This is awesome. Not to brag or anything, but I never did the AOL thing. It always amazed me that there were so many people who didn’t get that all you needed was Netscape and an IP. I do remember having a 9400-Baud modem, though. Took ten minutes just to download one lousy 56k dirty picture.ÂÂ
Update: Very funny, Dan. So, what were you buggering if it wasn’t goats? As for my modem, I was going on my obviously not-so-hot memory. After reading the comments, I realize it must have been a lot slower than 9600, because we got in right at the beginning of the intratubes. Good times.
that’s priceless
Yeah, did the AOL thing. Listening to that screechy dialup tone and making sure no one picked up the phone and disconnect me….
I will say one thing – I met my husband through AOL in 1998. :-)
We had Prodigy in the early nineties, but I never did the AOL thing, either. My first real internet access was through the campus ISP in college.
Netscape was invented by GTE. Died two weeks ago.
Managed to avoid AOL completely, college.
Well I was on Compuserve in 1987, where we had to use Unix commands over a 1200 baud modem. When AOL came, there was a bit of a Compuserve user elitist attitude and a certain amount of snark toward AOL users as being newbie lightweights. It was a different time. I participated heavily on the Roots Genealogy Forum and the Legal Forum and most of the members thought nothing of posting their addresses or phone numbers, having gatherings to meet each other, etc. Most everyone migrated to the Web and are still active today, only instead of get togethers at the local bowling alley lounge, it is week long cruises or fancy retreats.
I was working at Datastorm at the time, supporting Procomm Plus, so I was more of a BBS guy than an AOL guy. I did have a Prodigy account, though, until the intartubes hit big and I got dial-up access. Oh, and Craig, it was probably a 9600 bps modem–I think I still have my 14400 Supra down in the basement somewhere.
At work, we used TapCIS to download, thread, and reply to our support questions on Compuserve.
Yes, we had AOL! Why? Because we thought that AOL must be good, because in America they have this good things … that’s the way we thought before we knew Bush’s war opinion … And than we changed to t-online (yes, the t-mobile comp.). And at univerity we had since 1995 this T1 thing and Netscape (as you mentioned); Puuh
Greetings, Max
Um, I happen to agree with “Bush’s war opinion,” but you probably should have figured out after using AOL that not everything with “America” in its title was a good thing.
Coincidentally, I had a dream a few nights ago where I was trying to dissuade my dad from using those free hours of junk mail AOL CDs that used to show up nearly every day. For some reason, I couldn’t convince him that using them was a bad idea.
Reminiscing about dial-ups and AOL isn’t nearly as funny as hearing someone use them today. Or, as I heard, last month.
The AOL discs are only good for people who work putting together video game packages, so they can steal the game discs and sell them.
I was on AOL in ’94. So what? Stop looking at me like that. I’m THE SAME PERSON I WAS A MOMENT AGO.
[…] not to brag, but I never buggered goats. Posted by Dan Collins @ 6:40 am | Trackback Share […]
1994? I was still communicating by snail-mail in 1994. Didn’t get online until the following year. And didn’t ditch dial-up until 2000 at the earliest. Probably 2001, actually.
My idea of being an “early adopter” is getting into a technology before it’s been rendered obsolete.
My wife and I started out with Compuserve (on a 2400-baud modem) in ’95, mainly because AOL hadn’t gotten to Fairbanks yet.
By the time Fairbanks got AOL on 2400, Compuserve was up to — was it 19200? I finally signed up with a local ISP in ’96 because I wanted there to be someone in town I could snarl at if the service went down.
Hey Max — I’ll be calling you later for tech support. Ramp up the accent a little or I might be able to understand you.
Started out on AOsmell because it was free. My cousin blew up his computer and gave me his AOL passwords so that he could check his e-mail. Three months later when he replaced his computer I switched to a local ISP. I had a rockin’ 1200 baud modem at teh time.
I used to love the 5-6 fre floppy discs that AOL and Comuserve used to send me every month too. I didn’t buy discs for years
I think Dan was buggering goats back then.
I was a BBS guy in 95 and then went direct ISP with Netscape in 96.
