is no way I can remember exactly what that story is all about, but I guess it all started in high school, becuase I used to cut class and spend lunches and after school, and weekends screwing around Butte Hall on the Cal State Chico campus hacking away on a pdp 11/70 running RSTS/E there, as well as a CDC Cyber 170 running NOS. "Network Operating System". It was a card reading os converted to time shareing duty. What a kludge.

---------------------
-Tim

#!/usr/bin/perl
# usage: perl -I (k1)|(k2)|(k3)|(k4)|(k5) qrpff
# Where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least
# to most-significant order. Output goes to stdout.
s''$/=\2048;while(<>){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@ b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb25,_;H=73;O=$b[4]<<9 |256|$b[3];Q=Q8^(P=(E=255)&(Q12^Q4^Q/8^Q))<<17,O=O8^(E&(F=(S=O14&7^O) ^S*8^S<<6))<<9,_=(map{U=_%16orE^=R^=110&(S=(unqT,"\xb\ntd\xbz\x14d")[_/16%8]);E ^=(72,@z=(64,72,G^=12*(U-2?0:S&17)),H^=_%64?12:0,@z)[_%8]}(16..271))[_]^((D=8 )+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval

quote:

---

Originally posted by MrMachineCode:
My father is very anti-technology...

---

Man, that would suck having a luddite for da. I lucked out. Mine is a Phd in Fluid Mechanics, he's been a cool guy to have around.

1982
My first computer was a Vic 20, cause my Dad thought they were cool. I was HEAVY into books at the time, and played with it a bit, but wasn't very interested. Then my Dad bought me a Commadore 64 for Xmas, right after they were released on the market.

That was my first turning point. I loved that computer to death! It was at this point that my book reading habits took a serious nosedive and never fully recovered. I played games for weeks on end, and during the course of a very difficult protracted illness I joined Quantem Link (I've heard rumors that that Network became AOL, but I have not been able to confirm it).

Then in 1987 I jjoined my first BBS. Turning point number 2 here, as the second BBS I joined became my life. For almost a decade! That's when I started to really get into computers, and the people that used them.

Sometime around 1990 friends from the BBS who were away at school starting raving about this thing called the Internet. I foolishly paid no attention.

Turning point 3 happened when I finally got a shell account. Wow. Usenet, Email and IRC. Became addicted to IRC right away. Then in 1992 I got my first IT job at a local ISP.

The rest is history, as they say. Heh.

Turning point 4 happened when I quit my 2nd ISP job. This was in 1997. Since then I've only been formally employed once, and have been freelancing the rest of the time.

Turning point 5 hasn't quite happened yet, but I'm working with some interesting folks in Florida who want to start a couple of internet entertainment ventures. THAT will make the last 10 years worth of tears, sleepless night, and lack of RL worth it.

-Crystal

------------------
<* Crystal does not suffer fools gladly. Be forwarned *>

confirmed

Then I saw what a real ISP was like.

Five or six months after I opened my AOL account, I left for a real ISP (a friend inspired me to make the change).

------------------
opiate

quote:

---

Originally posted by Steen:
crystalcut wrote:
I joined Quantem Link (I've heard rumors that that Network became AOL, but I have not been able to confirm it).

confirmed

---

Coolness! And thanks..I hate throwing around facts I've not confirmed. Now I can shout this to everyone I want to! LOL.

-Crystal

I didn't do much with computers till '93 when I got into the state's residential math and science school (still don't know how I pulled that off). Anyway, we had a Sparc2 and a T1 to the internet. I was one of the few to get a Sparc account as a Junior. Wow. I fell in love with unix right there. I used to tweak my shell to display all kinds of stuff in the prompt. I pulled ray traced and 3-D stuff off of wuarchive all the time.

The next year my dad bought me a 486/33 with a 120M disk. And I was lucky enough to get a dorm room with an ethernet connection. I loaded linux on 100M with a 10M swap and 10M for windows 3.1. I had to run X-Windows on another box and display it on mine. The web was picking up at this time. I wrote my first webpage in pico.

Then I graduated. The only netaccess I had was a 2400 baud dialup over SLIP. Talk about withdrawal. I could barely even chat. I'd wakeup in cold sweats hoping it was only a nightmare. My community college had no access at all so I transfered to a university with dedicated access and a linux lab.

Later, got onto FidoNet servers and started playing with usenet via gateways to the local BBS, probably 1987 or so.

