Who did what/when??

[53flyingcloud]

.
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Just wondering if you could recall when you first sign onto the "Internet" ?
Let me dial'er up..
Here's our time-line..first..
My first computer to computer exchange was during the mid-80's using the BBS host that were local calls for us.(at 300 baud)
Tried to use CompuServe but the cost and, long delays in connect ruled out this for us. Finally, I gave it up all together as my son was using the computer to play games with his network friends on the BBS.
Then, in 1995, I was starting to hear great things about the latest computers and, the Internet being compared to the WILD WEST DAYS. My son begged and begged for a newer, more powerful puter to replace his tired, old IBM.
Researched through all the available computer publications of the day for weeks. Finally, the day came to place an order with a company called Micron.
Ordered a puter built to specifications just before July, 1995. (It arrived the very day we were leaving for a vacation trip out West~!!)
I60mg processor,SCSI Controllers, 2 gig SCSI harddrive, 256k ram, floppy drive, Plextor CD/RW, tape B/U drive, fancy keyboard, ATI video board, color monitor, 28k dialup modem. Loaded with the latest WIN95 and, all the other bells/whistles programs. COST? slightly over 4k$..
Thus begin my internet.

[pmclemore]

Oh, yeah - bbs in mid '80s, trying to figure out TRS-DOS (can you say "old cs1 in") Then learning from your Univ sys-op that the program you want is available online? And that I have a free account if I want it?

Wondering what the heck is out there? And then it is gui? I wish I had my TeleVideo luggable.

Man. Such memories. Pass the wine.

Pat

[klattu]

1988
First time I heard the word gigibyte, I thought was a joke, made up word.
Mouse had funny name too...microsoft...what the heck is that?
Browser was some name like mozaic...something

Oh and unix was like martian

[Fyrzowt]

My first computer was at work, late '80s.
Mac SE with 40 mb hardrive. We upgraded to 80 mb, woo hoo.
Mostly used for word processing and incident reporting.
That was long ago and we now have a real Tech dept. Our home use followed what we were doing at work by a few years, as money allowed.
Dave

[urbanfood]

my first computer was an apple IIc, a smaller version of the IIe. i was in eighth grade so it was probably 82 or 83.

[HiHoAgRV]

Dial up, 300 baud with an acoustic coupler on a Vic 20 with a home made 32k memory expansion. Compuserve at, what, $.10/ minute (i think)? Probably 1984. I still have the computer (it's newer than my Airstream)

[53flyingcloud]

We should have a VIC-20/Apple 11e Rally...lol
My puter will beat your's..
Still have the box it came in and, the tape drive..Grrrrrrr

[SilverRanger]

Abacus...

TI-99/4
Commodore 64 running GEOS
Magnavox 8086


Don't recall the year I first was on the Internet, but it was well before they had hyperlinks and all those fancy pictures. Armed with the Magnavox IBM and my smoking hot 300 baud modem, it only took about 20 minutes to load a page with a picture.

[ljmiii]

Originally Posted by 53flyingcloud

Just wondering if you could recall when you first sign onto the "Internet" ?

Talk about an invitation to reveal your inner geek.

1982 - Got IBM PC - two floppy disks, no waiting. BASICally played games until "C" compiler came along.
1983 - Started to UUCP at the site with more than 7 letters in its name
1985 - Discovered something 'better' (Rogue. no wait, I meant the Internet) (no...the Internet didn't have sex then...definately Rogue.)
1987 - Started working on one of the earliest TCP/IPs on PCs. On 'real' Ethernet thanks to a 3C500 card. Back in the day when TCP/IP in 20K was magic.
1989 - Wrote RFCs - IP over NetBIOS and IP over IPX

OH MY GOD IT'S BEEN OVER TWENTY YEARS...;-)

[dudebb]

1977? does Pong count??

[53flyingcloud]

Amazing~
Here's a short quotation from ISOC's website of the early days:
quote:
As the Internet evolved, one of the major challenges was how to propagate the changes to the software, particularly the host software. DARPA supported UC Berkeley to investigate modifications to the Unix operating system, including incorporating TCP/IP developed at BBN. Although Berkeley later rewrote the BBN code to more efficiently fit into the Unix system and kernel, the incorporation of TCP/IP into the Unix BSD system releases proved to be a critical element in dispersion of the protocols to the research community. Much of the CS research community began to use Unix BSD for their day-to-day computing environment. Looking back, the strategy of incorporating Internet protocols into a supported operating system for the research community was one of the key elements in the successful widespread adoption of the Internet.
One of the more interesting challenges was the transition of the ARPANET host protocol from NCP to TCP/IP as of January 1, 1983. This was a "flag-day" style transition, requiring all hosts to convert simultaneously or be left having to communicate via rather ad-hoc mechanisms. This transition was carefully planned within the community over several years before it actually took place and went surprisingly smoothly (but resulted in a distribution of buttons saying "I survived the TCP/IP transition").
TCP/IP was adopted as a defense standard three years earlier in 1980. This enabled defense to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led directly to the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities. By 1983, ARPANET was being used by a significant number of defense R&D and operational organizations. The transition of ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP permitted it to be split into a MILNET supporting operational requirements and an ARPANET supporting research needs.
Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people.
unquote:
The full report can be read here~
Internet Society (ISOC) All About The Internet: History of the Internet
This so interesting from many aspects, the teamwork that brought it together, etc.
Even as a ham radio operator, I fondly remember packet radio and how solid it performed..

[CanoeStream]

Unless related to Airstreaming specifically, political comments should be avoided. According to the Community Rules at the bottom of every page, "Discussion of politics and religion is permitted only in association with the topic of this forum." Minor editing has taken place with this in mind.

