Hmmm.... First INTERNET session? Egads... That's a LONG time ago. I... uhm... acquired (yeah, that's it) a list of phone numbers, baud rates, and terminal settings that happened to be available to some teachers at the local school system in the mid-to-late 80's. I had no idea what they were to. As a punk kid who enjoyed slacking off and getting away with it, personally, I was hoping it was the attendence / grading / records systems. Plugged the phone number an settings into CCGMS and found myself at the at a dial-in terminal to Merit/Michnet. Poked around on there a bit and started realizing this was a rather large network (ya don't say... To my defense, I was probably only 12 or 13 years old...). Seemingly nothing useful to my quest of getting my parents off my back about my grades and homework, I quickly lost interest in things like the weather center in Ann Arbor (MI). I kept the settings sheet, though and would poke in from time to time to see if I found anything of interest.
I graduated high school in '92, and by the end of that summer, my friend and I shut down our last BBS, and I sold off a bunch of equipment, including my 9600 baud modem a few months later. (early '93, I'd guess)... The local BBS scene for Amiga was pretty stale. I'd been on IRC and a few multi-line boards, but I grew tired of those, and didn't really need the 9600 for them, anyhow. I needed some money, so out the door went the modem. Didn't regret it a bit at the time.
In late 1993, I sat down in the PC lab at the university. Hmm.... What's this new "MOSAIC" icon? HOLY @%)*@*@ this is cool!!! I nose around a bit and learn that the first Amiga beta Mosaic version was just available for download a few days earlier. After leaving the lab, I stopped by Best Buy and picked up a new 14.4k modem. (ah, credit cards, a wonderful thing...) Then it was off to hours (and days) of trying to configure AmiTCP. (I had previously been using a dial-in to a TTY shell -- NOT using PPP -- this PPP and TCP configuration thing was a rude awakening. Then, DNS? grumble, grumble... pilfer more information.)
But, alas, it was all working. Albeit, slowly. Haven't really left the internet, since.
