When Did You Start Communicating Via The Interwebs

College gave me the accesses i needed.
Back when the BBS was watching the Rockets Win Their 1st Championship

Rocket River

 

My friend in college was a programming nerd and he figured out how to go into the registry and get rid of that huge NetZero banner that they made display across your screen when logged in. He was an adblocker before that was a thing.

 

I knew a couple of adults when I was a teen in the ealy 90s who participated in usenet groups, but I never did. College gave me an email address around 1995. Before that, the college had a DOS-prompt system for messaging, but we didn't have a real use for it, so we would just poke each other. But as far social interaction on the internet, probably clutchcity circa 1997-98.

 

A/S/L?

 

It was accessible to geeks and university people long before the WWW came around. I was shocked around 1989 or 1990 when I saw a friend in college chatting with his girlfriend in New York via a terminal in the computer lab at UH. "Oh, she's at Cornell". Wth. You can do that? Mind was blown. Up until that point, I had only heard of BBS'es and "the Internet" as a form of communication and hadn't run into realtime send and respond for communication other than something like a telephone or BBS. Like I said, most of my Internet communication was via usenet newsgroups on my and other BBSes from around '84-early 90's. We used to have some decent Houston sports conversations in those groups.

One of the most hilarious memories I have was back around 1993 or so I was with my first ISP and was creating my first web page. From what I recall, I had to mail a 3.5" floppy via USPS to them so they could take my work and update my web page. That still cracks me up. The other thing I remember about those early webpages, mine included, is how they caused permanent retinal burn-in with the crazy backgrounds we sometimes chose. I still remember the crazy backgrounds I was choosing. Smh.

 

My first message board sign up was a welding society website back in 2002. I had email a few years prior.

 

Yep, that was me in the early 90's. My girlfriend was in Houston student teaching and I was still at Sam. We figured out how to chat on that thing so I spent a lot of time in the computer lab chatting with her so we could save money on long distance bills. I mean this was FREE!

Then came AOL and I found a Rockets chat room which led me to Jeff's Save Our Rockets website which lead me to CF and my life was never the same.

 

one of the greatest mistakes our society has made is giving people like tinman access to communicate with other people.

when society gets redone, this should be top of the list of things to prevent.