First time on the net, what did you do?

[Boudicca]

BBS stories are great, but I meant when you called the phone company (or whatever) and signed up for an internet service.

The internet "developed", it didn't start on any particular day......I signed up with compuserve in around 89/90 and then soon after the www began. Before that we had Gopher, FTP, POP, smtp, Slip, PPP, UseNet etc. The first website I went to was NetScape's home page....exciting !

But.....this wasn't new, just different !

Fidonet was around in the 80's and I spent a lot of time, jumping from POP to POP, Telnet / Kermit was the internet way before Mr Berners Lee layed claim to the World Wide Web. Hoping across to look at content in the states from the UK was quite a regular thing before the "Internet" had even made the news.

[RMK305]

I think the Amiga Format website.

[zylesea]

Hi, what did you get up to the when you got connected to the internet?

I went to some Amiga sites including aminet, Yahoo, a couple of university websites and some companies (only intro pages at that time).

I bought my first modem in 95. The main reason was that my gf back at the time did an exchange year in Manchester/UK. Phone calls from GER to UK were rather expensive at that time (IIRC before 1.1.96 it was DEM 1.15/min!) and email was the all new thing! But also that time was the last time I wrote lots of paper based letters (still have them all in a few shoe cartons).
The first things I used a broswer for was amiga related stuff and gaining information about travelling to Bhutan (eventually the planed journey became a trip to India). The very 1st time I used a browser was in a CIP-pool in Manchester in autumn 95. I think it ran some Netscape. I was wondering like "well, so this is the broadly discussed Internet and what now?" But somehow I got excited and got the modem the next day I returned to Germany.
At home I used for the first while a terminal account from the university.

[beller]

I believe it was, technically, using GEnie, then a local BBS (Nucleus) with Lynx and Internet access.  My first REAL Internet download was TermiteTCP.

I think my connection was via GEnie too, through the interchange email they had in the mid-90s.  GEnie was my lowest cost connection since I was a junior sysop in the Amiga section.

My first real internet connection was probably earthlink...where I still have an email account.

Bob

[XDelusion]

Learned IRC and joined the Channel AmigaCafe which if I recall correctly was on Undernet.

It's been YEARS!! 1994 or 1995 I think?

[carvedeye]

Porn

[redfox]

I first got connected to the internet many years ago.  At the very beginning, I used a terminal emulation program on my A2000HD to access a text only webpage server called freenet over dial-up.  Then I got a SLIP account and used AmiTCP/IP and Mosaic.  Later updated to PPP, AmiTCP/IP and AWeb-II.  I used FTPMount to download software from the original Aminet site.

In no particular order, my favourite sites were:
The Amiga Web Directory
The Amiga Zone
Christian Kemp's Amiga Network News
http://www.amiga-news.de/en/
Amiga.org
another Amiga news site that I can't remember the name
Aminet

---
redfox

[Jope]

Hi, what did you get up to the when you got connected to the internet?

I went to some Amiga sites including aminet, Yahoo, a couple of university websites and some companies (only intro pages at that time).

I went on IRC and read some usenet news.

[halvliter'n]

Aminet, funet and altavista I think. And after this nomore xcopy, diskswap, snailmail, parnet. And of course no more copy partys.

[Akiko]

I got banned from AOL for swearing at a "Guide" in chat

Silly kid :-)

[halvliter'n]

I got banned from AOL for swearing at a "Guide" in chat

I was banned from this site after the first post since I called myself for the devil at one time. edit: Bad smilys, this  fits better:lol:

[RRunner]

1990... A1000 with 1200 baud modem, dialed into the university to do email and newsgroups. 1991- 1995 ran a BBS on CNet on an A2000 which is still sitting in my basement.

[halvliter'n]

1990... A1000 with 1200 baud modem, dialed into the university to do email and newsgroups. 1991- 1995 ran a BBS on CNet on an A2000 which is still sitting in my basement.

Hehe.. I have some friends who did the same. Boasted of the role text-based role-playing games they played online at the university here where i live. I was a little too young at the time.:lol: I got  lots of pirated stuff from them. And I  spread it on to people I knew. :lol: So I'm a  little devil?

[the_leander]

So when did Amiga.org become the forums like they are now?

(Did A.org use any forum software before the *previous* forum software? (The one before we moved to this one - XOOPS?))

Before XOOPS it was phpNuke.

Which got nuked by every script kiddie with 5 seconds to spare.

Funnily enough it was thanks to this site that I found out about goatse :lol:

Eventually Wayne got fed up and the result was what has since been called "the great reboot". Which is why a lot of us "oldtimers" have signup dates from mid 2002. Previous to the move, AO allowed for anonymous comments (iirc that did stop with immediate effect with Xoops).

Fun times.

Back to the original question... 1998 or so and it was an internet cafe. The first site I ever used was Yahoo. Before that though I also used (briefly) Moonlight BBS, which was run by John Marchant on an A4000 and I connected to that with an Ericson MC-16 palmtop hooked up to a GSM phone... Interestingly it was cheaper to call it up by mobile phone than the call charges for non local with the rates we were getting at the time.

Damn I feel old now.

[Amiga_Nut]

@Karlos:That would be a dial up connection never connecting to the actual 'internet' proper then?

Well my oldest memory is downloading various early DOS emulators for things like the Coleco and Atari VCS at komkon.org or something. Atmospheric Heights was an amazing introduction to the world of arcade roms too. And I think there was another site called The Dump for TG16 and NeoGeo roms.

Didn't bother with it at home until it was assigned flat rate monthly deal accessed via freephone 800 numbers some time in the mid to late 90s though years after we knackered out the floppy drives on the Sun workstations with Netscape.

It's a shame Commodore didn't grab this new goose laying golden eggs with both hands and make Amiga a nice out of the box internet solution. But then maybe like the Dreamcast it was just too early for it's time to work.

[the_leander]

It's a shame Commodore didn't grab this new goose laying golden eggs with both hands and make Amiga a nice out of the box internet solution. But then maybe like the Dreamcast it was just too early for it's time to work.

On the contrary, the Amiga whilst Commodore was alive had a perfectly serviceable suite of tools to go "online".

The trouble was there was only really BBS's available. The internet didn't really feature outside of honking great universities. The World Wide Web really only started to catch on after death of Commodore.