When did you start using the internet?

[Tuffdisc]

My brother bought me a Packard Bell PC for good grades in school i think... i must have been 12, 13, 14... First place i ever went to was some chat site: talkcity i think it was called.

I remember when Hotmail was not owned my Microsoft
Netscape was the most awesome browser back then

Napster - oooh the days of Napster! First song I ever d'd in Napster was Tai Mai Shu (google it LOL)
Leaving music to download for hours at a time and finally coming back to it having stopped because my mom used our phone :|

Hotmail has always been owned by M$

 

[Siphorous]

I think it was the mid nineties. It was around the time of IE1 and Netscape 3 or thereabouts. I remember it clearly - Netscape was so much better than IE back in those days.

In terms of 'online' though, prior to the world wide web - I was on bulletin boards and prior to that, Compunet with my C64.

 

[ZigZag]

Whaaat? There were the times without the Internet?! Nooo! Ok, I'm just joking.
I think it was the end of the 90's. We only had it at the university then. Oh, good old times... I used to chat with people from all around the world and I still have lots of good friends in the real life. Can't even imagine chatting with a random person nowdays..

 

[Tangerine]

I had a 486 at work in 1992 or 1993 that was connected to CompuServe, pretty much the first online service - even before AOL. I remember we used it mostly (I worked at a radio station) to download full color weather maps. They took about 1 - 1 1/2 minutes to download one screen shot, but they were in color and it was like having a TV stations weather graphics at our fingertips. Blew us away. I wound up subscribing to CompuServe at my house because of it, though I didn't really find much use for it. There were a few early BBS's there that I checked out, and I also sent and received my first ever e-mails from that CompuServe account.

 

[darkcgi]

1994 with my aol account and my 75mhz AST

 

[teh_fuzz]

Hotmail has always been owned by M$

HotMail was at one point not associated with MS. I believe it was in the late 90's that the big ol' M acquired it.

 

[darkcgi]

remember some of the old internet providers
prodigy
cant think of anything else at the moment

 

[pjbleek]

me and the dinosaurs back in the BCE

 

[dancingpotato]

Around 2000, I was 14.

 

[darkcgi]

My first internet bill was high
didnt know I was getting charged connection fees

 

[Stone]

January of 2000.
Dial up connection was initially provided by Gateway, my first computer.
That was painfully slow.... cable internet service wasn't available until ~3 years later.

 

[rback33]

'96 for me.. Freshman in college... spent a LOT of time in chat places (chathouse) still talk to some of my internet friends from that place from time to time... was using windows 95 and netscape...

 

[beyondthepale]

First internet experience was in 1983.

Note, internet does not mean webpages and such. Internet means wide area network of networks. Those using the word internet to mean webpages and such are talking about the world wide web and/or hypertext transfer protocol communications. A protocol is NOT the internet, it's just the rules that particular systems and/or programs use to talk to each other.

If you were "online" before 1991, you didn't see webpages - they did not exist yet, nor did HTML. Instead, as one user mentioned already, you used "dos like things" to dial up directly to another computer which ran Bulletin Board System software, which was a precursor to the very type of webpage you are on now - a forum. Most of the time BBS's were file dumps as well, where you could download stuff. To go to what we would call today another "site", you've have to disconnect and redial another number to get another computer.

I still miss talking to people on Unix's "talk" program, the first ever chat application. It came out in the late 79s and was the first thing I did with a computer, in 1983. I talked to some college professor guy about 20 miles from me. He and I are still friends, though he's very old now and does not use a computer anymore.

 

[Jaybird]

First internet experience was in 1983.

I too remember dialing up to Bulletin Boards in the early to mid 1980's on a Commodore 64 with a 300 Baud Modem. I remember feeling like I was the shiznit when my parents got me the Commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem.

Ahhh.

I also remember getting my ass chewed out by my parents for a several hundred dollar phone bill because I was dialing up to places all across the country. It sucked when they restricted me to local and in state dialing for the most part as all the 'good' boards were out of state. :/

Those were the days.....

 

[Merciless]

Sometime in 1990 in one of my high school classes....

 

[alice in chains]

1996.

 

[Dana]

1995-96

 

[Dana]

HotMail was at one point not associated with MS. I believe it was in the late 90's that the big ol' M acquired it.

Exactly. Hotmail was my go to email account service in High School before Microsoft bought them.

 

[retro]

HotMail was at one point not associated with MS. I believe it was in the late 90's that the big ol' M acquired it.

Hotmail was bought by MS in late '97 or early '98... it was founded about a year and a half before that. I could go look it up on Wiki, but I'm feeling particularly lazy today.

 

[beyondthepale]

Yep, hotmail was initially ran on Solaris and FreeBSD servers, and thus there was no way in hell that Microsoft owned them at first. They would have insisted on using WinNT 3.51 or WinNT4 servers to run it. Eventually when MS did buy hotmail they switched to the same crappy server platform.

Microsoft bought Hotmail about a year after it launched.