Reckon I started in 1993 in Cambridge University where my brother was. Must've been a few years before I got my own connection. I remember using Mosaic, I think it was - may have been Netscape 2? - and thinking that the Aminet was amazing and that there were really cool websites devoted to Frontier: Elite II which I was playing at the time.
Rush onto 1995 for my first connection - my trusty A1200 with a rather expensive Blizzard 1230-II @50MHz and a whopping 4MB of FastRAM. £200 bought me a PCMCIA ethernet card which I could connect to the (Aberystwyth) university network. Of course I had a heck of a job persuading the sysadmin (who on occasion still calls me Amigaman when I bump into him) that it wasn't going to nuke the network like Macintoshes did at the time, and nor was it about to slow down the entire network like Doom did. I had to cart my 1200 all the way down to Computer Services where he connected me up to a packet-sniffing laptop to make sure it was all working fine - except it wasn't because that particular ethernet card didn't have a MAC address so it did nothing. When I eventually figured out it needed a MAC address I told the sysadmin who was rather shocked because he thought MAC addresses were unique to each adapter in the world! Still he connected it up and it all worked fine in nicely compliant fashion.
That 1200 lasted half a year before I upgraded to my A4000 with another expensive network card and a very expensive CV64 and a bit more RAM (no prizes for guessing where my student loan went).
Ah, the good old days. Kinda! Setting up AmiTCP was sooo much fun.
Incidentally, the 1200 is now my Dad's occasionally used Amiga, the Blizzard is in my gaming A1200 and my 4000 is still working fine but with PPCs and stuff in it.
