OT - reminising
 

you know, when i first heard about the internet, i was a regular on bbs's, but almost never chatted, so when i first heard of the internet, my reaction was yeah, so? there where 3-8 'nets on any bbs with a good chat system and all i'd heard about them was that they were for transmitting Messages and since i wasn't chatty anyway...

so, where were you when you heard of the internet?

man, was that disconnected. need to sleep. shoon.

[ February 12, 2004, 08:23: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

Re: OT - reminising
 

Battle Net.

1995

Prodegy Dial Up

Re: OT - reminising
 

I first thought it was like BBS and wasn't very interested.
But in the med school library in 1995 I discovered it was more than a fancy gui for ftp libraries...

Re: OT - reminising
 

Hmm, I 'heard of' the Internet in the 1980s because I knew people at the local University who had access. Was allowed to slurp some usenet news Groups onto my own BBS as early as 1988, actually.

Re: OT - reminising
 

I remember thinking that the term World Wide Web was kinda ominous and spooky. Obviously another sign of the One World Government.
I had compuserv for my Commodore, Later I got Prodigy for my IBM 486. Gawd that sucked. Constant full screen advertisements that took forever to load. A forerunner of today's popups.

Re: OT - reminising
 

When I first encountered the internet as a college freshman in '77, it was still called ARPAnet. (Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Re: OT - reminising
 

Before I moved to Tampa in 1992, I was big on going to all of the Commodore/Amiga Boards in Phoenix (I got my first modem in 1989, and that was to my Commodore 64. then I got a Amiga 2000 a couple of years later), and d/l a bunch of stuff also. I don't remember exactly when I started hearing the word internet, but I was always curious in the early to mid 90's on all of those www. lines at the bottom of the tv commercials. I didn't get my pc until the summer of 98, and that's when I started exploring the 'net. Made all of those old bbs sites look basic and primordal. Now I can't imagine not being on-line at least part of the day.

Re: OT - reminising
 

It was around 1990 that I first started using Gopher space. It was all text-only but it was great fun just wandering around looking at all sort of information. I remember using Veronica to search for things and using FTP to download files. To get images, you just see the titles of the pictures, so to view them you had to download them first and then open them using a graphics program. It was a slow process, but really exciting back then. And we had e-mail but they were all simple text and the size was limited to something like 1K. No file attachments.

So if you wanted to e-mail to somebody a picture, like a bitmap, you had to UUENCODE the file to turn it into text. Then we had to split up the text into multiple pieces each less than 1K. Then you would e-mail multiple Messages. The person who receives the Messages saves the text, deletes the header lines from each, concatenates them together in order, and UUDECODES it to get the image file back. Ahh, those were the good old days... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Shortly after that, I was introduced to NTSC Mosaic, Version 1... the graphical browser. It had the cool spinning globe logo with the arrows. It was very slow. It was wonderful. The memories...

Re: OT - reminising
 

I'm not sure when I first heard of the Internet as it exists today. However, I think it was sometime during '95 or '96 that I could first get an Internet connection by modem here without having to dial long distance. As you may have guessed, this is a remote area.

Re: OT - reminising
 

the 'net? must have been around '96, while living in England for the year. My dad decided to spend his sabbatical year working for Cambridge University (or whatever it's called... I'm not too fond of Cambridge in general). I made the wonderful decision to buy Civ 2 and C&C: Tiberium Dawn (the first one). As soon as I beat the games, I started going to my dad's office to download mods, maps and scenarios for them... along with a couple modding tools for C&C. That feels like it was such a long time ago now... weird.