primitives discuss the using the interwebnets for the first time

[BattleHymn]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018864049

Here, the primitives discuss the first time they connected to those interwebnets from their house. 

Sat May 7, 2016, 05:08 PM
Miles Archer (2,810 posts)

Describe the first time you connected to the Internet at home. Me? AOL with a dial-up modem.

Bought a Sony PC from Circuit City. Came with AOL bundled. I knew I didn't want AOL but signed up for the free trial until my AT&T could get connected. Thought I was king of the world. 

There was no "high speed Internet" for home then. I worked in a tech environment, the people who needed that at home were getting T-1 lines installed.

You?

Sat May 7, 2016, 05:24 PM
Kaleva (15,178 posts)
3. WebTV with dial-up

Every time one of my aunts would send an e-mail with pics, I could get a lot of housework done while the e-mail was down loading.

Compound words are hard.  The inter net has a lot of them. 

Sat May 7, 2016, 05:38 PM
Star Member patricia92243 (8,546 posts)
4. I had Web too. It served as a good introduction to the internet. I was not "afraid" of it. I

had heard so many horror stories of viruses, etc. that I was terrified to even try it.

THEN - I got a PC. It came with the default on the firewall off. (I had never even heard of a firewall, so didn't know I had to turn it on.) In less than 24 hours I had so many viruses it quit working and HP had to restore it to factory setting - and turn on firewall.

Ah, the sweet innocence of youth (computer wise, that is.) lol

Afraid of the internet.  There you have it.   

Sat May 7, 2016, 05:45 PM
Kaleva (15,178 posts)
5. I recall telling an uncle how much I liked the keyless keyboard that WebTV used.

He asked me how such a thing worked. I thought a bit and realized I had meant to say "wireless keyboard".

This DUmmie tried to Voxsplain to its republican uncle how it used a keyboard.  I wonder if this happened during Thanksgiving dinner discussion?

Sat May 7, 2016, 07:31 PM
Star Member CaliforniaPeggy (119,213 posts)
10. My dear Miles Archer!

It was 2004 and my brother wanted me to have my own computer so I could back up my little hand-held device (don't recall the name, lol!) myself.

He was a computer nerd and had pieces of lots of machines lying around his house, so he cobbled together these parts and brought them down to me, and he set it up in my study. I was enthralled!

That year I found DU and in 2005, I joined.

We no longer have dial-up, but FIOS. It's grand.

Calpig crawls out of her coffin to make a post. 

[I_B_Perky]

Sat May 7, 2016, 05:08 PM
Miles Archer (2,810 posts)

Describe the first time you connected to the Internet at home. Me? AOL with a dial-up modem.

Bought a Sony PC from Circuit City. Came with AOL bundled. I knew I didn't want AOL but signed up for the free trial until my AT&T could get connected. Thought I was king of the world.

There was no "high speed Internet" for home then. I worked in a tech environment, the people who needed that at home were getting T-1 lines installed.

You?

Wow. I was doing the phone modem thing back in 1984.  300 baud. DOS.  No hard drives was standard.  256k was standard memory and 512 was max.  Procomm was the interface. Had a Xerox PC... it had the precursor to windows on it. Mouse?  That was a rodent you killed.  BBC's were the rage.  You could actually watch the cursor go across the screen.

[BattleHymn]

Wow. I was doing the phone modem thing back in 1984.  300 baud. DOS.  No hard drives was standard.  256k was standard memory and 512 was max.  Procomm was the interface. Had a Xerox PC... it had the precursor to windows on it. Mouse?  That was a rodent you killed.  BBC's were the rage.  You could actually watch the cursor go across the screen.

1984?  I was two. 

Man are you old, Perky.   

[I_B_Perky]

1984?  I was two. 

Man are you old, Perky.   

Bite me, junior. Didn't your parents teach you to respect your elders?  .   

 

[98ZJUSMC]

This DUmmie tried to Voxsplain

   Right! 

[SighLass]

Wow. I was doing the phone modem thing back in 1984.  300 baud. DOS.  No hard drives was standard.  256k was standard memory and 512 was max.  Procomm was the interface. Had a Xerox PC... it had the precursor to windows on it. Mouse?  That was a rodent you killed.  BBC's were the rage.  You could actually watch the cursor go across the screen.

Had a computer around 1980 or so... I could only do two things with it, make graphics like a Space Invader game and fake a report card from school (sign the real one myself and present the fake one for mom to sign)... got away with it for a few years... It worked on floppy disks if memory serves me... but it soon became a relic that was placed in the attic.

Didn't get another computer until about 1994 (wife's sister had it in the army)... and yes I did AOL for a few months until I I found a better alternative. Still miss some of the old AOL chat rooms to be honest... some nice folks. Found politics/guns/ebay/napster more to my liking later on around 1998...

[miskie]

Wow. I was doing the phone modem thing back in 1984.  300 baud. DOS.  No hard drives was standard.  256k was standard memory and 512 was max.  Procomm was the interface. Had a Xerox PC... it had the precursor to windows on it. Mouse?  That was a rodent you killed.  BBC's were the rage.  You could actually watch the cursor go across the screen.

Yeah, somewhere around 1984 for me too. I had a Vic-20 and later a C64 I bought with money I earned delivering newspapers before going to school in the morning. I also invested in a VicModem, a 300 Baud device. Browsing local BBS systems on the Vic20 was nearly unbearable because of the low screen resolution, but it was okay on the C64 My first 'real' internet connection came as a dialup VAX account in 1994 or so. I would browse what little internet there was at that time with Lynx, a text only browser.

I still use Lynx periodically, and have no problem doing things via terminal and commandline.

[SVPete]

I started using email in 1982 while working at Tandem Computers (SW fault-tolerant minicomputers that ran ATM networks and stock/commodity exchanges, not Tandy Corporation, Radio Shack's parent) on their internal network. Had a C64, a 1541 external floppy, and a daisy wheel electronic typewriter with an interface that Mrs. SVPete used for word processing, until the floppy drive went out and we didn't have the $$ to replace it. My first time on the Internet was in 1996 or 1997, using a SPARCstation 10 and Netscape Navigator during breaks at work for personal stuff, and for business-related stuff.

At home, we had a Packard Bell 486SX Win 3.11 computer that had a 2400 baud built-in modem, and we started with AOL. Our next computer had 14.4K, then 56K. Finally we switched to Earthlink and got a DSL modem. We've used another ISP, and have gotten a wireless network since then.

My first experiences on discussion sites was in 1997, on a now-defunct naval history site and a similarly now-defunct homeschooling site. My first news/politics discussion site was in 1998, CapitolHillBlue ReaderRant. At the time it was conservative-libertarian, but some time in the early 2000s it went liberal, and has become approximately as loony-toony-Prog as DU (TMN would find a good number of kindred souls there, too). It was on Kaleidoscapes, the homeschooling site, that I started using the forum name I've used in most I'net forums, "PeteS in CA". When I came here in 2009 I used "SVPete" to avoid complications WRT another (defunct since 2012) discussion site on which I was posting and was a Mod.