Online came about a year later, when I joined the GEnie service and stayed on for about three years. That was a great experience, as I wound up meeting some great people online and discussed all sorts of things from TV shows and musical acts. I even wound up doing some round-robin fan fiction stuff with a bunch of people that went to novel length (it was called "Bugs Bunny Vs. The Borg" ) . Strangest moment came when I reviewed a Les Paul & Mary Ford box set online in a music forum, and got a message about a day later from Les' neighbor saying that he read my review and thanked me for the kind words. :O Or when I asked the people in the Queen forum to print out words of greetings to Brian May (he was appearing at the local HMV for an autograph session) and wound up with around 75 pages of messages.....

By the time I finally got onto the Internet I had upgraded to a 4 megabyte STe (this was when it was cheaper to buy a new ST than to have the old one RAM-upgraded), but I did it via Lynx and accessing the USEnet via QWK packets offline. Thankfully three guys (one from Australia, one from Germany and one from the US) came up with a TCP/IP stack, a web browser and the .OVL layer to get the first two to work together, which was soon followed with the NEWsie newsreader/email client and the AtarIRC client. Of course, I finally went off the deep end and got a Falcon (the last computer Atari developed) in order to actually browse in colour. This system actually stood me in good stead for five years before I finally went to a Mac about two years ago in order to take advantage of online shopping and streaming audio.....

That's the first time I went online, the first time I used a computer was in the late 80's. It was an old DOS 286.

We went through a few computers before settling onour last DOS based 286. Next we got a Win 3.1 machine and a few more after that. Now I'm a Mac Addict and I use an iMac. Haven't looked back.

Now I run OS X with an ISP and IE 5.1.1 and Mail.app.

In 6th grade, the computer lab (all Apple IIe's) got a Macintosh. An LC, if I recall. It was like this pristine, untouchable thing. Everyone held it in awe. At first, no one was allowed to use it but the teachers. Then later, the teachers started giving people permission to use it if they were well-behaved and attentive in the lab. Everyone was so eager for their opportunity to use "The Macintosh". I remember the first time I got to use it. I was afraid to touch it at first, it was such an awesome, perfect machine.

It had KidPix, which I promptly fell in love with.

That was pretty much the scope of my computing experience until high school. In 8th grade I visited an out of town friend, and they had a computer, also an LC, and that was just so cool that they had their own computer. Maybe it seems that I was a little behind the times, seeing as how it was 1993, but no one else I knew had their own computer.

In February 1995 (my freshman year of high school) I got my first computer. A Macintosh Performa 635CD. When I took it out of the box I couldn't believe how big it was. The only Macs I had seen were the compacts and the LC's - I didn't know there were any other kinds of Macs. I was instantly in love. I knew hardly anything about computers beyond what we'd done at school (games and typing) but I made myself learn. I set up the computer entirely by myself and was immensely proud. (Not like my parents would have been much help if I'd ask - they're two of the most technologically illiterate people you'll ever meet.)

At that time I didn't know what the internet was. I had heard vaguely of something called "America Online" but didn't know what it was, nor had I cared enough to look into it. The Performa came with a 2400 bps modem, with which I wasn't quite sure what to do. The computer also came with Apple's ill-fated eWorld software (which could have beat out AOL if Gil Amelio had known how to market it). I remember first trying to use eWorld without even having the modem hooked up. (I guess I didn't really get the concept yet.) Then I figured out I had to connect the modem, but eWorld wanted a credit card number for a user account, and all this other stuff, so I gave up.

For about a year, I used my computer for school projects, my personal journal, and a lot of playing around and messing things up (but learning along the way).

In December of 1995, an AOL disk came in the mail and I asked my parents if I could have an account. They said yes. And so it began that in late 1995 I had my first taste of the internet. I was fascinated by AOL. I began reading and posting to message boards and going to chat rooms. Occassionally I tried to go to web pages, but AOL's excuse for a web browser was terrible, and half the time the pages wouldn't load, or when they did, it usually took about 10 minutes.

This was also when AOL charged by the hour, and I would stay up all night in chat rooms somtimes. That stopped when my parents got a ridiculously high bill one month (something like $400) and were not very happy!

In the first half of 1996 I learned considerably more about my computer. I had made online friends who were geeks and hackers, and from them I gleaned information, tips, and the confidence to experiment further on my own.

By later in 1996, more of my friends were getting email addresses. This was nice, since most of my good friends lived in various parts of the country (I met most of them at a summer program). Finally, an almost instantaneous way to keep in touch! We began chatting on IRC, too.

During my junior and senior year of high school I became progressively more geeky, and, well, I guess the rest is history! I made my first web page my junior year of high school. It was pretty awful. But I learned HTML by teaching myself, as I have learned pretty much everything about computers.

That's my story...

------------------
Amber Rhea
(macwoman)