Quite interesting to see when most of us started using the WWW or the usenet (which many don't know these days).

Anyone remember the day of BBS?

About '88 or '89 - used to log in to a multi-line BBS ( 2 lines ) running on a Mac.

It used to get a about 60 newsfeeds and had a public domain files area. It was all fairly limited.

The bad old days :)


Lats...

Originally posted by Lats
The bad old days

Ah, don't think so. What do you think is the percentage of people still using the Usenet? How many people don't even know that it exists?

Originally posted by Walter
Usenet

You poll might give a general indication of 'prior' net use :)


Lats...

Originally posted by Walter
Quite interesting to see when most of us started using the WWW or the usenet (which many don't know these days).
Anyone remember the day of BBS?

Your poll does not go that far back.. I first started using the Internet back in 1989 - with my birst 'web browser' experience in 1993 and the first time I used Usenet was 1990

Originally posted by AotI
Your poll does not go that far back..

Yes, I know, but there is a lmit of 10 options.

Sometime in mid-late 2000. Not too long ago.

The earliest thing I can recall was using compuserve and I have no idea what it was exactly. My guess is that it wasn't the internet nor BBS. I only remember chatting with friends and people from far off places that I didn't know, but viewing pages or web sites at the time doesn't sound familiar (can't recall now at least).

I started using the internet in the mid 80's. The University of Michigan had this great thing called Merit, which changed its name to MichNet eventually. It used to run on a totally proprietary system called Hermes and provided a gateway to a ton of services including Telenet (later to become Sprintnet, now defunct I think), Compuserve, Michigan Bell PSN (more X.25), a bank of 1200 baud modems that dialed out to any number local to Ann Arbor Michigan (you could trick them to dial anywhere internationally using 10xxx carrier access codes, Lytel was my personal favorite -- 10432).

That was a while back, but it was fun fun fun. I spent many hours playing lpMuds, reading usenet (with trn from a shell!), downloading things via ftp, executing archie searches... The list goes on and on.

Prior to that it was just regular old dial up bulletin boards. Chicken, there was a similar thing to what you are talking about called D-Dial, an old Apple based system that would link to hundreds of other machines every night via PCPursuit to build a national CB simulator type system. The first of its kind as far as I know.

Now here we are today and the world is a different place because of tiny little invention called the web browser. Odd!

1994! Wasn't much to do, as I recall...


NOTE: Post 311! :D

1994 And, it was with a 2400bps modem and I had to use a shell on a Sun Sparc... the following, I got PPP access.. yeh, color!

Let's just say... I remember bang addressing quite well.

Originally posted by Walter
...
Anyone remember the day of BBS?


I installed the second phone line in my house in 1979 so that I could chat in the online mesage boards. Modem speed was a hefty 110bps. :D

Heh... I had a 1200 bps modem on my Apple IIe dialed into what eventually became Prodigy (or was it Compuserve? I don't remember!)

That had to have been about 85 or 86 I think. That didn't last long (they didn't have a local phone number so after about a month my parents got the phone bill and freaked - that was the end of that!)

I picked it up again with (gasp!) aol in about 1990, and switched to the "real" Internet in about 1994.

Gotta love those early days back before the WWW existed.

Jason

Originally posted by DizixCom
I started using the internet in the mid 80's. The University of Michigan had this great thing called Merit, which changed its name to MichNet eventually. It used to run on a totally proprietary system called Hermes and provided a gateway to a ton of services including Telenet (later to become Sprintnet, now defunct I think), Compuserve, Michigan Bell PSN (more X.25), a bank of 1200 baud modems that dialed out to any number local to Ann Arbor Michigan (you could trick them to dial anywhere internationally using 10xxx carrier access codes, Lytel was my personal favorite -- 10432).

Oh wow, I remember Tymenet, Telenet, and Sprintnet. I wrote one of the first hackers for that service. It acted like a war dialer, only with address numbers instead phone numbers, and if it got a response, it would dump the results to a file along with the account number for later review. If it got disconnected or stopped responding (which sometimes happened), it would automatically disconnect and redial the next phonenumber down the list. Back then, it was easy to have 20 local numbers for theses services to dial into, because all commerce was done over those nationwide commercial networks, because the Internet wasn't really available to commercial places at that time. My program was released by KGB (hacking cracking group).

Found lots of interesting things on those commercial networks. Senate conversation pools and stuff.

Of course I was still a teenager then, and the government is now aware of my seedy past, as I came clean when I started working for them.

I never had a modem slower than a 300bps, though.

Originally posted by bitserve

Oh wow, I remember Tymenet, Telenet, and Sprintnet...


In one of my previous lives, I did some system programming on the Telenet X.25 network. I did network software development, mainly PAD (packet-assembler/disassembler) coding in assembly language for the Zilog Z80. The Z80 is the CPU Telenet used in their PADs. In the switches, they used the 6502 CPU, same as Apple used in the AppleII.

Originally posted by Chicken
The earliest thing I can recall was using compuserve and I have no idea what it was exactly.


I have to agree with Chicken since this was about the same time I started "surfing".. Although I used to run a couple of BBS' on the side, Compuserve was my first real "online" experience with chatting, email, etc.. In 1996 I remember surfing to different websites, but before that is a little fuzzy.. :D

Edit: Oh, anyone remember the old compuserve email addresses? Like 1234567.8901@compuserve.com ? hehe :stickout

laterz..
palmtree

Originally posted by palmtree


Edit: Oh, anyone remember the old compuserve email addresses? Like 1234567.8901@compuserve.com ? hehe :stickout


Yep - even weirder, remember you could actually telnet to your compuserve account across the Internet and as you were logging in it used to ask you to select speed of connection - 300 baud, 1200/75 etc etc. It was as though compuserve hadn;t realised they were connected to the internet. :cartman:

I was using it illegally back in 1997, let me explain, bear in mind im in the UK

in 1997 I would have been 16/17 and back then I didnt have much money, since there was a huge bill from compuserve to pay and nobody offered a simple "pay for the calls" service without a subscription I had no choice.

