IN OTHER NEWS

[holsta@mastodon.art]

@blogdiva My teacher at the time clearly wanted to demonstrate the reach of the internet.

From our little classroom in Denmark we had to use gopher to find the opening hours of a particular library in Hawaii, and a few other far away places.

Later came some newfangled things called a browser and HTML.

[dhobern@scicomm.xyz]

@blogdiva

I guess it depends what "online" means. From 1986, I was using the IBM internal VM/CMS mail tools and fora - I've been racking my brain trying to remember what they were called, but they were shared discussion threads using XEDIT as a client.

As for something actually internet-adjacent, I was using FTP, Gopher and Lynx in 1992 and then Mosaic.

But that's only 34 years. Did you really mean 42, because that would be well pre-Gopher?

[dhobern@scicomm.xyz]

@blogdiva @aud @FeloniousPunk

It is indeed great and opened my eyes to some music I would not have checked out). I love that the album starts with the guitar from Long, Long, Long, easily my favourite Beatles track after all these years.

[johnzajac@dice.camp]

@blogdiva

AOL 2.6 on a 14.4 modem

[sassitina@autistics.life]

@blogdiva Continuously since ARPAnet so it probably doesn´t count.

Used ftp to the wsmr.mil software archives and the various sunsites.

Quite some time before Canter & Siegel.

[clippersncrows@mastodon.social]

@blogdiva 33+ years. AOL, USENET, and WWW (mostly at school at first)

[acsawdey@fosstodon.org]

@blogdiva I was on PLATO in the early 80’s, had email (ihnp4!uiucuxc!merlin!sawdey) mid 80’s via uucp on a Unix system. Maybe around 1987 connected two Unix systems with thinnet but it was 192.x.x.x so not really internet

[affekt@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva @JoBlakely same, I got it off a CD that came in the back of a book about the Internet. prior to that it was gopher in the public library. and prior to that it was BBSs. I guess I was first online in the early 90s or maybe late 80s but I don't have the best memory. basically my entire life. somehow my mom did something right and we always had some kind of computer in the house even though we grew up dirt poor and on welfare.

[eub@ohai.social]

@mlrife remember how Mosaic didn't support HTML tables with proportional-width fonts? But there was no Netscape for the DECstation 3100 in the late 90s so there I was

[drahardja@sfba.social]

@blogdiva Yay, a fellow Before Timer! I wrote and ran my own BBS on an Apple //e in Singapore in the early 1980s.

My first “Internet” access was BITNET around the same time.

[ozdreaming@infosec.exchange]

@blogdiva mists of time... I got hooked on BBSes when I met (age 14?) a sysop from the Dorsai Embassy, and volunteered to manage the Mac software uploads. That was in the mid-80s, and they were a special group of nerds -- some of the first people to offer AIDS information online (at least on the east coast), along with hosting files and forums for many other groups. And they ran a weekly soup kitchen (well, chicken & potatoes) out of Jack's loft in Soho, until it burned and the servers moved to an anodyne basement in LIC.

Then in college ca 1990, I got hooked on bitnet relay, usenet, SunOs 4, gopher, and the rest is more recent history...

[koushiniku@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva I’ve put stuff on gopher! Just before its demise in the early 90s. No idea if anyone actually saw it. Later, we ran the Georgia Extension Forestry web server under the desk. Prior to university, dialup was an expensive long distance call, so I rarely used it.

[quinn@social.circl.lu]

@blogdiva @aud @FeloniousPunk I still listen to the grey album regularly.

[quinn@social.circl.lu]

@blogdiva kinda tough to say, actual internet: door trailing into a next lab at UCSB, where I was not attending but pretended that I was. I was using someone else's credentials to log on and found usenet, the original social media brainrot

But I started BBSing in the 80s from my land line.
... which was not sketchy at all...

[steter@mastodon.stevesworld.co]

@blogdiva I think it was ~1980, with a connection between the math department at SJSU and UCLA.

[aletheia_e@kolektiva.social]

@blogdiva I started internet access with Delphi dial up ( $20 /20hours + $3 for bridging to internet ).
I've looked in recent years, and NONE of the Usenet post I made in the 80s and early 90s are in any of the retained archives, so I guess my digital footprint isn't much from the past.

[icooiey@mastodon.green]

@wcbdata about the same for me. But I think we had Gopher at the first uni, then Mosaic where I was after 1992. I remember taking a stats class in 1990 and uploading my program to the mainframe, then having to run down 3 flights of stairs, out to another building, up 2 flights, then waiting till my printout was filed to learn I’d left out a semicolon. Then retrace steps, add it, run again and repeat process until I had something that worked. Watching birds was more fun.

[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.