GStwin.com GS500 Message Forum

Main Area => Odds n Ends => Topic started by: pliskin on May 10, 2013, 08:26:32 PM

Title: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: pliskin on May 10, 2013, 08:26:32 PM
When was your first internet experience? Do you remember when it was called the "web" or "web net"? I think my first time on the web was in 1989. It was mostly dial-up to internet bulletin boards. I don't remember there being web address or URL's. You basically dialed directly to another machine (website) on the web. Or, you dialed a directory that would attach you to another site. It's been so long ago I really don't remember how the he11 we did it.

My first IT job was in a data center that had an IBM mainframe. Disk storage consisted of  machines as big as van with hard drives that weighed about 50lbs ea. and where about the size of a microwave oven. The hard drive in your PC today has about 3x the storage the 5000lb IBM had. Terra bite was not even a word then. We had about 50 car batteries as the backup power supply in case of power outages...and they never worked.

Here I sit with a 3lb computer in my lap. And I'm going blind looking at the screen all day.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it was more like 93-94ish when I first got on the web. At work, not at home. I started at the company in 89 but did not work in IT until 94.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: noworries on May 10, 2013, 09:53:08 PM
Supposedly one of the earliest - 1992 - webpages around. Anybody go back further???

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: jdoorn14 on May 10, 2013, 10:00:06 PM
This site started archiving snapshots in 1996....but check out the Internet Wayback Machine to see current urls in their past forms.

http://archive.org/web/web.php (http://archive.org/web/web.php)
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: Kijona on May 10, 2013, 10:35:29 PM
This website is really something even if it's totally useless

www.something.com
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: makenzie71 on May 10, 2013, 10:45:02 PM
Well that sure was something.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on May 10, 2013, 11:18:11 PM
BBS's in 1988ish. compuserve early 90's fulltime jun2003 here lol
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: slipperymongoose on May 10, 2013, 11:25:34 PM
My first time on the net was looking up cheezetv.com back in 1994. And I sent my first email in 1997. Both accessed from a 486. Thems were the days. Dial up and all.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on May 10, 2013, 11:58:15 PM
mid/late 2003 here mosts posts had 56k warning preceding  subject  :oops:
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: Slack on May 11, 2013, 05:11:31 AM
I think it was '95, maybe 94 though.  Just hopping on an AOL chat room.

I remember coming home from elementary school in the late 80's and playing Pac-Man on the home P.C.  (Both parents worked for I.B.M.)
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: pliskin on May 11, 2013, 04:10:22 PM
My brother got a Commodore 64 when we where kids.. It loaded games from cassette....took foooorever.

At some point I remember I worked on 286's, &  and NEC and Memorex 386's (with a trubo button that took it from 8mb to 16mb speeds).
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: dam on May 11, 2013, 08:41:38 PM
Sometime around 1980 or so with an Atari 400 computer playing games connected through Compuserve. My how things have changed.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on May 11, 2013, 09:09:13 PM
Quote from: makenzie71 on May 10, 2013, 10:45:02 PM
Well that sure was something.
theres something, then the last page of the internet
http://www.endoftheinternet.com/
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: pliskin on May 11, 2013, 09:14:51 PM
http://snarg.net/ (http://snarg.net/)
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: Kiwingenuity on May 12, 2013, 05:17:56 PM
Earliest here was 1994 - connected using good ol' NCSA mosaic (replaced by netscape navigator).. at that stage we had one gateway in NZ - Waikato University

I assume BBS's don't count?
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: pliskin on May 12, 2013, 06:32:29 PM
Quote from: Kiwingenuity on May 12, 2013, 05:17:56 PM
Earliest here was 1994 - connected using good ol' NCSA mosaic (replaced by netscape navigator).. at that stage we had one gateway in NZ - Waikato University

I assume BBS's don't count?
Yea, Netscape was one of the first. I have a collection of old AOL CD's that came in those metal tins. I used to have hundred of them. \
Back then part of my job was to sit for 2 hr. a day placing dummy orders on our internet site. This was before ordering things online was popular. I had to log every time AOL had an error or got disconnected when placing an order on our web-store. It had about a 50% fail rate. Boy, did that ever piss-off the big wigs. They could not understand why these orders would not get processed. If I had a nickle for every time I said it was a problem with AOL I'd be rich. They also could not understand why the time of day effected the speed of the internet. DAMMMIT, I forgot how much they pissed me off every day. They somehow wanted one guy to fix it so they could get a big bonus.
BBS's count. We called them Bulletin Boards...BBS. In fact in my current job we still used dial up to a BBS until about a year or 2 ago. It was a site that ran a program we needed to access. It was so old nobody knew how to "upgrade it" so they just kept it running rather than spend a bunch of $$$ to write a new program. This happens a lot in government.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: jestercinti on May 13, 2013, 10:51:16 AM
1994...AOL Online.  The Floppy disk in the mail.  Remember those?

