When did you get your internet connection?

[mtosev]

I got connected to the internet in the year 1999 via dial-up.

I also remember my computer's specs at that time. I had a Celeron 466MHz, Asus 440BX chipset motherboard P2B, 128MB of ram, Riva TNT 16MB graphics card, 10GB Fujitsu HDD, HP CD-RW and a year later a Pioneer DVD-Rom, 17inch Nokia 447Zi monitor, US robotics modem, Windows 98.

So when did you get connected to the internet?

[moonbat]

'98, dialup. Pentium 166 MMX with 64 MB RAM, 2.1 GB HDD, S3 ViRGE graphics and a 33.6 kbps modem. Those were the days when CPU clock speed doubled every few months

[somdcomputerguy]

I operated a BBS in the late 80's. One of the other BBS's I visited eventually offed a 'gateway' to this thing called the internet. By the mid 90's I had an account with a dial-up internet provider.

[Night Wing]

It was back in 1982. At that time, I was using a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Rainbow 100 desktop computer with a external 15" monitor which was my first computer.

I mainly visited Bulletin Boards (BBS's) in the Houston, Texas area using an external 300 baud dial up modem since I live (and still do) in a small rural town in southeast Texas.

[Moonchild]

I got "internet connection" before the internet as such was a thing. I ran a FIDO netmail node in conjunction with my dial-up BBS for years. e-mail didn't exist yet; mail nodes would hand off mail packets to each other with daily dial-up exchanges. Eventually SMTP routing as the internet was established became a thing and I handed FIDO mail off to gateways instead. I don't remember what year I got my own dial-up internet myself as well to use but it was early on somewhere when the Netherlands got their first ISPs for residential users.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I never got a personal Internet connection at home until the beginning of the pandemics (2020), when we were forced to work from home during the lockdown and I got a little router with a very cheap SIM on loan for use from my academic institution. With the declared end of emergency, I bought a similar router and got a cheap SIM from another provider and I am on my own since April 2022.
However my institute (where I used to spend some 10 hours a day) got a network connection (Bitnet ! based on IBM RSCS protocol) since 1987. A few years later we got both Decnet and our first TCP-IP address, i.e. Internet, say 1990. We had our first httpd server in 1993. So I knew how to run a DNS and even how to patch sendmail.cf from the early times, despite the fact I got into the "customer network" much later.

[Falna]

1992 or 1993 - dial-up, of course. With a digital fax...

[athenian200]

1998, and the provider was America Online. My Dad set it up for me with the new computer he got me, a Compaq Presario 5204. 350MHz AMD K6-2, 64MB of RAM, Windows 98. So I was launched into the Internet and upgraded from an old 486DX at around the same time. Up until this point, I had relied on magazines like Nintendo Power for gaming news, random old books I bought from the Half-Price Bookstore for information about various computing topics, and CD-ROM encyclopedias for general research. If I wanted to determine something like, say, my moon sign in Astrology, I had to use a Farmer's Almanac from the year I was born to work that out. The really neat thing is Compaq shipped with both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer... so I already got exposed to the idea of switching between browsers depending on what websites prefer right away, because the market was evenly split around that time and sites would always clearly indicate what they worked better with.

Let's just say I was not happy with AOL, and we eventually found a better provider for half the price that worked without the need for AOL's software. This opened up the possibility of using other operating systems.

[Pentium4User]

2007, when my dad bought a computer Shuttle Sk22G2. I was 6 years old then about 2/3 years later I started really using it. 2021 I began with using newsgroups.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Usenet newsgroups in 2021 ? I am a survivor there, but I thought the new generations never encountered them.

[Pentium4User]

Usenet newsgroups in 2021 ? I am a survivor there, but I thought the new generations never encountered them.

But I did, and I like the concept of it. No FB/Twitter-like censorship.
And mostly no "woke" people.

[Bilbo47]

Getting a modem for the family PC was a big deal. Followed that speed progression from 1200 baud up through 56K. At university the PC labs were connected to UseNet, so downloading 7-bit ASCII-encoded ummm pictures was much faster there than from BBSes. After school a roommate hosted a BBS which acted as a game server.

Then with a different set of roommates, signed up for an early ISP - not AOL and not CompuServe. Getting my first-ever personal email address was another big deal. When they switched from dialup access to webmail the address changed from user@isp.com to user@ix.isp.com and that was a pain.

That's when it became obvious that relying on an email address hosted by any ISP was never going be reasonable. User@comcast.net or Yahoo or Cox or Gmail, none of that. The annual or 36-month cost for securing one's own email destiny was *very well* worthwhile to buy that peace of mind. The private domain name and web space that came along with it was a bonus.

[Bilbo47]

Usenet newsgroups in 2021?

No censorship.

Agree the signal-to-noise ratio is still much better there.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Usenet newsgroups in 2021 ?

Agree the signal-to-noise ratio is still much better there.

I don't understand how you can say that with a straight face. The incredibly poor signal-to-noise ratio in all of usenet is what made me turn away from it and what pretty much killed it for everyone else I know that used to use it. Usenet hasn't been usable for a long time due to the vast amounts of spam in every group, as well as the fact that all groups get scraped to have spambots pummel your inbox if you dare to have your e-mail address exposed in any way.

Unless, of course, usenet has magically been freed of the spammers in the last years -- I haven't checked lately.

[mtosev]

I see that some people replying here are quite older than myself.
Do you people remember geocities? I remember having a website there when I was 14-16 years old. I used it to host my noobish VB6 program that I made.

[Pentium4User]

Off-topic:

Unless, of course, usenet has magically been freed of the spammers in the last years -- I haven't checked lately.

Off-topic:
Then you might do it. Spam is mostly a problem in English news groups.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Then you might do it. Spam is mostly a problem in English news groups.

Well guess what? That would be the groups I'd be interested in (along with the majority of other usenet users).
Good to know other language boards are seeing a reprieve for the moment.

[Pentium4User]

Off-topic:

Then you might do it. Spam is mostly a problem in English news groups.

Well guess what? That would be the groups I'd be interested in (along with the majority of other usenet users).
Good to know other language boards are seeing a reprieve for the moment.

Off-topic:
There are some spam posts in a week, but not much, I read many English news groups and yes, sometimes there is spam, but in my mail inbox is much more.

[Bilbo47]

Off-topic:

signal-to-noise ratio is much better [in Usenet].

I don't understand how you can say that with a straight face.

You're right; I have not seen real Usenet since 1991. The one NNTP server I use is adminned by one person, and the user population is tiny by Usenet standards. On the occasion of infiltration, the community is tight and expels disruptors.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

The one NNTP server I use is adminned by one person, and the user population is tiny by Usenet standards.

When you're talking about a local server with only local groups not actually exchanging articles and groups with other servers, then yes, of course you'll be able to control it and it becomes just another protocol for a local forum/board. But that's not the networked Usenet I was talking about.
In fact it's the very beginnings of what Usenet became. One would have local groups with news articles. then an exchange would be set up to exchange the local news with news from another local group elsewhere, resulting in 2 linked Usenet nodes. Then another, etc. in the end creating a mesh network of all local news but accessible globally.