IN OTHER NEWS

[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.

[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. 🫠