It was the mid 80's. My girlfriend's husband had one. One night we drove out to their place for dinner, an hour drive and he turned it on for us, I was amazed. Don't recall the ISP but they paid five cents a minute for access! They were oout in the country. He showed us a website for the Most Wanted list, but that's all I remember. My first home computer was 1997 with AOL.
@Molly Hazel People learn things at different times for different reasons. In the 1980s I worked with people at a couple of different jobs who were knowledgeable about computers, and I learned some things from them. I read all I could about computers and later took a class at a community college (where I was taking other classes). But a lot was "learn by doing" and things I learned on jobs. I bought my first home computer in 1990. This was when word processing and spreadsheets were really taking hold in businesses. (Much more efficient than typewriters and desk calculators with a paper tape.) In the 1990s I worked with a few people who really fought the idea of using computers, and got away with it unless the boss insisted.
I first got the internet in the early 90s when I started my word processing service. I never signed up with AOL but another service. I remember my son and DIL got so many emails from me about nothing that my son had to tell me stop very nicely.
I worked with computers on my job in the late 80s and early 90s. I didn't get internet at my house till about 1995. My 2nd oldest son brought me my first computer from Sweden in his suitcase. He and his wife bought a new one and gave me their old one. It was in Swedish but most of it he switched over to English for me. I remember how excited I was to get a computer of my own. Before that I had messed around with my daughter's some when I visited her. At that time she was single and worked as a bartender so I was always happy when she worked nights and I got the computer for a few hours. I believe back then she paid by the hour so we had to be careful.
I worked at a job where we used computers in the 80's; but we didn't have anything online back then. It was in the early 90's when I got my first computer at home. The whole reason that I got one was because my daughter, Robin, was in the service and stationed in Germany, and I had very little communication with her. Because of the distance, the time difference, and her duties with the military; it was almost impossible for us to talk at all. When she could call, it was only for a few minutes, just long enough to send love to each other and then say goodbye. When I got the computer, brought to me by my son, and set up for me, and basic instructions on how to use it and send an email; then we had communications again. I could write to Robin on my time schedule, and she wrote back on hers. Once I learned how to send and receive emails; I was hooked on the computer. We had Compuserve, and they charged for the time you were online; so I didn't do anything but check for emails every day for a long time after that. Eventually, it got to be that you were allowed so many hours each month for the service charge, and I had more available time to become acquainted with the internet. Naturally, the first thing that I discovered was online classified ads, and didn't do any of the chat rooms or any of that like most of the rest of the people did.
My first experience was horrible. In 1978, I got a job with a brand new Toyota dealership. The largest Houston had seen. I hired into the parts department, and at first I had a great time setting up the inventory schematic system in the warehouse. That took me a good month to do, and then one day they led me to an office with a desk and a great big monstrosity of a machine and told me to transfer all my inventory info into the "monster". "Uh. Do what??? All I remember was I was told it was a DOS system, which meant nothing to me. I pushed all kinds of keys, and tried all kinds of keyboard commands. After three days, I quitely quit, and I didn't even go back for my check. I figured it was going to cost more than my check to pay for the mess I had made. Then when I start college in the mid 80's I was scared to death od computers, so I took a course into introduction to computers, and I came out with a grade of 140/100. I couldn't figure how that worked, so I asked my teacher. It seems I didn't understand that a lot of the assignments were for extra credits for those students that were struggling. Well if it was posted on the chalk board I did the work, and it turns out that I was pulling A's, and with all the extra work I ended up with that weird grade. I never took another computer class, because I didn't feel I had a good enough understanding of them. But I was a wiz at writing programs, so after I took a couple of course in Statistics, I was ask by the teacher that taught the course to help him computerize it. Here in Houston, our police cadets had to pass Statistics to be able to finish and become a policeman. But most of them were having to repeat the first course two and three times. I don't know why they found the subject so hard, but by computerizing the course it cut down on the need to repeat it as often. We finally got Comcast service in our home 1992, and it was AOL, and I still use AOL today. I've had the same email address since then, but I've only been playing with online for maybe 2&1/2 years, and I'm having a hard time learning to use it.
My first computer was a Coleco Adam. I was the treasurer of my church at the time and the church bought a Coleco Adam to keep the books on, in 1984, I think it was, so I learned to use it. Shortly after that, I bought my own. With a Coleco Adam, and other computers in the early days, you didn't get much in the way of software with it, nor was there any commercial software available. The Coleco Adam bundled with its own program compiler so if you wanted to do anything with it other than play a few games or use it as a word processor, you had to learn to write your own programs. Not realizing that this was a complicated thing to do, I wrote several, including the one that we used to maintain the books at the church. Neither the Coleco Adam or my next computer, a TRS-80 (Tandy-Radio Shack), came with a hard drive. The Coleco Adam used cassette tapes, while the TRS-80 used floppies. For the TRS-80, I wrote a program that kept the records for the first ambulance company that I worked for. Everything from the run report completed by the paramedic was entered into the program, and it would print out first, second, and third billings on a set schedule, and it would connect to the Texas DPS computer to transmit required reports that we made to them every month, which included information from the run reports for the purpose of statistics. It would also print out my reports to our board of directors.