I can remember firing up my 14.4 dial up and getting on Prodigy. I was my first venture into the internet. I thought Prodigy was the ****...little did I know. I think it was back in the late 80's. I would go into a college basketball forum and blast the Kentucky fans (I'm a Louisville fan). I started something called the KHC: Kentucky Haters Club. I named myself the president. There was this other guy, a Razorback fan, who wrote some of the most clever posts I have ever seen in my life. We would spend (waste) countless minutes and hours posting notes just to piss of Kentucky fans. I had a signature that just pissed them off like crazy: "1978: AMC Pacers, Billy Beer, Disco and the last time Kentucky won a championship" Kentucky fans are nuts and hadn't won a championship in many years. Rick Pitino came along, I moved to Compuserve and the rest is history. How many of you old timers remember your first venture into the www? os
My VERY first was a 200 baud modem that actually required you to put the phone receiver onto it like in War Games! I used to dial up the KLOL bulletin boards with my friend on my Commodore 64. My first internet service was with Mrs JB back in '92. We had Prodigy then AOL and were using a 2800 baud modem. I actually had my first real, honest-to-God, non-AOL service in 1995 with InSync in Houston. They were in the same building as the company I worked for and the owner of InSync used to ride the elevator with me nearly every day. That was, mabye, a 24KBPS modem but it was still really early on.
Prodigy. I was hooked on that stuff. I played Carmen Sandiego on its web games...and whenever it connected to the net and my modem made sounds...it sounded like sweet bliss.
Prodigy with a 1200 baud modem in the late 80s then in 1994 I joined the world of AOL with my 9600 baud modem... of course this was before anyone else at my school knew what the Internet or e-mail even was! Except for one of my best friends, with whom I emailed everyday (even though we hung out all day in school!)
2600 baud modem on the BBSes and Prodigy. Then when the net became available, 14.4 on a free internet connection (30 minutes a day) offered by the New Wave BBS around 1995. Then Beginners BBS offered one in 96, and I actually paid for net in 97 via PDQ. By that time I had gotten a 28.8 modem. Anyone remember RIPTerminal? Man, that was the BOMB. I had the graphics pack for L.O.R.D. and it was so much cooler!!
Started on bbs'es with a 300 and 1200 baud modem back in the mid-80's on my Apple. Ran a BBS for a couple of years in Houston. My first experience with the Internet came when I went to UH when I was in jr. high/high school and one of the professors there let me watch him chat with a friend in New York via a terminal. Later, around 1985 or 1986 I began running my BBS as a node on the FidoNet network and began hosting Internet/Usenet newsgroups on my bbs. My first WWW account was back in '93 or '94 with Hudson Trinity in Houston. I could create a web page, but had to snail mail it to them on a floppy so they could update it. The WWW had only been around for about 2-4 years at that point, so you can imagine how advanced HTML editing was. That was all before the commercialization and pornification of the Internet...
I don't know how college students spent their time before the internet. Life before Instant Messenger, e-mails, and Clutch City!
