What year did you first hear about the Internet? (revolutionary, comparison, different)

[Brave Stranger]

i knew about it in college in the late 80s. A guy I used to work out with at the school gym was in on the ground floor of the creation on the internet.

[ohmanon]

In the mid 90s, my nephew (about 10), was already going full speed ahead, taking programming classes at the local university and even sending emails to some guy named Steve Jobs. He was an Apple boy all the way and gave me a big black garbage bag full of free stuff he got for testing software thinking he could spark my interest. Nope, I wouldn't budge even though I had 10 years of prior word processing experience...I was terrified of the Information Superhighway! Telling me it was like a big open library didn't work; I was just sure I would have to go to Internet School, lol. Then, in the late 90s, he said something that finally sparked my interest - there was all the music I could ever hope for and it was "free" - that did it for me! Got myself a brand new Microsoft eMachine, a freebie with a year's contract - the little brat just snickered and wouldn't help me or explain anything since it wasn't "a Macintosh." I was lost at sea until I finally got 'er hooked up and typed in those first keywords - probably Mungo Jerry or some other old song from my childhood, lol. All that fear for nothing - I went straight to Napster and was like a kid let loose in a candy store! My dialup was so slow I would sit up all night waiting in line/disconnecting and competing with something called 'cable'. Driven and desperate to get a song, I would jump up and down and scream out "Caught one!" when it would finally download at 3am. That computer was so awful I spent the first year learning to take it apart and put it back together...hard drive finally failed and I lost all that hard-earned music! In the end, the kid's superior little Apple attitude and my free 'puter served me well as it forced me to learn the inner workings of a PC - wasn't long before all the other family members would bring me their broken down and infested eMachines for a nice clean format with Windows 98. The kid became one of the founding developers of a very successful global funding project...still helping everybody but his aunt...thanks a lot, brat!

[Nepenthe]

Middle of 1994. I had sent emails in 1993. In 94 I started using Newsgroups in a big way, followed by a text-based browser called Lynx, followed by the first Netscape. I had a Jove account through my university. Have used it nearly every day for just about twenty years now.

[Oberon476]

Early 1978 on the Arpanet/DDN (Defense Data Network) when stationed in Keflavik Iceland.

Although technically the system was intended for "official" use, we had to check it every couple of hours to make sure that it was still running, and during the checks we were allowed to simply "chat" with the folks at the other end.

We didn't use CRT monitors at the time, communications were typed on fanfold computer paper.

[goofy328]

Originally Posted by valsteele

i think for me, like most people it was probably 1995 or 1996. From what i understand before then it was little known unless you were a scientist or a science student, or perhaps in a few select fields of business. Even as late as 1991 there were by some estimates fewer than a million people on the internet so i imagine many if not most people had never even heard of it.

Just a few years later though, by 1995-96 though it was becoming common to go online from home and even a lot of elementary schools had access in their computer labs. I was in kindergarten then and i don't think our school did, but i would guess that our teachers at least had e-mail in their offices.

92

[DewDropInn]

Early 80's. My employer (film industry) sent me to a three day seminar in Beverly Hills to learn how to use LexisNexis which was pioneering the use of search terms. It was state-of-the art then but an absolute dinosaur compared with today's Google. LexisNexis was unwieldy, unforgiving and not for the faint of heart since it was nothing but lines of green print on a black screen... subject to going *poof* at any time. The hardware engineers (who made enormous amounts of money being in the first wave of computer geeks doing this stuff) set me up with a Commodore and a dial-up modem that cradled the handset of a telephone. They spent weeks trying to get it to do something besides make a lot of rude noises. The first piece of info I was able to retrieve was a movie review from the New York Times. Being able to sit in an office in Los Angeles and read something in the NYT was a big, big deal.

[Mightyqueen801]

I still have the first email address I ever set up. I don't use it anymore, but it still exists.

I had taken my daughter on a weekend trip to Mystic, Connecticut, and the hotel had free Internet access with a keyboard that connected to the TV screen, which was the monitor. We set up Yahoo accounts.

[danielj72]

I am shocked how many people are listing pre 1990s dates. I always thought the networks were really more in the government and academic world before the early 90s. (think wargames) No one had heard of the "internet" back then. Didn't congress pass legislation in the early 90s that made the internet more mainstream? The whole world wide web, modern internet thing seems to have come to my attention around 1996. I had a computer in the early 80s (texas instraments) and thought it was nothing but an overgrown calculator. My first REAL computer I bought in 1998, it could do many of the things we expect the modern computer to do, albeit a lot slower back then.

[Mini-apple-less]

Originally Posted by danielj72

I am shocked how many people are listing pre 1990s dates. I always thought the networks were really more in the government and academic world before the early 90s. (think wargames) .

In theory yes, but I guess in practice some determined people were still able to hack the system from their home computer, or get recreational access for ostensible "research" purposes. Still honestly, before 1994 or so the Internet seemed to be 100 percent "geek territory".

[nightbird47]

Originally Posted by Austin023

I first heard of the "Internet" back in 1988 and that was the year I got to experience its use, which was in a computer class I was taking after school. In those days it was largely by phone modem and text based interfaces. The World Wide Web did not exist yet, but I was using BBS boards as early as 1992 and email around that time as well, once I got a modem for my own computer.

I got my own first computer in 86, and used my ex's Model 4 before that. I loved BBSing immediately. We started out own which ran until most of our posters were on the net, but used the linked bbs's of fido and relaynet before that. It was amazing to be able to have an ongoing conversation with someone acorss the world on Fido. For a while they bbs's faded and I felt a bit lost, except for Usenet. Loved usenet and posted my fanfiction there with newsgroup awards. I still wish it was active.

But I love that the net is again full of message boards and that I don't have to sit there for an hour or more dialing in and getting a busy signel until I lucked out and the modem answered on those first ones where only one user got in at a time.

I'm not much for the new social stuff like Facebook and stuff like tweeting. I won't use Facebook. But I'll spend hours on a favored bbs.

I think the first modem was 600 baud, but some of the boards were only 300 baud and you just let them scroll to read them.