What did you think about your first time getting on the internet?

In 1997 I began 6 years of work at Cisco Systems, the 800 pound gorilla of the early Internet. Before then during the Usenet text era, worked 2 decades in UNIX computer engineering under VAX development systems where much of that evolved from. So encountered all that technology as it developed years before such became common with the general public.
 

fuzzybuddy said:
Since you are reading this, you are computer literate. 30 Years ago, did you ever think you'd be sitting in front of a TV, typing away? What did you think about your first time getting on the internet? I can do banking and a few other things, but that's about it. What do you think of your computer skills?
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For being self-taught since just a few years after the WWW via a PC started, my skills are pretty good.
My grandchildren would disagree.
 
Learning how to use the internet was a huge challenge for me but I also had a late start and learned on dial - up which was unreliably intermittent. I believe the first time I tried it was at the beginning of this century. I swear Iā€™m technically challenged ; I had a horrible time learning and it really wasnā€™t until I got my first phone that I actually started learning. Unfortunately we still couldnā€™t get a good connection and the only thing that saved us was that we had use of my husbands business phone which was a superior one.

The fact that we preferred to live in a rural area wasnā€™t in our favour when it came to the internet and believe it or not, we only just got high speed a couple of months ago. Up until then we could only read about people streaming Netflix and watching unlimited movies , which is something we now can do.

Fortunately iPhones had a good roaming cell which made it possible to get online and then my phone had a better connection than my husbands. Now Iā€™m able to join sites that allow me to sing and play my musical instruments with others from around the world, I can take fairly decent photos to share with others, can send and receive texts and info from others as well as use art apps, print off important documents etc.

How did I feel when I first tried the internet ?
Like a frustrated, incompetent chump šŸ˜–

How do I feel now?

Most grateful that I can interact with others, learn new things and share that . Itā€™s like my personal hub for socializing which is miraculous for this introvert. I very much enjoy the companionship I find here. Itā€™s life changing.
 
I thought the PC and connectivity was for serious endeavors such as business, academia and military.
I wondered first how I talked myself into spending over $2K for one and second, how was I even going to use it as an average guy?
What was I going to do with it besides just wasting time on AOL? ... since then I've found many more sites to waste time on :ROFLMAO:
 
Trish said:
I loved the internet - I thought it was amazing. These days, I think the internet has been ruined by scams, viruses and paywalls.
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It's mainly ruined for those who are careless, Trish. A good firewall, coupled with a good virus program should do it! That and being suspicious of an unfamiliar site asking you to click on certain links. Or more frequently, eMails from unknowns asking you to click on a link! Once or twice during the past five years, someone did get through all the protection, but when faced with it I ignored my usual procedure for shutting down and simply hit the power button immediately. They never got a chance to get a ransom from me!

But I agree with the thought behind your message, I miss the old days when we communicated through the usenet and knew each others' real names, even where we lived and what we did for a living. It was just like having an extended family. Some of us even visited each other in person! Ah, how I miss the more innocent times with my friends on alt.forty-plus!
 
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Old Salt said:
It's mainly ruined for those who are careless, Tish. A good firewall, coupled with a good virus program should do it! That and being suspicious of an unfamiliar site asking you to click on certain links. Or more frequently, eMails from unknowns asking you to click on a link! Once or twice during the past five years, someone did get through all the protection, but when faced with it I ignored my usual procedure for shutting down and simply hit the power button immediately. They never got a chance to get a ransom from me!

But I agree with the thought behind your message, I miss the old days when we communicated through the usenet and knew each others' real names, even where we lived and what we did for a living. It was just like having an extended family. Some of us even visited each other in person! Ah, how I miss the more innocent times with my friends on alt.forty-plus!
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In the very early days of the internet, a friend of mine introduced me to a tiny online forum which was run by her cousin and everyone on it was either family or friends of the cousin's family. I think there were a lot of those small forums popping up at the time; the software was free and it was easy to set up, no one worried about online security. It was lovely and people helped each other out, even did a Secret Santa! Eventually, the cousin closed the forum because it became a target for people just wanting to cause havoc. Good while it lasted though. šŸ™‚
 
Trish said:
In the very early days of the internet, a friend of mine introduced me to a tiny online forum which was run by her cousin and everyone on it was either family or friends of the cousin's family. I think there were a lot of those small forums popping up at the time; the software was free and it was easy to set up, no one worried about online security. It was lovely and people helped each other out, even did a Secret Santa! Eventually, the cousin closed the forum because it became a target for people just wanting to cause havoc. Good while it lasted though. šŸ™‚
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I remember those forums with great fondness. They were pre-internet and were set up by computer nerds nearby and we called them Bulletin Boards, or BBs. I made quite a few friends through them and was actually able to download pictures that the BB had in a separate folder. Wow, I could download one of those in half an hour tops! There was also another feature about the bulletin boards I admired: through a whole chain of BBs you could actually communicate with people at the other side of the country! Awesome! Then came the Internet! And later on Windows! Well, I appreciate the electronic advances and use them daily but miss the closeness and innocence of the earliest days of PCs!
 
