When did you first access the World Wide Web?

[Orrex]

For purposes of this question, I'm not talking about when you first used a modem or first sent files via FTP or even when you sent your first email. When did you first access the WWW, and how did you access it?

For me, it was in 1994, using a 14.4 modem and borrowing my roommate's college account (with his permission) to get online.

However, my first use of a 300 baud modem was in 1983.

[ghostsofgiants]

1. Late 1997 maybe. I was 12 at the time

My middle school had internet access on the library computers. They got me hooked kinda young.

[Tom Kitten]

2. In the year 2000

when I first bought my 1300 dollar Imac, which is now sitting useless in my other room (the CRT went bad, but it has Photoshop and Illustrator on it so I am not inclined to get rid of it)

[JCMach1]

3. I used to enjoy the wonder that was Gopher

before there even was a graphic browser... ca. 1993.

[DarkTirade]

4. My school had Prodigy in 1993ish if I recall correctly

then the first time I actually got on the internet was back in the early days of AOL. 2.0 was the first one we had.

[billyskank]

5. 1994 at university.

We used Mosaic on Sun workstations. Then I came across Netscape.

[143tbone]

6. Early 80's on Compuserve. n/t

[Orrex]

7. You accessed the World Wide Web via Compuserve in the early 80's? Wow!

:evilgrin:

[billyskank]

8. Yes. Tim Berners-Lee hadn't even thought of HTML yet,

but we were still browsing the web anyway. :7

[rcrush]

9. Sometime in early 90's

I just remember dialing into AOL one day and something about the new World Wide Web was available. It was weird.

[RushIsRot]

10. 1992 - I bought my first PC and signed on to Prodigy

[Zavulon]

11. 1996.

I was dragged kicking and screaming into the information age. I still remember my first free e-mail account at usa.net. The site still exists, but no more free e-mail. :(

[Liberal_in_LA]

12. gosh, long time ago, I was the 1st one I knew who had access thru a bulletin board...remember those?

Everytime you logged into the bulletin board you got loads of 'solicitations' to chat. I had to go thru the bulletin board to get to the WWW which was heavily text in those days. No pictures.

[pokerfan]

13. A couple of months after Mosaic was released in 1993

[mwooldri]

25. 1993 was a first for me too.

At university, of course, in the Sun computer lab - and it was Mosaic. In 1994 it was made available in the PC labs, along later with Netscape Navigator. There was also this curious application called Cello, which was a web browser, but nothing like as good as Mosaic - but it was quick and efficient at just displaying text and some images.

Mark.

[graywarrior]

14. 96

[MorningGlow]

15. '96

On my first Mac. I had AOL. :blush:

[Jamastiene]

16. I was at a friend's house.

I had been a Deborah Harry fan forever and a day but had little information on when she would be touring or releasing new music. It was hit and miss to find out that sort of thing.

He found the Deborah Harry Home Page. That was my first ever thing I saw on the internet. My jaw hit the floor. Not only did they have all sorts of info I wanted, but they had pictures and videos of Deborah Harry.

Naturally, I had to get the WWW so I could ogle the pictures some more and look up all sorts of other stuff too. I spent the first entire day, though, just looking at the pictures and catching up on all the places she played and saving information on stuff I had missed like individual songs on soundtracks she had done and movies she had been in that I had missed...

I remember the first thing I printed on the printer was that info about music and movies she had done that I'd missed. So I could buy them. I did it using that first 33.6k modem I had back then.

Man, those were the days. I could buy stuff I wanted back then instead of mostly stuff I need and very little of what I want.

God, I miss those days when I could buy CDs and games and books and stuff to my heart's content.

[Oeditpus Rex]

17. 1991 or '92

I was gonna take care of a friend's cat when she went out of town, and when I went over to her place so she could show me where everything was, she introduced me to this... this thing called America Online.

I ran up a pretty big bill for her in the week she was gone, as AOL cost $3.50 per hour back then.

[Crabby Appleton]

18. I was a network engineer at a large university in the early '90s

and had been working with some hypertext apps (hypercard & Folio Views)since the late 80s, so when http came along I was involved with building our school's first web server in late '93 using Lynx then Mosaic on the client side. Most of my access was through the campus network as well as dial-up. My first project at the university was implementing dial-up from home to access university systems and the pre-web Internet that was rolled out to students and staff in '92. I worked for Motorola Communications and Electronics Division in the '80s and used the pre-web Internet then and worked on DoE Internet projects as a contractor.

[lunatica]

19. 12 years ago in 1996

I got a divorce and needed to learn computer skills so I went back to Junior College. I was 48 years old. It was the best decision I ever made.

[Maine-ah]

20. hmmm, around 1998

the old Gateway is still up and running too.

[blaze]

21. Gosh, I don't have any idea!

I was on Compuserve pretty early on... and I remember not liking all that GUI stuff... I mean, I *liked* typing in EDIT and SEND and knowing what my computer was doing!! Those buttons that you just clicked and everything happened in the background... Nope. Didn't like that one little bit!

[yasmina27]

22. Fall '95

Got my first computer. Was pg. with our first daughter and joined MSN via a 28.8 modem to participate in a pregnancy forum.

Got really addicted after 9/11, and found DU through freeperville - yikes! Lurked here a lot before I finally took the plunge and joined - to my everlasting gratitude!

