The DOS thread got me thinking...

[mward69]

What was you 1st experience with the internet? Mine was a 486 DX 66, I think 16 megs mem, and a 9600 baud modem, running WIN 3.1
I started with local BBS, then to AOL by the hour.{when I discovered the "adult" sites, my bill got HIGH}
Anyone remember those days?

 

[need4mospd]

I remember when I was little watching my dad tinkering with his old modems. I think that was on our 386, 2400bps modem.

 

[Trevorus]

486, Win95, USRobotics 14.4 modem. Before that, it was my friend's PowerMac 7200 on dialup. Woo, that was fun!

 

[mward69]

Oh yeah...you have to "tinker" with the old modems....adding in AT commands and crap...oh, the good 'Ol days. I remember Dling dos games that were 50 megs and thinking it was going to take HOURS to DL....lol

 

[manicbassman]

accessing bulletin boards with a 1200 baud modem on an 8086 running DOS 3.3 way back in late 80's

 

[MJ5150]

Anyone remember those days?

Sure do, but I had a 2400 baud modem. The first PC I bought had a 400MB hard drive. I was offered an upgrade to something like 540MB, and I remember telling the guy to take a hike since there was no way I'd ever fill up the 400.

I used CompuServe at first. I remember they had a "free" area on the site, so the big trick back then was to go to the "free" area to read your e-mail. E-mail wasn't really all that popular yet, so I remember adapting to reading e-mail instead of hanging out in the chat rooms you had to pay for to be in.

I eventually switched over to AOL after a brief stint with Prodigy. I held out to the very end to sign up with AOL, I was trying to resist the mainstream. Of course, someone gave me a copy of AOHell, and then I thought AOL was most excellent.

-Mike

 

[Atoz]

Getting my email from the Chemistry Department dial-up line at school using my Mac Plus (8 MHz 68000 processor & 2 MB RAM! ) w/2400 baud ZOOM external modem.

(In high school (1983), I used to use watch my brother use his Commodore 64 w/300 baud acoustic modem!)

Sigh... those were the days.

 

[Johnny Crab]

(In high school (1983), I used to use watch my brother use his Commodore 64 w/300 baud acoustic modem!)

Sigh... those were the days.

In college(late 80's), a Commodore 64 w/300 baud modem connected me to campus to use a Vax 11/780
Link Removed

It also let me use those early all-text BBS services.

Everything worked fine for a couple of years and then the Amiga came out(stereo, based on the Motorola 68000) at a blazing 9600 baud. Then the college "upgraded" to an IBM mainframe which, although faster, spit out 400 screens of error messages similar to Windows error messages. The VAX never did that. It pointed you at your program error. Some upgrade.

Still have the Commodore 64 and the Amiga.
Both got some use when our teens were 1~10 years old(pre-Nintendo game madness).

 

[Chris M]

I was never able to connect to any BBS' or anything because my parents wouldn't spring for a coupler modem (Watch Wargames if you don't know what I'm talking about.), but I learned how to code games in BASIC on my old Atari 800..

 

[Brad Johnson]

IBM/etc. mainframes. First PC - 8086 IBM PC, 256k RAM, 10MB drivehyper: ), 360k floppy, 300 baud modem. BBS access. Dos 2.1. I was a BASIC and debug fiend

First games? Text-based "search" type. Before Pong and Tank

 

[Komakino]

Mine's not that interesting... a P200 I think, 28.8 modem. Actually it was a 56k USR modem, but BT used a line splitter to give us a second line, meaning that each line maxed at 28.8. It sucked

It amazes me to think how much faster stuff is now... I remember thinking that 20 minutes for an mp3 was reasonable. Today I downloaded a Linux distro in about 20 minutes

 

[GregC]

Wow, I didn't think this many posters in OT besides me remembered when there was no high-speed Internet access.

 

[Atoz]

In college(late 80's), a Commodore 64 w/300 baud modem connected me to campus to use a Vax 11/780
Link Removed

It also let me use those early all-text BBS services.

Everything worked fine for a couple of years and then the Amiga came out(stereo, based on the Motorola 68000) at a blazing 9600 baud. Then the college "upgraded" to an IBM mainframe which, although faster, spit out 400 screens of error messages similar to Windows error messages. The VAX never did that. It pointed you at your program error. Some upgrade.

Still have the Commodore 64 and the Amiga.
Both got some use when our teens were 1~10 years old(pre-Nintendo game madness).

Nice!

Ever used these:

On one of these?

We got to use the cards for first semester Fortran, until they finally let us use the green screens second semester. I quickly changed my major to Chemistry.

 

[GregC]

Sweet! We had a VAX and used punch cards, my senior year in HS.

 

[WalterBush]

Radio Shack/Tandy 100, NOT 1000. A laptop, sort of, through a modem with rubber cups that attatched to your non-cordless phone.

I played a wierd Star Trek game that we stuck on the computer with a cassette tape drive.

Later on, 2400 baud on an IBM AT, logging on to bulletin boards.

Ahh, those were the days. Why did we get rid of command-line interfaces, anyway?

 

[middy]

Ummm, I hate to break it to y'all but BBS was not "internet".

 

[Brad Johnson]

Ummm, I hate to break it to y'all but BBS was not "internet".

You're right, they were the precursor to the internet and lead up to it. The same modems could be used to dial into web connections when they became available. Look at the OP.

 

[Basshole]

My first personal computer was a Packard Bell 386 SX 16 w/4 megs of RAM and 40 meg HD, from SEARS. That's 16 Mhz, folks...and that's with the "turbo" button IN.

DOS 3.2, but DOS 4 came out almost immediately after, and I got the free upgrade.

My first experience with computers at all was a terminal at Jr. High School, that you put a regular telephone handset into an acoustic coupling cradle. It saved "programs" on a paper tape, with small holes. If/then/go-to statements...that kinda thing. I had a rather limited crack at it, and was suitably unimpressed. I think I wrote one very simple program, only about 12 lines. I remember thinking how far off the "Jetson's age" was still.

 

[hbarcat]

Wow, I didn't think this many posters in OT besides me remembered when there was no high-speed Internet access.

My internet debut was relatively late (in 94) but I had a good dial up connection and a 33.6 modem. By comparison, I've been getting online access for the past year at a maximum connection speed of 26 kbps (yes, that's only a 26!) with my crappy phone line out here on the farm. [Cue the banjo music]

 

[embellisher]

1993. We had an Acer Pentium 75 with 32MB of RAM, Zoom 14.4 modem and a 850MB HDD. Windows 3.1/DOS 6.22 baybee!!!

I first started out getting on dial up BBS's. I love those old 'door' games. BRE, and what was the medieval one?

We moved 'up' to AOL after about 6 months, and then found out about the 'real' internet in 1995, right after we bought Windows 95.

Finally ditched AOL as an 'ISP' in 1997.