I was in law school in 1994. Online? Who had time for that?
I was a professional musician in 1994. The only thing I had that plugged into the wall was a Fender amp. Even worse, when I did finally get online in the late 90s it was webTV, and only then because someone gave me a TV and my roommate had a phone line I could use when he wasn’t home.
In ’94 I was finishing the last 3 credits for my BA, working for a photo processing lab in OKC, typing my papers on an IBM PCjr, was NOT on any network, and that fall decided to join the OK National Guard–shipped to Basic in October.
It took getting a new job working for an attorney to get me online where I discovered USENET….
Mindspring, Biatches!
My first internet connection was possible because my company had dialup, and left everything wide-open so that I could jump out to the Internet from there. I’m thinking 1992 or so. There wasn’t much to be found in 1992, IIRC, but the MUD access was bitchin’.
Earthlink was my first ISP, back in 1995 or so.
…but using [what eventually evolved into the Internet] for me started back in 1980 or 1981. CSNET, I think it was called.
That video is just too good!
I started college in ’90. My neighbor in the dorm had a 2400 baud modem for his machine, but better than that, we had a row of VT100s in the basement that connected at 19.2k. Ludicrous speed!
I spent a lot more time in MUSHes than in forums, but even so I can remember the September That Never Ended like it was just last week. God, how we hated the AOLers. It was like the Endless Night of a Zillion Timmahs.
I’m just thankful that I caught a quick glimpse of things as they were in the beforetimes.
You bunch of techie elitist bastards… Everyone pretending they were in the tiny minority of people of never had AOL..
I had AOL.. Proudly.. It had it’s day back before DSL and cable modems.. It was more than just internet access.. It was the start of mass internet community.. Where else could you go and talk dirty to a hot 19 year old blond beach babe? (and pretend that she wasn’t really a morbidly obese 50 year old bored housewife from Nebraska..)
By 1994 I was quite addicted to the internet through school, but my parents had AOL because they were the only company who would serve them in rural BFE through a toll-free number. The nearest city with an local ISP was a long-distance, several-cents-a-minute call (I could drive to my cousin’s house the next town over cheaper than I could call him for five minutes; rural telecoms were interesting). They moved to a town with a big corporate telephone provider and a local ISP in 1999.
I’m not sure what the state of access in rural areas is today, since I’ve been living in cities with phone companies to sell me broadband since 2001, but there was a definite gap in the mid-90s.
One positive thing about AOL: over time, their free CDs morphed into some pretty cool works of graphic art. My wife glued felt to the shiny side of several of ’em, and we use them as coasters to this day.
19.2kbaud? In 1990? Archaic.
In 1979 we had ADM3a dumb terminals communicating at 38kbaud. We had a dozen-plus 11/780s all networked together. Life was good.
Four years later, I graduated and took a job with a defense company. We communicated with a mainfraime computer in Huntsville, AL at 2400 baud, if we were lucky enough to get a fast connection; otherwise it might be as slow as 300 baud. Our own mainframe we were limited to 9600 baud until we got a dedicated, LOS microwave link, and that pipped us up by about an order of magnitude, IIRC.
I’ve never had AOL. AOL has always, always sucked. My in-laws had AOL in the mid ’90s, and it sucked then.
Having never used AOL, I was wondering…could you find pr0n there?
Not that I look for that.
1994? I too had an IBM PCjr. (Don’t look at me like that, my company bought it.) I used it to log on to the mainframe. This was so we didn’t have to drive in to work to fix problems at night.
Did you ever try to figure out a problem with some guy on the other end of the phone, only to realize after getting up and driving in in the middle of the night – mid winter, naturally – that he neglected to read the message in BIG RED LETTERS at the top of the console screen?
He’s now an exec at huge computer manufacturer I will not name. I’m still here, getting called in the middle of the night. Bush was right about those C students.
The good old days – or something like that.
RTO,
Some of us still hang out on usenet, I still participate in several semi to professional photography forums.
