IN OTHER NEWS

[jpaskaruk@growers.social]

@blogdiva An uncle with a room full of computers and printers and whatnot got me onto the UManitoba mainframe in the early 80s, played Adventure.

Put up my first BBS in 1987, days after getting my first modem. Ok not that soon, needed to sort out that second phone line. But it was believed this was assuring me a bright future, so they got it for me.

Got back on the Internet round 92, by then UoM had a dialup service available at $1/hr, which I promptly racked up hundreds, then thousands, of hours on, while no billing requests ever came, to this day. So far as we know, nobody ever received a request to pay for their hours.

First mersh ISP showed up round 94 and I was among the first customers.

[patsplat@open-ground.org]

@blogdiva technically a local bbs, but my real favorite was ytalk at university.

Once I stood in line waiting for my turn at the terminal watching a girl break up with someone live via ytalk. Such angry typing.

[jf_718@mas.to]

@blogdiva @JoBlakely Same - in college on Sparcstation/SunOS (before Solaris was a thing). I still used gopher/pine/vi/emacs if I was using the far more numerous text terminals (there were only a few of the above workstations) - to this day I still have a soft spot for DEC VT220s.

[robotdiver@starlite.rodeo]

@blogdiva

I don't remember what I used first, but I still remember writing code on Texas Instrument computers in Basic that made turtles run across the screen. I think I was maybe 10 or 11. I'd save up to get code books from Scholastic. I think that was around the same time I learned how to output ascii art to a printer.

[robotdiver@starlite.rodeo]

@blogdiva

I'm guessing it was Usenet, but not until maybe 92-93, when I had access to a computer in senior high. Spent a lot of time on BBS servers at my friend's house in junior high.

[spiritualannie@chattrbx.com]

@blogdiva

I started using computers at work in 1979, but that was an IBM 1120 with punch cards for road design. Then we started getting PC's with DOS 5.0, then Windows for Workgroups 3.4, which is when I got access to Netscape and the Internet.

I couldn't afford a home PC for years, still, but I moved and switched jobs. They figured out I wasn't afraid of computers (and had small hands), so I was assigned to helping the SysAdmin set up new and upgrade older PC's. Did that until disabled.

[dan@axillae.telent.net]

@patsplat @blogdiva the great thing about ytalk was it was endian-independent, so you could ytalk a Vax from a Sun

[ericfielding@mastodon.social]

@blogdiva My college had a mainframe computer with a chat program that was connected to at least one other college back in 1978. Not exactly the Internet.

[nmo@tilde.zone]

@quinn It's generally weird to hear The Beatles originals as someone who didn't grow up in a Beatles house hold.

[climatejenny@biodiversity.social]

@blogdiva For oldsters, y’all have good memories! I don’t remember the protocol (if I ever knew) but about 48 years ago, when, as a girl, I pioneered getting into “stranger danger” via computers using the instant messaging function of a dial-up PDP-11.

[lysdexic@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva
Finger, chatting up boys from other universities. I was bad at it.

Dammit, not finger, phone.

[whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz]

@blogdiva Ooh, my friends and I started with local BBSes in the mid-80s -- a friend's older brother had a 1200 baud modem!

It was Usenet and Gopher that put me on the internet.

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva SLiP. A local university had a dial-in that allowed you to launch SLiP and get a nice little connection. Suddenly I could use Mosaic. Once that happened, the BBS that I used to run always had a busy tone. 🫠

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva @FeloniousPunk ... I haven't stopped downloading music. Strangely most of the music I download was released in 1975-1985.

[paradegrotesque@mastodon.sdf.org]

@blogdiva

14400,8,n,1

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva I should note that the dial-in dropped you to a shell menu and I could use Archie, Gopher, and Pine, or drop to the shell easily. And while exploring with Archie and Gopher was interesting, Mosaic really changed it all for me.

Before that I was dialing up long distance BBS's and snagging cool tfiles, warez, and OS/2 stuff.

[jmelesky@tinylad.social]

@blogdiva@mastodon.social My first was the dialup service Prodigy in 90 or 91, which I believe used its own protocol (it definitely used its own image formats). Technically only a small slice of it was the internet (just email, iirc), but I used that bit, so it counts.

I remember being envious of CompuServe users because they had the “cb simulator” (early text-only chatrooms).

There was a brief period in the 90s where having a 7-letter last name was, well, not “cool”, exactly, but maybe “convenient in a neat way”. So many usernames had a technical cap at 8 characters and “first initial last name” was such a common way for organizations to assign usernames.

[revndm@queer.cool]

@blogdiva gopher is so simple, so beautiful…

[levzadov@kolektiva.social]

@whitneymcn @blogdiva

Me, too, them plus the WELL. It The internet was better then. There weren't as many assholes.

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@blogdiva

ftp from some universities was my first experience on the "internet". that and usenet over uucp.