What was your first exposure to the WWW ?

[kramer5150]

I'm curious, what was your first exposure/experience to the www and internet?

I remember in ~1992 my friend had an ancient IBM PC, with a monochrome color monitor. Its modem was hooked up to a telephone (one of those ancient Charlies Angels looking things). He used to get stock quotes scrolling across his screen. He was playing monopoly on line with someone in new york. He got all excited and I was like...

"Dude whats the big deal? I can play monopoly with you.. here". I think his ISP was "Prodigy", I can't remember.

LOL!!

 

[Darkestred]

oh wow, mine must have been around 93. I remember going through prodigy, a linux based email program/hot tub chats with a nice linux black background and blue text and then onto aol. I think one of my first websites was in 96 while playing red alert.

 

[dan1son]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kramer5150 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm curious, what was your first exposure/experience to the www and internet? I remember in ~1992 my friend had an ancient IBM PC, with a monochrome color monitor. Its modem was hooked up to a telephone (one of those ancient Charlies Angels looking things). He used to get stock quotes scrolling across his screen. He was playing monopoly on line with someone in new york. He got all excited and I was like... "Dude whats the big deal? I can play monopoly with you.. here". I think his ISP was "Prodigy", I can't remember. LOL!!

What you described isn't the WWW. That was Prodigy which was a private service back in the 80s and early 90s. Not unlike early AOL and Compuserve they couldn't get on the internet and were limited to portals, e-mail between members, and other services specific to Prodigy only. AOL was the first one (IIRC) that added full internet capabilities, and that wasn't until the mid to late 90s.

The web wasn't really used much until the mid 90s... before that it was all about newsgroups, gopher, and FTP. There were no ISPs yet, you had to be in academics or work for a large research company to have "internet access" which is not the same as the world wide web.

I remember the first time I opened up Netscape Navigator in Windows 3.1 dialed up to an ISP on a 9600 baud modem. The first site I visited was the site first advertised in a video game magazine I received. I don't remember what it was. Man most websites sure were gaudy back then. But what a change from the text only ideas of newsgroups and the files on FTP servers. All of a sudden there were pictures, things moving around, different fonts, midi files playing in the background... quite an experience.

 

[RedLeader]

I was a relative latecomer, I hit the scene about 1996 with my brand-spanking-new pentium 1 and a top-of-the-line 14.4K modem. Blistering speeds I tell you!

 

[lan]

It was around 1992 / 1993, we had some UNIX machines in school and we used email and IRC mostly. Our line speeds was 56kbps ISDN. The web was slow but I recall the mosaic browser.

 

[zyxwvutsr]

My first web browser was Microsoft hyperterminal, I telneted into a university server (I think) and browsed the internet in text only mode.

 

[laxx]

AOL for me. AOL for DOS!

 

[fordgtlover]

In '92 I had access to the web through my university. This was pre-browser. Everything was text based and command line. There were no central search engines (like Google). There was an index of sorts for FTP servers and other documents called Gopher and Archie.

I would download files from file lists around the world. The files would download to the university server and from there I could do a "get" to bring them down to my PC.

All of this action happened at the blistering rate of 9600bps, because I didn't want to hand over the money for a new fangled 14,400bps modem. Not that it really mattered, because while theoretically at 9600bps a 1MB file should have taken 2 minutes to download, in reality it would usually take 5 - 10 minutes per MB.

When Mosaic was first released in '93, the web was all still text based. I still couldn't browse. I would still text trawl and dial into BBS's until about '94 - '95. The rest is history (by definition).

 

[nibiyabi]

AOL chatroom. Yeah, I had nowhere to go but up.

It was . . . hmm, 1997 I think. I was kickin' my Windows 3.1 machine which probably had like 16MB RAM and a 128MHz processor -- huzzah!

 

[craiglester]

I remember using e-mail to send messages from my college to another about 50 miles away in 1988, I couldn't say for sure if this was "the internet" for sure, or some kind of acedemic network. We used it for the very noble purpose of organizing a party. (It was quite a good one too).

Seeing as no-one had cell phones back then, it was damn useful for us college kids.

 

[plainsong]

My first experience wasn't with the WWW it was with something called Gopher. Anyone remember Gopher? Anyone? Anyone?

But I suppose with html pages and such, that would have to be when a local isp finally got ppp support with good ole Trumpet Winsock and Mosiac was the browser of choice.

 

[Yen]

My first touch with the web is at a local library with Mosaic browser around -94. I didnt know what to do with it, so I surf to AC/DC's website via a search machine (altavista I think)...

Some older boys were playing with MUDs, but my English wasnt adequate at that time to understand the game, I was about eleven years old.

 

[plainsong]

I was more into MUSHing than MUDding, but which ones were you on? We were on TinyTim and GlobalMUSH mostly, both of which are still around if ya know how to use telnet.

 

[AuroraProject]

Depends on the definition of the web. ARPAnet came out in 68-69, TCP/IP in 73, packet switching started with ARPAnet.

Personally we had a US Robotics 9600 baud in the 80's. Thats as early as I can recall.

 

[lumanogin]

typing "www.nintendo.com" into the netscape browser on our new mac in the early 90's. compuserv charged by the hour for internet and we had 30 free hours or something. that's all the exposure i got until we picked up AOL with 500 free hours, then the unlimited plan came out and the rest is history. online chess and warcraft baby.