were you online in 1994?

[zerocool84]

AOL Chatrooms

Ahh those were the days. A/S/L

 

[TechAZ]

I think I had Prodigy around '93 or '94 and rocked a 1400 baud modem. First games I got were Doom, Doom2, and Heretic from a BBS. Still remember the name of my favorite BBS; Citidal of Blood.

 

[erikistired]

aol in the first half, shell account in the second half of '94. those were the days.

 

[Rubycon]

Yeah, used Compuserve.
I tried AOL in 96 when it was unlimited. Providing you could actually get through without a busy signal. :biggrin:

 

[Exterous]

Ah - fond memories. I think I got online around '98 but I was also not tech savvy at all.

 

[ViRGE]

Yes, although it was AOL. The parents weren't happy about the $200 bill I racked up the first month either...

 

[zerocool84]

Yes, although it was AOL. The parents weren't happy about the $200 bill I racked up the first month either...

Damn, pay per minute back then was insane.

 

[QueBert]

BBS's were great, I remember always calling the operator to see what the minute rates were for a new BBS, and of course they varied depending on the time of day.

 

[erikistired]

BBS's were great, I remember always calling the operator to see what the minute rates were for a new BBS, and of course they varied depending on the time of day.

what kind of BBS were you getting on?

 

[TraumaRN]

Damn, pay per minute back then was insane.

Kinda like wireless data plans now....it's truly getting out of hand...

 

[QueBert]

what kind of BBS were you getting on?

long distant ones, mostly ANSI art ones, like ACiD/iCE board. Imagine a huge phone bill because I wanted to download Ansi & Ascii art packs lol.

 

[erikistired]

long distant ones, mostly ANSI art ones, like ACiD/iCE board. Imagine a huge phone bill because I wanted to download Ansi & Ascii art packs lol.

gotcha. all mine were local. i was wondering where the charges came from.

 

[NetGuySC]

In the early to mid 80's on Compuserve, paid like $12 an hour (off peak) plus long distance fees

 

[Tsavo]

Yeah, used Compuserve.
I tried AOL in 96 when it was unlimited. Providing you could actually get through without a busy signal. :biggrin:

AOL had the wheeziest line from the telco I worked at in the great north. Compuserve had 3x the bandwidth at the time. But...work had monster bandwidth due to being on the end of a fat fiber line. I never had to download large files over dial up at my house because I had one of these at work and one at home:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedamnmushroom/4425509693/

 

[MotionMan]

The oldest e-mail I have (I save all my e-mails) is dated in May 1995.

I had AOL for at least two years before that (Of course, I was not able to save those - Some things never change).

I was also in the Los Angeles earthquake they discussed in that clip.

MotionMan

 

[GuitarDaddy]

My first ISP was AOL in 92, then when windows95 launched I switched to Microsoft network, had that until charter cable came to my area.

Hard to believe I've been surfin the web for almost two decades. One thing I remember was the first couple of years I had AOL there wasn't much on the intarwebz, you could actually search for something with one of the few search engines like webcrawler and get 0 results and there was absolutely no advertizing or retail. And there for a good while in the 90's it seemed there was more content within AOL than you could find on the WWW.

 

[Zebo]

Yes, although it was AOL. The parents weren't happy about the $200 bill I racked up the first month either...

Damn! $200 was almost real money then. I didn't know it was pay by the minute. Lucky I could call into school.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I'm honestly surprised at most of these answers, as I thought there would be more responses of people being "online" in the 80s. I guess that makes me old!

Dialing up CompuServe or connecting to a BBS at 300 baud in 1982 was an interesting (and sometimes frustrating) experience. I still have my 300 baud Vicmodem and I think I have my Vic 20 somewhere. I definitely have my other Commodore hardware as well (see sig).

 

[sdifox]

I'm honestly surprised at most of these answers, as I thought there would be more responses of people being "online" in the 80s. I guess that makes me old!

Dialing up CompuServe or connecting to a BBS at 300 baud in 1982 was an interesting (and sometimes frustrating) experience. I still have my 300 baud Vicmodem and I think I have my Vic 20 somewhere. I definitely have my other Commodore hardware as well (see sig).

Mid 80s for me, but the question was 1994...

 

[JimmiG]

I'm honestly surprised at most of these answers, as I thought there would be more responses of people being "online" in the 80s. I guess that makes me old!

Dialing up CompuServe or connecting to a BBS at 300 baud in 1982 was an interesting (and sometimes frustrating) experience. I still have my 300 baud Vicmodem and I think I have my Vic 20 somewhere. I definitely have my other Commodore hardware as well (see sig).

Well, I had a C64, but there wasn't much point in going "online" back then. Many games supported split-screen multiplayer so we just gathered around the computer and challenged each other in games like Lotus, International Karate etc. BBS's and the very early Internet were mostly viewed as something for perverts looking for pr0n (even more so than the current Internet), or something hackers used to discuss programming and computers.

What prompted me to get online was AmiNet. It was huge in the mid-late 90's..games, alternative operating systems, music, animations, tools and GUI enhancements, scene demos... Kind of like the huge repositories for Linux. There's still nothing like it for Windows.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Well, I had a C64, but there wasn't much point in going "online" back then. Many games supported split-screen multiplayer so we just gathered around the computer and challenged each other in games like Lotus, International Karate etc. BBS's were mostly viewed as something for perverts looking for pr0n (even more so than the current Internet), or something uber geeks used to discuss programming and computers.

I had a ton of fun with the V20/C64 and the BBSs of the day. Most of the BBSs I viewed were used for "borrowing" games. A lot of them were discussion boards, as you mentioned, specifically Fidonet.

 

[bobdole369]

Dialup to Q-link on a C-64 circa - 1989ish? My dad had the q-link earlier than that, I inherited his setup. I was on BBS's using Novaterm on the C64 and 128 up until I caved and got a PC when I was 14 or so. It was an XT I scrapped together from bits when computer shows were trading shows and not showcases of the cheapest chinese bullshit.

I'm fairly sure a BBS I called had a bridge over to real usenet in 1993.

So my first real foray into real internetz - was via grex (a VAX set up near UMICH), a competing VAX was m-net.arbornet.org. They had dialup and for a small fee would let you drop to a shell and telnet and gopher and pine, etc.

It wasn't till I had win3.11 (and a full tcp/ip stack) and WIN32s on my 386sx-25 that I actually ran Mosaic and Netscape and mIRC and found the "real" internet. It was 1996.

 

[ultimatebob]

1995 for me... I think that I got a free month of MSN with my new copy of Windows 95.

I had an old (even by 1995 standards) 2400 baud modem at the time. Hell... even loading up the menu pages took 5 minutes over that connection. It was completely useless.

We didn't get "real" 28.8 dial-up connections in my area until 1996.

 

[db]

Finally bought a computer in 1992 and was using telnet, bbs's, etc in 1993.
Started upgrading my computer in '93.

 

[FeuerFrei]

:hmm: I think my university's computer lab had access in 1994 so I'd go there to surf the early web. I'm positive they had it by 1995.
Personally, I got my PC online in summer 1996. It was a Pentium 100Mhz I spent $2048 on that arrived around New Year's 1996. 1.2 Gig hard drive!!! 16MB RAM!!!

Then in 1997, before I graduated, I discovered IRC. :awe: