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1992, when I first went away to college. Took my 286 computer with me with 12MHz of RAM, 40MB hard drive, and 2400 baud modem. (That's 2.4 kilobits per second for you youngsters, as in about 150 times slower than your average broadband connection). Back then the entire university campus of 13,000 students and 2,000 staff was connected to the internet through a single T1 line. In the days when the internet was 99.99% text, that was all you needed.
It was 1993 and Steve, a fellow I worked with told me about a BBS that he "chatted" on.
The rest is history.
I used a DOS program to telnet in to the BBS way back then. Boy, when Windows 95 came along, I was in heaven. I did not get really serious about the Internet until 1999 when I bought my first Gateway Laptop for about $1,000. From then on it was a 40 hour a week habit. (Some weeks, much, much more).
You'd have to define "Internet Access". I had access to USENET and email in the mid-80s, and those began to be carried over the Internet in 1985. Before that it was carried via UUCP over dial-up connections.
As far as TCP/IP all the way into my home, that would be 1993, when I had a simple UNIX shell account with a provider. This was before you could get a dial-up PPP account. There was a piece of software called "TIA", or "The Internet Adapter", which I could run on the shell host, and enabled me to run SLIP (serial line IP) over my shell account. A couple years later the shell account provider offered dial-up PPP, so I could dump TIA, and use MacPPP to connect to the Internet. My employer had a T-1 connection to the Internet in 1994, and I recall Sun Microsystems putting up a bunch of content from the 1994 Winter Olympics on their web site then. The web browser was Mosaic, running on a Sun SPARCStation w/the X Windows System.
The real internet? July 1996, through AOL. I had Compuserve before that, but never figured out how to install Netscape Navigator on Windows 3.1.
This poll, being in a forum dedicated to talk about the internet, is not likely to render results that would be representative of the general public. If I remember correctly, around the time I first obtained internet access, about 15% of the (American) population was online - a far cry from the 50-65% shown here.
The internet has changed so much since I first accessed it. What was once a suite of several independent services accessed by individual software applications with their own unique uses - E-Mail, HTTP, USENET, FTP, IRC, etc. - has largely been brewed down to one protocol, HTTP, accessed through one application (the web browser). E-mail is more often accessed by way of web interfaces than not. USENET newsgroups have largely been replaced by sites like these. FTP was once the rule for file downloads, but again HTTP now seems to rule. Web-based chat replaced what IRC once did (accessed through programs like MIRC and Xchat), though chat rooms to have decreased in relative popularity as more "normal" people, especially women, have got on, only wanting to talk to their "real life" friends.
Love it!! You asked "Real Internet?" then go on to say "AOL"....hahaha...classic!
Btw, what is the 'fake' Internet? Too much silicone? No silicone?
I still don't think I am on the 'real' Internet. I feel government authorities are keeping me in some sort of a cyber purgatory la-la-land so that I can't do any harm!
Love it!! You asked "Real Internet?" then go on to say "AOL"....hahaha...classic!
Btw, what is the 'fake' Internet? Too much silicone? No silicone?
I still don't think I am on the 'real' Internet. I feel government authorities are keeping me in some sort of a cyber purgatory la-la-land so that I can't do any harm!
Well, he meant the actual internet. There are people in this thread discussing online services such as BBS', Usenet and email, which all existed prior to the internet.
AOL did not add ful internet to their online service until the mid 90's. Prior to this, they had only web access (above their online service).
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJBest
Well, he meant the actual internet. There are people in this thread discussing online services such as BBS', Usenet and email, which all existed prior to the internet.
AOL did not add ful internet to their online service until the mid 90's. Prior to this, they had only web access (above their online service).
The original AOL was a Mac-only service.
The original AOL for the PC released in 1991 was a DOS client using the PC/GEOS (Geoworks) runtime, and it was just as proprietary as CI$, GEnie, or Prodigy. At that point, there was no web. The first HTML spec wasn't released until 1993.
AOL's first internet-related service was e-mail. They didn't add other elements of internet access until somewhat later.
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