I started with exploring my local BBS offerings. BBS’es were small independent operations where users could exchange messages and do things like play very basic games. Things were text based in those early days and the internet wasn’t a reality for the public at time. This was about 1989. Then, before long, a service was started called Prodigy that seemed to be a little more upbeat than these local BBS’es. It wasn’t the internet but it was nice for the time. Graphics were far better but still not great. As time went by I learned about things like Gopher, Veronica and Jughead and Archie. These basically were precursors to what Google is now. It all seemed very interesting and it brought the world to my desktop. Compuserve had been around for some time by then but for me it seemed quite expensive. I was never a subscriber. I learned all that I could about Usenet and I still visit there even yet today but those are my pre-AOL days there. I’m sure that for many, AOL dialup was the first taste of computering that you may have had. I started with MS-DOS as my operating system too. I was offered a copy of Windows 2.0 but I decided that it wasn’t anything I needed. So do tell, what was your first time like?
While I scrape my brain to remember my first internet experience, I shall confess that I once wiped the hard drive on my dad's early Radio Shack computer, which traumatized me so much that I wouldn't touch one for years. An early internet / email trauma happened when I wrote something about someone, intending to send to a 3rd party, and instead it went to the person I had written about. Ever since, I check the TO: line thrice before sending!
Those made me laugh but I bet that your dad was just a bit more traumatized about the hard drive than you were. I too have had emails sent astray. It happens but c’est la vie! None of us are perfect, even though many would try to convince us that they’re the exception to that rule. Thanks for sharing you experiences. They made me laugh!
Since I have answered that question before, in this post, I won't go into any details here, but my first online experiences were through ARPANET in the early to mid-1980s, and through running a BBS around the same time. Indeed, the first Internet access that was available in the Rio Grande Valley was AOL via dial-up. America Online was far from the first ISP but it was the first one available to most communities throughout the country. My wife worked for AOL for a while, although we hadn't met then.
My first encounter with the internet was also with Usenet. I answered the question in another thread this way: Trying to pin down the date. On second thought, if it was truly 1980's it was probably someone pulling my leg. I don't think the Soviet Union was on Usenet in the 1980's. See: ..The Kremvac Hoax
I've been trying to pin this down. I can't recall getting much involved beyond email until I needed to do some academic research and some libraries were starting to put professional journal abstracts online. Thank goodness there were, because I was able to do nearly my whole dissertation research online, or order books through inter-library loan, without out spending hours and hours actually at a university library. Somewhere in there I also began learning how to created my own website with some freebie tools offered with my Earthlink.net email account.
I believe my first Internet usage was searching online on how to make my job resume' better. After that, it was searching job sites. That was about the time local jobs stopped using the classified section "Employment" to advertise for a job.