what was the first thing you did? (I mean at home, not work) For me, it was early 1998. I'd been using an old computer at home and I decided to upgrade. A tech-savvy buddy took me shopping and got me set up. I first sent some emails, then I went to AOL chat rooms! Woo boy, remember those? (This was just as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was heating up.) A whole new world! Life as I knew it would never be the same.
I was connected to ARPANET in the mid 1980s, before the Internet was born. At that time, it had expanded from a system that was available only to the military to one that was made available to college systems. I was an instructor for Texas Southmost College at that time, and TSC was affiliated with the University of Texas at Brownsville, which had access to ARPANET. There was no graphical interface then. When you logged onto the system, you were faced with a C:/ prompt, and you had to navigate the system from there. At around the same time, I ran a computer Bulletin Board System. The BBS was another precursor of the Internet, something that would be more recognizable to Internet users than ARPANET was, as there were graphics, although rudimentary ANSI graphics. I ran my BBS from the early to mid-1980s through 1991, I think. In the Rio Grande Valley, public access to the Internet was first made available through AOL on dial-up. Next came Delphi. This was in the early 1990s.
I remember those AOL disks we got in the mail. Seemed to be endless. For a long time I had dial-up. I remember that sound when I logged on. This was before most of us had cell phones, and when I was online no one could reach me. Speaking of BBS, in early 90s a friend used them to try to drum up* business ("gigs") for her fiance's band. *(Unintended pun)
We lived in MO, mid 2000s, before the net was available via the only local phone provider, ITT, using only dial-up service. Very crude, exceedingly slow, sometimes needing 5 minutes to send a sentence of text. So, little real ability learned until we left the area.
I went to computer courses and learnt some DOS in the mid '80s and eventually went on the internet with a PC in the mid '90s with dial-up and have been on ever since.
Mid 1990's for me too...shocked to realize that it's 20 years...I remember playing games..and made a lot of friends in the games rooms...surprising really just how many , when I think back...but I did, and I still have a lot of those friends (all in the USA) to this day, although it must be over 15 years since I played any of those types of games.. Email of course was AOL, and Hotmail......( I still use Hotmail to this day along with several others but AOL was gone a long time ago)
1998 AOL...Went shopping for a computer and could not even find out how to turn one on!! Why do they hide the on button?? . CLICK ON THE VIDEO .
Wowzers... stretching my memory here. First computer around the mid 80s... it was a Tandy (Radio Shack, oy!) and I bought those programming magazines called "Rainbow" (the TRS-80 magazine.) I punched those thousands of programming lines in for hours and hours just to see something I made. First experience before the Internet was a local BBS. Wow, remember those?! I was amazed that something I wrote on there to a person on Germany reached them in... shockingly, THREE DAYS! Imagine... to Germany in three days. hehe WELL in a little while, they talked me into trying the Internet and the first email I wrote to the same person in Germany was answered in less than a minute. To say I was hooked would be putting it mildly! I should say that I had no concept of what the Internet was. I viewed it at the time, as a huge and very expensive glorified mailbox because that's all I thought I'd ever do.... write emails. After a couple of days, someone asked me if I'd seen a certain sci-fi homepage. My response? "What's a homepage?"
For sure, @Ken N Louis ! Probably one of the reasons I'll never have a smart phone... they scare me, they do!
Like many, I got my first home computer in the 80's ... a big Dell desktop, with AOL Online (thanks for that memory Ken) .... good ole dial-up! Had so much entertainment at my disposal. Just loved it. At work I used an Apple computer. It didn't impress me back then, but I've learned over the years that it was the way I wanted to go.
That sound brings back memories not all good ones though, how far we have progressed since those days.
My first computer was in 2003, when we just moved to Fresno after returning from 6 yrs in Hungary. My son from Illinois came to visit us, mainly his father because he was already sick and did die a year later. Anyway, my son bought me the computer and set it up for me. I was afraid to even touch the thing because I thought I would do something wrong. My first email acct was AOL and I barely got any mail back then but would check constantly. That's when I met @John Falcon and we would talk. He helped me wile away those hrs my husband was sleeping. I think he was new to computers too around that time and his wife had died the previous year.
@Ken N Louis Thanks for the memories! I used to like the "You've got mail!" voice, but now I would find it very irritating.
Gosh I must be the newest to using a computer here, I had never been on one at all until 5 years ago and did not have a clue. Just bought a couple of starter books and went from there. I only know limited use but that's enough for me. My husband has never been on a computer.. And know I have an I pad as well,wish I had done it sooner.