June 24, 2010
Dear Clusterflock
What year did you first get internet service?
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comments:
- Deron Bauman: It’s a start.
- Joel Bernstein: The first of many things, no doubt.
- Deron Bauman: I’ll pick him up at eight. He may not like the way I smell.
- Michael Smith: Joel’s Dream Date: Phantom Menace; Cat urine cologne; Deron.
- Joel Bernstein: For the record, if you pay to see this, you are no longer my friend.
- Deron Bauman: Meow.
- Joel Bernstein: This must be why I fuck so many cats.
- Michael Smith: Seems to me the experiment almost does itself.
- Casey Cichowicz: No. It is not possible. I can assure you.
- Joel Bernstein: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes?
- LaurenH: I’m with those who say get that girl out of that household. The father has now very effectively...
- Rick Neece: Holee sh..!
- Rick Neece: Asian calligraphy, ‘cept instead of a brush, hot glass. The image of her controlling the glass and...
- Rick Neece: For the gull-wing, I’m sure it would knock me in the chin every time I opened it.
- Marco: Oh god yes.
I think it was ’94.
oh gosh. I’m almost embarrassed to admit.
19-2000 or so.
For us, 1995, when we first moved back to KC. We got our first home computer in 1989. We got high-speed cable internet in 1998, as part of Time-Warner’s Road-Runner beta-testers, after we bought the house. We’ve been on the slippery slope ever since.
I don’t remember the year but it was Prodigy.
At home – 94, from a small Canadian ISP that no longer exists.
At work – 92 or 93? I can’t remember anymore. I remember Mosaic was my first browser.
If I remember rightly, we had SWBell dial-up. I can still hear the bpong-bpong-bpong, as it connected.
Walt, okay, now the iterations. Wasn’t Mosaic the precursor to Firefox?
I started with AOL. so proud.
Mosaic begat Netscape which sort of begat Firefox, so you’re sort of right, Rick. I’m not a code person and I’m sure someone can explain this better than I can.
I remember the first picture I downloaded at work, too. It was a picture of the Enterprise from Star Trek.
Did you use a separate program to view the image?
now that you mention it, the Enterprise pic was pulled off a Usenet binary newsgroup and it didn’t involve Mosaic… damned if I can remember what we used, though.
I haven’t thought of this stuff in nearly 20 years. Golly.
Y’all, I remember the first time I used a fax machine.
I used it to send a photograph of James Joyce from a United States library to a film producer in Dublin. The phrase “coals to Newcastle” came to mind.
But I remember my incredulity when the machine spat out a message confirming delivery of the image.
And getting back to your internet, I remember Cello. That didn’t last long.
I joined AOL at age 11, so… 1997? We got internet and a computer because I was starting online tutorials for school. My user name was Shirpiper. (A contraction of Sirocco and Pied Piper, my two favourite horses at the time.) I got some porn sent to my account, and my dad blocked the two addresses and then told me I couldn’t have my own account. So began a love affair with the internet, an addiction I would do whatever I had to, to propagate.
The first time I used a computer was about six or seven, and the first time I used the internet was at a public library at about age 9. There was one computer with internet and it was rudimentary at best. I saw a box on the screen and typed ‘horse’ into it. (Altavista?) I found pictures of horses and printed some off. No one ever taught me how to use a computer, it just made sense to me.
I think it was 93 or 94 Windows 3.0 with 2meg of RAM and a 32 meg HD. I remember at one stage upgrading to 4 meg of RAM. I though I was flying the starship enterprise!
I don’t remember when we got it at home, but I used the Internet at work in the 80s. We’re talking the Internet before the Web. Libraries were ahead of the curve in terms of sharing machine readable data. I also dealt with mainframes and those huge disk packs. (In fact, there’s an 80s photo of me in a promotional university brochure, holding two disk packs. Daryl, do you know where that is? That would be hilarious to post.)
God, I’m old. It’s funny that was not all that long ago, but it seems like a million years past.
Walt, Mosaic was the first web browser we adopted in my library–94, I think. It was complex and strange, but I remember using it with the feeling that the world was about to change in an astonishing way. Boy, did it.
AOL 1.0.
I think we got it in the mail with samples of Tide — or maybe from the grocery store at the service desk. Either way, it was before we had Windows 95, which was probably around 1996. Maybe 1994 or 1995?
I remember it was a big deal, because it was the first time my dad was excited about the possibility of continuing working after he got home.
I don’t remember when we got it… I was really young, I am thinking maybe 1990-1992ish…my parents worked at a university so we got it through that. I don’t remember ever not having the internet. It was all text, black screen/white letters.
I don’t really remember browsing the internet back then, but I do remember email. I have this amazing/foggy memory of lying on the floor in the den while my mom wrote an email. In my memory if felt like hours just lying there listening to the click clack of my mom typing away on the computer. I was amazed at how fast she could type, and the noise was so soothing and happy. That is a very warm/happy/safe memory.
In 1994 my friend Dylan wrote a book about the Internetz, and through it he got some kind of (free?) Prodigy family account that let him give e-mail addresses to, like, five people, regardless of location. So I was part of his “family,” even though we lived on opposite coasts, and I had access to something kind of Internetlike. My address was ugtr78d@prodigy.com, the mnemonic I devised for which was “ugly tramp 78 RPM D-cup.”
No, it didn’t make any sense. But I still remember it, so there.
Eventually—like, five years later?—Prodigy kicked us off the service, but by that time I was not only online but playing at being a webmaster, so I had access through two work accounts. I didn’t start paying for access until I left that job, at the end of 2001.
When did you first get broadband at home? I stuck with my old dial-up account, leeching off my neighbors’ open wifi, until 2008, when I was about to start grad school and knew I’d need a more reliable connection.
1989 or ’90 I think. Got an account for Compuserve and downloaded my first porn on the ol’ Mac Plus.
Still use the same password today.
I remember mucking around with BBSes in the late early 90s, but I think I got internet late (1999?) and didn’t really bother with it until the early 2000s. I didn’t seriously start using it until clusterflock, to be honest. I was a late bloomer by my generations standards, I think.
I get it. Because you could play a MUCK on a BBS system.
Bulletin Board System System.
I remember being able to read exactly as fast as my modem could deliver characters to the screen. For a while, we delivered, read and turned pages simultaneously. I thought I was flying, and I was.