What did you use your computer for, before the internet?

[stocksj]

I used my amiga on BBS doing some chat and looking for programs. One of my first BBS's I used was called F.E.T.C.H. used by US military in Japan from the 80's to the 90's and the internet took the members away.

[Jpan1]

I used it for music, Protracker and Octamed, and numerous other music programmes with synths and later midi. But i also loved D-paint animation, 'digitizing' and altering photo's and general creative stuff..of course games, demos, and then it was a real tool, less for communication. IMO internet killed the videostar! or rather reduced it to an MP4 file

[4pLaY]

I totally agree!

I used mine for BBSing, running my BBS and games. I also did some school work on it for college. Kindwords was a good word processor.

I also noticed how unproductive people started to become once they made the "switch" to the Internett, gone were the days of coding or doing other productive things with theyr computers (myself included).

[the_leander]

Games, Word Processing, a little light DTP and using BBS's.

Fun times to a degree and yes more personal. But I wouldn't swap the internet for that, I remember only too well the hateful experience that was using dialup.

(It's something I get to relive all too often thanks to 3g coverage being as poor as it is)

[4pLaY]

you can and l have

No i cant, when i closed shop finaly in 2001 i had all but closed the dialup nodes and even the telnet nodes got very few "calls", its just not the same when there is 2/3 users telneting in a week to take a peak 5min before dropping out. There was a whole society on the BBSes with lots of nice people and friendship made! the only thing that comes close to this today are forums like amiga.org, but its still far from what it was back then.

[4pLaY]

BBS for me had alot more personal interaction. Though AO comes close.
It was always interesting who was calling in at the same time I was logged on. Some called from some distance.
The local BBS I was the SubOP for the Amiga section. Always nice meeting other users in the area.
A friend I made the day I moved into my college dorm ran a BBS on a C64 and 3 1581 drives. Never expected to meet another C64 user at college, much less two doors down.

Exactly, it was another world and it was much easier to find someone local and acctualy make some real life friends as well, to this day i still have a few real life friends that i meet through my BBS .

[pwermonger]

My first computer, Commodore 64, was used for games and education. I was just in High School at the time. No online at all didnt even have a modem so everything was within my circle of close friends through school.
About halfway through college I replaced the 128 with an Amiga 500 I saved like crazy for. Games games games and playing around a bit with turbo Silver for 3D raytracing.
My first modem was a 1200baud I got with the students discount special on the 2000HD (with 286 bridgeboard). Bridgeboard was mostly a curiousity for me and bragging point. It never got used since who would play a game on it with the Amiga right there. I finally started calling some BBSes mainly to look at the wide range of software and found the much much wider range of porn. Replaced the free Amiga1000esque modem with a USR 14.4 and signed up on Genie who still had fairly active Commodore and Amiga sections. Here I met the Internet using Lynx. So I played games on it, and eventually a 1200, ray traced with Imagine, Astronomy with Distant Suns, graphics with Dpaint, Brilliance, Photon Paint and Vista Pro and finally, my 1200 was used for Internet email using YAM and webbrowsing using Aweb and Ibrowse.
 
Internet is a huge timesink now, unfortunately, and moved over to a Windows laptop. While it can expose you to a wider range of people and info, and makes a lot of things more acessable, it just does not have that sence of 'community' BBSes had where you knew most users you could easily meet with.

[Fats]

I also noticed how unproductive people started to become once they made the "switch" to the Internett, gone were the days of coding or doing other productive things with theyr computers (myself included).

Before the internet you had minesweeper and solitaire to waste your time.

greets,
Staf.

[hardlink]

Before the internet was a big thing, what sort of tasks did you use your computer for?

Do you mean the "web", and do you mean NOT Amiga? Really.

The internet pre-dates the Amiga by a *long* shot. And before "your computer" there were terminals, yes, "on" the "internet" since the 1970's. I used to play Star Trek on IBM mainframe terminals on the Plato network in the early '70's, but they were not my computer.

Soon after I booted the shiny new A1000 into WB1.1, I was connected to the real live bona-fide INTERNET! Luckily, the serial ports worked even in OS1.1, and I had some kind of digital interface to plug into, and POW, I was  on the honest-to-deity internet.  Net News, Mail, the whole shebang. Anybody who ran WB1.1 remembers when that was, and that the WWW did not happen until 1992-1993. The first web browser I ran was Lynx, we had A4000's by then, and I was showing cloneheads running MSWindblows 3.11 the wonder of the Web on an A4000!

So as far as Amigas are concerned, the internet has always been a big thing, especially for developers; MITS and Altair owners, your mileage may vary.

[ToddH]

My A500 (and later my A1200) was connected to the internet as far back as 1990 thanks to the university I was attending at the time. Downloaded a lot of Amiga games that way (I was a poor college kid at the time so don't hurt me).

Other than that I used it for the usual...creating music, playing games, writing papers. My roommate and I would play Lemmings and drink beer all night long. Good times.

[A1260]

Playing games with friends, watching demos, listening to mod music, copying disks, making utility disks, making music in ProTracker, pixelling with DPaint for myself or for the demo group i was in at that time....

[B00tDisk]

My computers have pretty much all always had some kind of telecomm function as their primary raison d'etre with gaming as a close second.  From using dialup on my VIC-20, C64, 128, A500 and A1200 (and the first few PCs I had) through the various broadband connection types.

First got on the internet (via UUCP and newsgroups) in 1989, had a GEnie sub that I abused terribly back in the day...became co-sysop of a C-Net running BBS that had an "internet door", then used pseudo-SLIP on my first PC to brows the nascent web around 1995, which gave way to direct connection, etc. etc.

[murple]

BBSing, QLink, and hacking my way on to the internet (mostly to run IRC over telnet on my Commodore 128). Games and programming were kind of tied in second, and most of the programming was BBS related anyway.

[skilgannon]

That would be my A1200.  Non expanded (apart from RAM).  I would have gaming evenings in my room with my mates (and beer of course - we had just discovered beer haha), but other than that I used it for midi sequencing via Steinberg software and I did a LOT of DTP via Pagestream (Sooooooo sloooooow on my machine - whilst my mate had a mac which flew through such things). I remember having a Star LC 24-10 NLQ printer which at the time was the Mutts nuts for a bedroom machine!  I also remember using it to go "on line" to several Scottish BBS systems such as Blue Lagoon (which my mate ran) and Verities and Balderdash.

Didn't have a lot of money back then but those days were awesome!

John

[basman74]

Mainly Games, creating school assignments and the occasional BASIC programming

It is interesting to note beginning from 1985 onwards, our local telco in Australia launched it's own 'mini-internet' service known originally as 'Viatel' and then changed the name to 'Discovery' a few years later.. Speeds were (up to) 1200/75 Baud Download/Upload and Subscription fees were outrageously expensive for the day, around USD$450-500 per month in today's money roughly (cost even more if you leased their terminal..). Anyway here's a Youtube Video Ad promoting the service.


Regards, Valentin

[DCAmiga]

*It Started with Atari 2600 - Solo Gaming.
*Then C64C - Solo Gaming, copying games.
*After that was my Amiga 500 - Solo & Buddy Gaming, Using X-Copy to copy games, messing with 'SAY' in WB, learnt to upgrade it, added a KS Switcher and KS 2.04 and dissing my friends 286 at the time (Great times)
*Progressed to SNES
*Then PS1
*Sadly I was given a P4 motherboard, and I built a PeeCee for the first time and bought a 56k and the rest is history