Windows 3.1 running 386 Enhanced Mode!
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: pliskin on May 13, 2013, 01:51:53 PM
Quote from: jestercinti on May 13, 2013, 10:51:16 AM
1994...AOL Online.  The Floppy disk in the mail.  Remember those?

Windows 3.1 running 386 Enhanced Mode!
I still have a laptop running Windows 3.1. It has a non-color LCD screen.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on May 16, 2013, 11:14:43 AM
lol same here. as well as an 8088 and a sinclair 16
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: jestercinti on May 17, 2013, 04:09:01 PM
I thought only Sinclair was a gas station?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on May 24, 2013, 02:44:59 PM
Quote from: noworries on May 10, 2013, 09:53:08 PM
Supposedly one of the earliest - 1992 - webpages around. Anybody go back further???

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
i used to find this using the BBS'
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: ralph13 on May 30, 2013, 05:16:41 PM
If I recall correctly, I was maybe six years old, and I went to a web site about breakfast cereal (got the URL off a cereal box). This must have been around 1995-1996. I am probably one of the younger posters here.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: pliskin on May 31, 2013, 08:54:37 PM
Quote from: ralph13 on May 30, 2013, 05:16:41 PM
If I recall correctly, I was maybe six years old, and I went to a web site about breakfast cereal (got the URL off a cereal box). This must have been around 1995-1996. I am probably one of the younger posters here.
Age is only a frame of mind. If I did not know my age I would think I was in my 20's. I act like I'm in my 20's.
By the way, I loved reading the back of the cereal box every morning while I ate. It was like reading the newspaper for kids. Captain' Crunch or Boo Berry where a treat. Most of the time it was Rice Crispies, Cheerio's or Honey Comb's. The simple things life are the best. They just don't taste the same now.
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: codajastal on May 31, 2013, 10:45:33 PM
I think it was some time in the late 70's or early 80's. Used the old dog'n'bone with the dial and plugged the handset part into a box with 2 rubber suction cups to connect to other computers.

Looked something like this

(http://www.teelectronics.co.uk/images/archive_comms/KN_Acoustic_Coupler_1978_01_small.JPG)
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: noworries on June 09, 2013, 04:32:58 AM
Web and Web Search Book recently released by US Govt under FoI.

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/Untangling_the_Web.pdf

It's the 2007 edition and, thus, dated but still has some particularly heavy stuff in the area of Google search hacks
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on June 10, 2013, 12:17:13 PM
Quote from: jestercinti on May 17, 2013, 04:09:01 PM
I thought only Sinclair was a gas station?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
a timex sinclair ( i guess made under license from the british company )
(http://i.ebayimg.com/t/TIMEX-SINCLAIR-1000-VINTAGE-COMPUTER-WITH-16K-RAM-MODULE-SOFTWARE-BOXED-TESTED-/00/s/NTQwWDgwMA==/$(KGrHqZ,!hwFBZ0QKtU3BQh2OsbRcg~~60_12.JPG)
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: yamahonkawazuki on June 10, 2013, 12:20:48 PM
Quote from: codajastal on May 31, 2013, 10:45:33 PM
I think it was some time in the late 70's or early 80's. Used the old dog'n'bone with the dial and plugged the handset part into a box with 2 rubber suction cups to connect to other computers.

Looked something like this

(http://www.teelectronics.co.uk/images/archive_comms/KN_Acoustic_Coupler_1978_01_small.JPG)
the wargames modem lol been looking for one of those for my collection
Title: Re: Do You Remember The First Time You Got On The Internet?
Post by: SAFE-T on June 10, 2013, 12:46:52 PM
Sometime around 1994 ~ I remember thinking how awkward it was. Dialup. Text only. Firgured I would just have to  come back later when it was ready LOL.