[Jim & Susan]

My first personal computer was also an Apple IIc. The year after we bought it, Susan bought me a second floppy drive for Christmas! Woo Hoo! Also got a spell checker program on three disks. You had to change the floppies out to check an entire document.

First time on the internet would have been around ’78 or ’79 (in the military). Obviously, that was in the days when it was still closed to most folks. I think DARPA put together the early version of the internet around 1968.

First time on the World Wide Web was around ‘96(?). Been a loyal Mindspring (Earthlink) customer ever since.

Dang, I’m getting old.

Jim

[summerkid]

In '96 I left the Chicago Sun-Times & wanted to freelance. It felt as if the Internet had just been invented. Don't know what kind of computer it was but I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to load AOL onto a machine I knew zip all about, a procedure complicated by the fact that 3 out of 4 AOL discs shipped back then were faulty but a newbie had no idea where the whole process was breaking down.

But once I had AOL & a story was sent from one computer through thin air to mine & I could SEE IT WITH MY OWN EYES, it felt like true magic.

It still does. Check out my homework assignment for 3D modeling this week. We had to draw an actual paperclip, which is easy, then do something to it with the rendering tools (background, light source, applied materials). OK, so it represents 8 hours of my life I'll never have back but I used to look at illustrations like this & wonder how those geniuses went from a blank page to realistic perspective objects. Now I'm one of those "geniuses"!

Then again, my beautifully designed resume with a specially chosen font for the headers, done in Microsoft Word, will not transmit correctly in Microsoft Word. It comes out looking Plain Jane with no right-hand justification. So there are still days I hate computers.

[bobfowler]

My first experience with computers and remote computing was back in the mid 1970's. Mt Dad was a project manager at GTE in Waltham, Massachusetts and brought home a dumb terminal with a built in printer (no monitor, everything was printed on a long roll of paper) and acoustic coupler modem. On the far end was an IBM 370-158. Dad taught me the basics of programming in FORTRAN, NASTRAN, and later APL.

My first home computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 with a whopping 4K of RAM. Shortly thereafter, I bought a Radio Shack Color Computer. My brother and I bumped up the RAM to 64K and modified the floppy controller so that it would read both sides of a double sided 5 1/4" disk drive (but as two drives). I still have that computer, but the drives are long gone.

Fast forward a couple of years and I picked up an 8088 XT. The XT came with 2 floppy drioves and no hard disk. I can still remember laying out $350 for a Seagate 30MB RLL drive and controller card - man that hurt! A few months later built my first 386 based machine, a 40Mhz SX. In 1995, I put together a 486 DX-2 66 with 16MB of RAM and two, count 'em two 65MB hard drives, THAT was the cat's ass!

I've lost track of how many PC's I built since then, but my last 3 are still in use as servers here in the house.

BTW - the 16MB of RAM for that 486 was over $500 back then (4, 4MB SIMMs) OUCH!!!!!

[summerkid]

I don't envy the kids in my community college classes who take them so for granted because it's been a fun ride.

Then again, some things never change. Back in the early '80s when I was in actual college, we got some hand-me-down computers for our student newspaper and, if we didn't type a weird bell symbol at the very end of the story, it didn't transmit to the printing department downstairs. It just went away. How many times do you think we had to rewrite stories because we forgot about that bell?

And last night I had spent 2 hours drawing a floorplan for a client & went to insert symbols, starting with a toilet for the bathroom. I'll be danged if an error popped up, AutoCAD shut down immediately & the whole drawing went INTO the toilet. At least it's nowhere on MY computer anyway.

So aggravating. And then there's the whole GIGO problem. I am terrible at saving things to correct folders, they just get stored where I was last, so photos end up with documents & documents end up with the desktop icons. Kind of like how there are cookbooks in the bedroom & plants in the bathtub and, just yesterday, a phone in the fridge.

[Jim & Susan]

Kid, want a walk down memory lane? Go rent a copy of "All the President's Men" and look at the computer "terminals" in use at The Post in the mid '70's.

Jim

[summerkid]

well, i've always loved movies & TV shows since "War Games" at least, where someone sits in front of a computer in enemy territory & has 30 seconds to hack into it and there's always a green blinking "PASSWORD" blank on an otherwise black screen & somehow they break into it.

A) My computer never looked like that even in the DOS days.
B) I can't break into my OWN computer in 30 seconds.
C) My computer doesn't even boot up within 30 seconds.

[digger bear]

I still have my original mid 80's mac - the one that looked like a toaster and came with 1/4 meg of ram- it came in a canvas backback. I remember having a very serious discussion whether anyone would actually need an entire meg of ram. We decided it was simply for the pretensious...

Today my mac has 4 gigs of ram.

[Pick]

I remember getting on the 'net in the late 80's through Compuserve. Not much WWW activity, then, mostly email and newsgroups. Folks with @compuserve.com and aol.com email addresses were looked down upon. Thus, my first real email address was shimek@hooked.net! It was an alternative ISP based in San Fran, that you dialed into through Compuserve's dial up network.

My first computer was a TRS80 Model III with NO disk drives and 48K of memory. My first PC was an XT with an 8 mhz processor, 640K of memory and was eventually upgraded to a 10 MB hard drive. That's MB not GB for all you young'uns! I remember when one of the members of our radio club bought one of the first 386 machines. I think he paid something like $4000 for it. We were all in awe of this supercomputer Joe had bought.

Hard to believe I have a 4 GB USB drive in my pocket most of the time. Some of the IT folks at work use 8GB drives that carry whole computer HD images on them!