Same here - my own dial-up connection to the internet was in '94, using Demon.

However, my first stuff online was at uni 10 years earlier - using some packet switch terminals to connect over Janet into a MUD server in Essex. Mind you, the server was so overloaded, that you rarely managed to get in & play.

Of stuff I had to actually pay for myself, I recall a 1200/75 modem connecting to Prestel a couple of years later.

My first experiences of the internet came around 1991, from having Sun desktops at work that weren't actually connected to the internet. However, you could use email to control a remote download server - which would download something from the internet (with FTP), then email you the results uuencoded in many, many chunks. My first Linux downloads & distributions came that way - and I probably still have some of the Slackware floppies from that time!

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Same here - my own dial-up connection to the internet was in '94, using Demon.

BT must have made a fortune from the dial-up call revenue in those days, I heard of people who spent hundreds on their phone bill back then just to connect to the internet.

Oh Xerox copied the idea from Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demo

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Oh Xerox copied the idea from Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demo

True, but, "As the seventies started, much of Engelbart's team departed ARC and went their own ways, with many of them ending up at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Among these people were Bill English, who would further improve upon the mouse.[2] Also migrating to PARC was Engelbart's former backer at NASA and ARPA, Robert Taylor.[16] Alan Kay, also in attendance at the demo, would go on to design an object-oriented computing environment called Smalltalk while he was at PARC.[12] By 1973 the Xerox Alto was a fully functional personal computer similar to the NLS terminal that Engelbart demonstrated in 1968, but much smaller and physically refined. With its mouse driven GUI the Alto would go on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple's Macintosh computer and operating system in the 1980s.[17] Eventually, Microsoft's Windows operating system would follow the Macintosh and use a multi-button mouse like the Alto and the NLS system did.[1]"

It's fair to say Xerox made a business out of copying.

Makes me go all nostalgic thinking about them days and the possibilities

Back then a PC upgrade actually meant it could do more than it did before. These days it is harder and harder to justify an upgrade because it makes little noticeable difference for most purposes. Used to enjoy looking through all the specs to get the best possible build but these days you don't really need to eek the last possible ounce of power out of the components.

How boring the world has become...

In reply to a post by caley:

Makes me go all nostalgic thinking about them days and the possibilities

Hard to imagine that we, Xerox, had a worldwide intranet working back in the 70's eh?

I started with CompuServe (an original pre-AOL account). I think the first modem was a 4800 and initially I was mostly using their forums rather than the internet. I didn't really start using the internet until they began to migrate the forums and by then I was on k56.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I started with CompuServe (an original pre-AOL account)

Likewise, and they are still around in some form: http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/menu/about... - However, "The newest version of CompuServe, CompuServe 7.0" referred to on that page was launched in 2001!

Edited by kasg (Fri 29-Aug-14 16:54:18)