1984, not the George Orwell novel the year, I had a subscription to Compuserve and an 1800 baud Acoustic Coupler, there was only 1 line for the dial up in this area(New Mexico and west Texas) and at certain times in a day it would take a while to log on. Most BBS's were text only (ASCII) and either nerdfests or College and University research. That was before the World Wide Web that Al Gore invented

I remember the thrill of being able to order from Sears for Christmas and making the pickup on Christmas eve. Saved me from having the Kid's find out what they were getting.

I guess that's the reason I don't B*I*T*C*H about it too much these days.

my first experience was around 1994 when I decided to go back to college. it was a small community college campus, but we all got email addresses and there were public terminals running NETSCAPE!  I thought it was just absolutely the best!

OH - WAIT!  I forgot earlier uses:   using a dial up modem in 1990, I used prodigy until about 1992, then just got onto the early BBS's until we got a real ISP.  I only briefly used AOL and hated it - didn't stick with it at all.

I think it was shortly after getting my first computer @1992 from Radio Shack; IBM Pent 100.
IIRC it was very much like the first time I used X2...after a few minutes of waiting a picture showed up of AOL wanting money. I turned it off.
Later on my wife messed with it long enough to "surf"...
I should load X2 on her computer. :) There's a thought.

tlw


Demon Internet customer since 1992.

Ding! those dial-up modems.



Though I did write an email program for networked CPM machines in 1982 using Pascal.


In 1984 I wrote a bulletin-board/messaging service for the BBC model B using 6502 machine code for the software house I worked for, One to One I think it was called.


Like Bitflipper I had access to X-Windows prior to the full blown internet thing.

In the late 1980s I worked for a networking company that built processors and software for connecting terminals to mainframes (think old green-screen CRTs). At one point they were thinking about building products to connect with the fledgling internet and asked me to research the technology and write up an overview document on the architecture. I used telnet to log on to BBN servers and spent several weeks reading the RFCs for IP, TCP, SMTP, FTP, etc.  

After I finished the overview document, they decided not to go forward with the project. About 1990 I went to another IT company and eventually got to work on some of that company's earliest web projects. Mosaic was the first browser I had any experience with, and I remember it was a big deal when inline graphics came along. Besides getting to work on an emerging technology, the best thing about being at that company was having access to a really fast network connection. At the time I could justify looking at web sites during work as important research.