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In the late 90s into 00s, most people new to the Internet thought it was about social sites like AOL. That was never the case until the smartphone social media craze began in 2005. By far from the beginning, it was primarily about commercial, business, university, and science research sites. Sites the majority still have little awareness of. Many such sites eventually became more difficult to access beyond welcoming home pages due to security issues.
 
The business I worked for bought its first computer probably early 1980s. It was so special they placed it in its own office and no one was allowed to smoke in there. The owner told me I could use it for ordering tooling, but never gave me any instructions on how to do that. After messing with it a few times I asked for help, and then the secretary showed me how to connect to the internet.

Being a dufus I guess I figured all computers were just magically linked together and once you turned it on the world was at your fingertips. I knew nothing about logging on or what the internet was or how it worked.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
What did you think about your first time getting on the internet?
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I first got on something like the internet in 1981, CompuServe. I had a dumb modem that you physically put the telephone receiver into. Like the one in the picture below. I think you had to do the dial up yourself. I was impressed by its speed, I could down load text almost as fast as I could read it. Had a kind of texting function, you could send messages to other users, and a very early forum like thing. It was live, discussion groups - people from all over the world. I was absolutely amazed.

Did not get the real internet until about 1995, don't remember being as impressed with it.
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David777 said:
In the late 90s into 00s, most people new to the Internet thought it was about social sites like AOL. That was never the case until the smartphone social media craze began in 2005. By far from the beginning, it was primarily about commercial, business, university, and science research sites. Sites the majority still have little awareness of. Many such sites eventually became more difficult to access beyond welcoming home pages due to security issues.
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I knew of the intended purpose of the Internet, it was to connect great minds in order to achieve great things and to expand our knowledge. Then they put a computer into my hands and I found it was wonderful for playing Tetris and PacMan! MY PC, what a wonderful Games Console! O.S. off to play Diablo II Resurrected! :LOL:
 
My first time on the internet I was nervous, my mom bought me a machine called Mail Station. I hooked it up to my phone jack I could email people but there were no attachments. I had it for 3 yrs, then my brother&sister strongly suggested I get a computer
In 2011 I bought a HP Widows 7 computer it was trial&error as I surfed the internet, certainly was a big change from what I had before
I had no idea how to use it, at my church one of the ladies in our business office, Lenore{awesome graphic designer} patiently taught me the computer skills I have today. I remember the 1st time I made plane reservations online, my hand was shaking but I did it,so happy
 
I enjoyed connecting with people from all over the globe. There was an Australian site that my friend near
Adelaide had me on. It was so interesting to hear the Aussie accents. We used to go into text chat forums
as well with a friend of hers. It was all good fun.

Later on, I experienced being hit on, by men who obviously wanted internet sex. That made me more cautious.

I loved playing online Scrabble and other games. Nowadays, I just play solo games.
 
The first Windows PC I bought was in 1998, with Windows 95. The most expensive electrical Item I had bought, along with its iiyama crt monitor. Later computers I bought, then made myself, were significantly cheaper, yet far more powerful.

The day I bought it and 'installed' it was probably the longest time I had spent on the internet in one day. I was fascinated by the internet at that time.
 
EmptyCup said:
It was the in the 1980ā€™s. I believe it was necessitated by research I was doing. I had to communicate (email) with a professor at another university. Dialed into the schoolā€™s mainframe and connected to Bitnet? (I think that was what called) and the forums were Usenet. I found it useful for the project and it did get published. Everything was done by commands at a prompt - no graphical user interface. The irony was I was doing research on prototyping graphical user interfaces! Ha!
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Correction (I was wrong!): BitNet was not part of ARPANET. It was Internet-like, run by universities. My first ā€œrealā€ Internet account was when I was with the Department of Energy in the late ā€˜80s.
 
I got my computer , which had Windows 96. I can't tell you how many techies told me that the 96 version was never released. It was Win, 95 then XP. Anyway, turned it on and it dialed up, made a sound and connected me to the wild, wonderful world of the internet. But all I got was a blank screen. I didn't know you needed a browser. BTW, adding a printer was an all day affair. In order to get it to work, I remember having to type in this huge long line of code like 2(def)rA67>wed45[d]a{34gtBo} etc. etc.
 
I remember when a Google search listed several thousand results.

Each unique.

I used to put in a word, any word, and the results were 100s of different websites featuring that word in all kinds of usages. This was how I discovered new websites and learned new things.

Can't do that today. The only results today are 6 sites offering a definition of the word.
 

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