I had a debit card and compuserve accepted debit cards back then, now I figured, what if i enter the incorrect debit card number but a number close to my own number, what will happen?

Well it just so happens that it accepted my incorrect number and signed me up with the service. now after 4-5 days they noticed it was incorrect and cut me off, so i repeated the procedure but with a slightly different card number, sometimes it worked sometimes it didnt and i kept trying and eventually it would let me on.

Thats how I went until i was 18, I spent an entire year doing it, I had signed up about 200 compuserve accounts, crazy i know, but it worked and I didnt have to pay anything.

Then came friaco (free subs and only pay for calls) then I started using freeserve and freenetname, until i got btinternet freephone with a fixed subscription, then finally I moved into my own house and cable internet all the way !!!!!

pretty much my life and times on the internet there, I might write a page about it actually. LOL

I hear the French are still using MiniTel more so than the www Isn't minitel similar to those days of ASCII color screens and such with BBS's?



--------------------
Remember These?

The Humble Guys
I.N.C.
FidoNet
Rusty & Edie's
PCBoard
Mustang Wildcat
ZMODEM
Kermit
Gopher
pine
homer
Carl Stedman's (of Suck.com fame) ultimate disk for the Apple gsII.

Originally posted by PsyberX
I hear the French are still using MiniTel more so than the www Isn't minitel similar to those days of ASCII color screens and such with BBS's?
--------------------
Remember These?
The Humble Guys
I.N.C.
FidoNet
Rusty & Edie's
PCBoard
Mustang Wildcat
ZMODEM
Kermit
Gopher
pine
homer
Carl Stedman's (of Suck.com fame) ultimate disk for the Apple gsII.

Minitel is still in use in some other countries too - more so than in France.

Fidonet is still going - and the UK Node admin is still the same - my old friend Jon - www.fidonet.org - as for the others - kermit, zmodem, gopher - yep remember them all.

Anyone remember BlueBook X25, PAD, archie, veronica?

Anyone remember terminator (archive.mich.edu)?

Any one remember System Enhancement Associates? They were the inventors of ARC and sued the pants off of Phil Katz for developing "pkarc", a super fast version of ARC. Later on, Phil went on to write "pkzip". I remember a conversation I had with him once in "chat" mode on his BBS and he explained to me how you would be able to store directory information. I was blown away! Can you imagine? Preserving your directory tree! What an amazing idea!

System Enhancement Associates went on to be one of the most hated companies in existance for suing Phil, and eventually I think they went bust. They were also the inventors of SEALink which was a "better" xmodem, before ZModem came out.

Anyone rememer Bently Sidewell Productions or SPI? Mookies Hideout? Those were some fun fun days back when being a geek wasn't cool.

Originally posted by palmtree
Edit: Oh, anyone remember the old compuserve email addresses? Like [email]1234567.8901@compuserve.com

Remember? I still have a customer who uses one! No lie!

in the dark ages of computing I ran a little BBS out of my house, The Dreaming Isle .. ran on an old POS 8088 with Maximus bbs software and frontdoor. I think i started on a 1200 baud modem and was so excited when i upgraded to 2400! I eventually upgraded the board to a 286 machine and a lightning fast 9600 baud modem.. Man i was cruising! lol.

I had to find a small hard drive the other day for some stupid project i was working on and found all my old Bluewave mail packets.. it was like finding a time capsule.

I first used the Internet back in 1995, when it was first introduced to the public here in Kuwait. I think it was netscape 2.0 or something, a 14.4 kbps modem. The first website I saw was the ministry of communications website and it had a link to tucows. Yahoo was almost the only portal and search engine I knew back then.

BTW, I was only 13 years old :D

ABERMUD pre 1993 & PAD :D

1994; BBS; Bluewave; QWK; Procomm Pro; ZMODEM; "Your tagline collection is great"; DOS pkzip; old 9600 kbps modem without data compression & error correction; modem kept dropping connection

1995: Netscape 1.1/2.0; trumpet winsock; "please give me detailed step by step instruction for connecting"; 14.4kbps v32bis modem; yahoo.com was great; microsoft.com was actually accessible with other browsers; spam was almost non issue; mIRC.

1996: Windows95; Netscape 2.0; IE 2.0; Java applets were everywhere; can't really surf the web without crashing; stupid marquee tag.

Well For me I 've been connect since 1992 with Internet Email FTP and USE NET I used Lynx to browse the web until 1994 when I download Netscape.

In 1994 I ran a BBS with RA 2.02 PRO made by Andrew Milner who currently owes Western Australia's Largest ISP
http://www.iinet.com.au

I had http://www.fidonet.org which had a email gateway!
so all my users had an email address somthing like this
username@z3.r623.689@fidonet.org

Those were the days of LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon)
with other BBS's were the crazy.

Mp3's were the lastest and coolest file format.

Icemodem was the best protocol for download

Terminate was the Best BBS Terminal Software

Ahh stolling down memory lane...

Legend of the Red Dragon was one of my favorites, that and Tradewars.

I was lucky - I got my exposure at 12, meaning in 1995. It had been fun, for a while... :p

Too many things on the Internet now, IMHO. It's sooooo hard to find what you really want because of all the extra junk sitting on top of it :D

Mmm, LPMuds. I think I spend a whopping two years playing NannyMUD like obsessed, even made it to wizardhood. Those were the days; I logged in the other day to find the place crowded with kids. Is nothing sacred? ;)