2400 baud *guffaw* I started on local dialup BBS at 300 baud. A fair typist could outpace that throughput. Never got on AOL until I married my future ex-wife who already had it…….. there were other problems as well. *sigh*
Hey, y’know what? I just remembered I called a guy on his cell number, in Fairbanks, in 1995. Was Fairbanks that far ahead of L.A. or whereverTF Jack Bauer was operating in 1994?
Expanding on my #4 comment, I started computing with a Tandy with no harddrive, got it as a Christmas gift while I was in the hospital recovering from a major accident that left me bedridden for almost a year. Then I went to work for a member of Congress in late ’87 and I was the only one in the office who had ever used a computer so they put me in charge of computers. Dumbies! I would buy manuals and software and sit in my office with the instructions on my lap and try to learn how to use the darn stuff. One day, the “boss” said, make your wish list and go buy us a whole new computer system. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. My only caveat from the boss was it had to be American made. We ended up with Zeniths. I got a new computer with an 80 mb harddrive an 2 mb of high DOS memory and this was state-of-the-art. I got one to use at home and another for my office. It also upgraded me from 1200 to 2400 modem. Somewhere in that timeframe I discovered the BBS system, probably someone on C-serve told me. Being a woman on C-serve was fun, there just weren’t very many of us and when you joined a forum you got a mad rush of attention. Good for the ego.
A few years later my 88 year old Mother wanted to buy a computer and learn to use “this email stuff everyone is talking about,” and find “someone to play online bridge.” Since I didn’t want my Mother snooping around “my” C-serve, I put her on AOL. She let my son have a screen name on her account and here we are a good 17 yeas later and he is still using that account. When she died, he took over paying the $9 a mo.
I switched to the web sometime around 1992 using Chameleon and a couple of different dial-ups until finding Earthlink. Even though I had broadband really early, I kept the Earthlink account for traveling and online access from motel rooms for years, right up to the time I got my first wireless laptop.
It all seems so long ago. I was thinking last night that I didn’t even own a mouse until I switched from DOS to OS2-Warp and then to my first Windows with Win95. And until I read #5, I’d forgotten TAPCIS. When C-serve came out with that, it was again like dying and going to heaven, it so automated the DOS/UNIX command system. That and when I bought my first two “store bought” programs, Symantec’s database program and Word Pefect 1.0. both DOS-based. Computing is so much easier today, but I’m not sure it is as much fun as we had back then when just being online set up real camaraderie among those participating and we weren’t worried about online stalkers and predators and jerk off identity thieves. Or maybe I was just more naive.
And a PS: I don’t remember the year, but it was sometime in the early to mid ’90s, I got an ICQ account. I still keep it because my account # is in the low 400,000s and today they are in the multi-millions. A friend who was a project manager for Intel turned me onto ICQ and I do know it was before AOL came out with AIM.
Sara, I had completely forgotten about ICQ. My number was 189xxx, do I date myself. My first machine was an 8088 with two 5.25 floppys (and no hard drive.) Oh how far we’ve come.
darn tags
My number was 189xxx, do I date myself.
Yes, that does date you. LOL. In a good way, I think.
[Tsk!] Whippersnappers. When I first communicated with computers we punched our instructions on 80-column IBM cards (“Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate”!) with a keypunch machine. When I bought an early IBM portable personal computer in 1982(256kb ram, 360 kb 5.25″ floppy, and a glitzy amber screen) and wired up a 300 baud accoustic modem so I could actually write (and edit whoo whoo!) programs and data in ASCII and save on a disk, then transmit to the university computer instead of slogging across campus (up-hill both ways it was!), and send notes to other campuses over gopher net, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Later I got a dial-up with 1200 baud modem and an early version of Netscape. Never used AOL.
Sara, that’s funny about owning a mouse. I stubbornly resisted GUI’s for quite a while. I insisted that DOS commands were just ducky, dontcha know.
Am I the only one that ever bought a Commodore 64? No floppy drive at all..(Harddrive? Haahahaaha.. no) Just a tape drive and a few simply programs… all hooked to a little b&w tv… Stepped up to a Franklin clone of an Apple II+ in about 82 so I could play Wizardry & Zork… Good times…