Do you remember when you used the Internet?

When I was a freshman in college I took a intro to computer science class and they seriously still used those punch card things. WTF.

My first experience with the internet was in 96 when I started college and used the university computers in the library. And I had hotmail and was cool shit.

And then I had aol at home, unbenounced to my mom who thought the internet was for satan.

9 years later, here I sit, typing to ya'll on SG.

remember paying for the internet by the minute?

When i first used the internet, there was no graphics just text. If you wanted to find stuff you'd use something called "Archie" and/or "Veronica".

I'm glad someone else chimed in on GEnie.

My high school physics classes would attend engineering open houses and get to play a little Star Trek on PLATO which ran on a supercomputer network based at the University of Illinois. We said it was pretty boring compared to Asteroids. About ten years before MOSAIC.

I personally didn't make it online until the early nineties. I was the shit because I did all my x-mas shopping online with Lands End via Prodigy. When the after x-mas sale catalogue showed up, I sent them an email, and they credited my account for the previous twelve months of purchases. Hooked.

oh and on an unrelated/related note, if any of ya'll want to play oregon trail, I have an emulator for it....

The internet didn't exist when I was a little kid. And I am only (almost) 24.

Yea I still remember the days before the internet. I remember the days before google too, I was on Yahoo all the time. And I still remember when SG had one set a day, haha.

Oh man, that game is so classic. Nostalga. Pure Nostalga.

Old Amiga games give me a a boner.

The Internet was the thing that made computers interesting to me. I had owned them in the past (a 1981 TI-99 4/A, a 1987 Amstrad) but I always lost interest. In college the computers I had to work on were mainframes with text-ony printing terminals, that's right, no monitors, everything was printed out on massive streams of paper. Control Data, baby!

But when some friends started using e-mail and looking at BBS's then I knew I had to try it myself. I bought an Amiga 1200 and a 14.4 modem in 1993 and signed up with Delphi (which still seems to exist in some incarnation). It was cool, but when I heard about AOL and graphical Internet, well I just had to jump on board that action! I traded in my Amiga in 1994 (right after the bankrupcy announcement) and bought a 486DX33 (smokin!), signed up for AOL, and I've been www'ing ever since.

BTW, to all you people who had the Internet in high school: I got to use a Commodore PET sometimes, the one computer available to students, with special permission of the math teacher. Later, we had a room full of Digital Rainbow computers and a sneakernet to connect them. We all got one free 5 1/4 inch disk to save our work on, and I never filled it up. Those were the days.

I mean, you know...like, in a totally non-sexual kind of way.

here's me in a nutshell. I got the internet for the first time when I was like 18. Within 24 hours I had a serious crush on some chick I met online. Not much has changed.

I was actually discussing this the other night, how we've become so spoiled by technology....

On the video game example:

Remember your ass exploding upon seeing that the video/images from Metal Gear Solid 2 were REAL TIME graphics at 60fps?! Now, I look at even the latest games and think...."Damn. I can't wait to see what the top notch next gen games are gonna look like! Maybe they'll be able to put more on screen!"

I'm 22, so as I was hitting puberty the internet was starting to take off. I remember being AWARE of it, and some days at school being able to connect for about half an hour (of mostly trying to figure the damn thing out). It wasn't until 1999 that I finally got sorta net access.....and the boom was gone before I could do anything about it.

I somewhat envy kids growing up in this digital wonderland, but on the other hand....it does remove a lot of the potential mystique of the "world out there", I would imagine.