How long have you been online?

[shouldbeinbed]

Well, in answer to that, the first internet porn I saw was some time in the mid-late eighties. You had to work hard for your porn then. They were encoded into plain ascii (not an ascii image, just a string of characters). The ascii was broken into chunks and shared on a binary news group. To view them all you had to do was save each file on your computer home directory and append them in order, then run them through the correct ascii-to-binary decoder, then send them to the departmental printer (because you couldn't view them on your 80x24 character green monitor) and leave them lying in the out tray of the printer for female staff to see and raise hell with departmental head.

Too much like hard work, it took a while for technology to supercede soggy copies of razzle that lined my dog walking route along the local golf course. How they found time for Golf I'll never know

I'm surprised no enterprising pornographer back in the day printed a waterproof version called hedgerow babes.

Anyway back on topic, we had scratchpads on the dos systems at work that predated email and were far better as you had to be concise & they didn't accrue dozens of spam mails a week.

 

[mybike]

I worked on the early packet switching networks in the late '70s and we had some limited access then, mostly through test gear!

At home I had a Compuserve account some years later with a 9k6 modem and Amstrad 1640 that you could con into giving a full set of colours by running an included programme meant for GEM.

I recall experimenting with text only browsers at some stage.

 

[classic33]

I think it was the mid or late 90's, and mostly genealogy related.

93/94, and for much the same reason.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Also around 20 years - originally at university, for research. I didn't have an Internet connection at home until later.

 

[stephec]

I started the first ever helmet debate back in '96.

And it's probably still going on about 4000 pages long.

 

[stephec]

Well, in answer to that, the first internet porn I saw was some time in the mid-late eighties. You had to work hard for your porn then. They were encoded into plain ascii (not an ascii image, just a string of characters). The ascii was broken into chunks and shared on a binary news group. To view them all you had to do was save each file on your computer home directory and append them in order, then run them through the correct ascii-to-binary decoder, then send them to the departmental printer (because you couldn't view them on your 80x24 character green monitor) and leave them lying in the out tray of the printer for female staff to see and raise hell with departmental head.

I think the urge would've passed after all that.

 

[slowmotion]

I can't remember precisely, but there was certainly white dog poo on the pavements when I first went online.

 

[Old jon]

1989, I will spell that, nineteen eighty nine, with CompuServe. Needed it for a college ( evening ) course I was doing

 

[TheDoctor]

I first encountered the online world with in about "85. Then my first OU course had a forum - about '96 or so.But I only really got heavily online once we went from dialup to broadband in about 2000.
Probably my main drivers were going on CC at work during a particularly depressing time about nine years ago, and then some of my friends quitting CC for Facebook.

 

[DaveReading]

First proper Internet (i.e. IP-based) experience, mid 90s.

Prior to that, a Compuserve user from the late 80s.

First "online" experience, courtesy of a 1200/75 acoustic coupler to connect an ancient Compaq luggable to Maplin's dial-up Maptel system (anyone remember that?) and various Fido BBs: early/mid-80s.

First time I used a computer (via a remote timeshare connection, so technically "online"): 1967.

 

[NorthernDave]

1998, with a beige PC from Tiny (remember them?) that cost about £1200 and had a whole 2GB hard drive.
Connected to the net via a 56k modem, although I never got a faster speed than 33k...
Oh, the delights of waiting for 6pm to log on due to the ISP package being cheaper and then not being able to use the phone while you were online.

 

[marknotgeorge]

When I started uni in 1990, you had to log into a gateway to get from JANET to the internet proper, where one of the US universities had an FTP site where one could download some filth, or so a second-year told me. There were even GL files - think of animated GIFs, but low res and monochrome, sorta like something John Logie Baird would've produced if he was working in Hamburg rather than Hastings.

 

[Leedsbusdriver]

1999 via a Sega Dreamcast. I thought it was the bees knees at the time.

 

[Rezillo]

1994 for me. Windows 3.11, Trumpet winsock, Netscape Navigator 1.0 and a 28.8k modem, dialling into Anglianet with a script of various Hayes commands that eventually got me a connection. First site we went to was NASA's.

We could have been with Demon earlier than that but the phone costs were too high and we had to wait for a local ISP for local rate dialup. As the ISP only had a 64k connection, it all slowed down with multiple connections but there were so few subscribers, it wasn't a huge problem!

 

[AndyRM]

1999 via a Sega Dreamcast. I thought it was the bees knees at the time.

A hugely underrated console, and one that I still love.

Internet wise, around 20 years for me too. I can still do a pretty good impression of a dial up modem.