[eppur_se_muova]

23. July '94. I found photos of Shoemaker-Levy 9's collision with Jupiter ...

only hours after the actual events occured. A friend had been using Mosaic and I got my own copy for the occasion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9

[hippywife]

24. 1996

I was a little behind on technology but did a lot of catching up pretty quickly. Now I'm behind again and don't care. :hi:

[flvegan]

26. '92 on Prodigy.

[Digit]

27. I ran a BBS in the early 80's, started a thing I called "gatherings"

I can't recall the year, but accessed Compuserve during the 80's, and became a Prodigy person in the early 90's.
It has been a long ride, but interesting.

Damn, I'm old.

[tigereye]

32. my husband did that kind of thing way back when.

I can't remember when I got interested. It was pretty late.


In the mid-80s I remember him talking to some woman in California on the computer and I was just stunned. This was before the "internet" became a thing and before he got his CS degree.

[Mudoria]

28. 1993 I think it was via Prodigy.

Then it was on to BBS's for a few years after that. I really miss the BBS scene of the mid to late 90's. We had some great local BBS's and the local message boards were always fun. I miss FidoNet too..

[CatholicEdHead]

29. College lab, fall of 1995

[puerco-bellies]

30. 1993 Using Mosaic Camellion

Most web pages were text, and the few that had images I could not keep the line clear long enough to view the image.

[jobycom]

31. Early 90s, sometime. I remember browsing a menu that listed all available web sites.

The menu got more and more complicated quickly. IIRC, the first times I "surfed" (or should that be "Cerfed?") was with a textual interface, and you had to click on photos to make them appear. It wasn't much better than FTP. The big joke was that you could view a picture in about as long as it would take you to drive to the library and look it up.

I used Prodigy and Compuserve early on, and then AOL. Those weren't the actual WWW, although each eventually got you to the WWW. I also hung out on a lot of bulletin boards, and some had internet access.

My spouse hated it. Every time she called, the line was busy. :)

[Celeborn Skywalker]

33. 1995.

I was in 6th grade and my friend had a computer with the Internet. My first site visited was www.nba.com

[hunter]

34. I've been on the internet since 1979, on the web since 1991 maybe.

http://www.w3.org/History.html

The World Wide Web was born in late 1990. I got my first, um, honest, personal internet connection in 1992, and I'm sure I must have played with the world wide web a bit before that, but I really remember using the web a lot with Lynx, which wasn't released into the wild until 1993. I had a few web pages up pretty quick, but I didn't start buying domain names until 1998.

The wayback machine at archive.org has some of my old stuff, which was sort of unexpected, but not nearly so bad as when all my old usenet rants got sucked up by google. Thank the Lord I was paranoid as a young man, and therefore among the early more-or-less anonymous mad people on usenet. Some people I know were out there under their own names stark naked.

[Orrex]

37. Usenet. LOL!

In about '95 I savagely ripped into a guy I'd judged to be a smug and sanctimonious asshole, so I showed him up by trying to be much smugger and sanctimoniouser and assholer. Mission accomplished on all three fronts, I'm embarrassed to say. I certainly wouldn't have won Miss Congeniality for my performance.

Recently I was inspired to track down that thread to see if it was as bad as I remembered. I found the thread via Google, but my posts were missing. There wasn't even a "post deleted" tag--they were just gone as if they'd never been.

I suspect that Skynet, while running the Intertubes, realized that I wasn't the jerk that I'd originally seemed to be in that thread, and it decided to edit out the incriminating posts for the sake of posterity.


Didn't use my real name, though. At least, not my full real name...

[csziggy]

35. 1983-84 I "surfed" on a 300 baud modem through an inter-library system

And accessed library files in Hong Kong, Portugal and all over the US. Late in the 80s I was doing online research through The Source all over the internet with a 1200 baud modem. In 1992, The Source was purchased by CompusServe and I started visiting their forums using an offline reader called Tapcis. Compuserve charged by the minute and Tapcis let me download message headers, select which threads I wanted to read, then would download the threads so I could read offline and respond and go back online to upload my responses. Instead of paying hours a week to read forums, I was paying for minutes a month. About that time I upgraded to 14.4k modem - smoking fast!

I maxed out on phone line speed with a 54k modem around 1996, then got DSL around 2002.

I still have nostalgic memories of the problems staying online with that 300 baud modem - back then on a curve in the dirt road I lived on there was a "landmark". Two sections of phone cable came up out of the ground in the middle of a large puddle. They were spliced together, then the splice was stuck into a drink can and the whole mess was duct taped to a big stick to keep the splice out of the mud. About once a week, somebody would slide their truck in the mud, knock down the can, and get water in the splice. Then we'd have static on the phone lines and not be able to maintain a connection until the phone dudes came out and set it back up on a new stick. Now we have fiber optic cable running down the road in front of the farm.

[PBS Poll-435]

36. 96.

Hooked ever since.

[Kickin_Donkey]

38. 1996 ... I was living overseas ...

and working at a newspaper. We had one terminal for the Internet which was rarely used, as it wasn't a big thing in that country at that time. We usually used it just to look up the official names and spelling of things.

At the same time, my mom would send me newspaper clippings from home (Northern California) and in the spring of 1996 the legendary columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, whom we were all avid fans of, won the Pulitzer Prize. My mom sent me the Chronicle edition in which it was announced he won the Pulitzer. Unfortunately, she didn't send the jump page for the Pulitzer article, so I could only read half of it. Then I got the brilliant idea of going onto the Web to get the rest of the article. So the San Francisco Chronicle Website, sfgate.com, was the first thing I saw on the Web.

[HEyHEY]

39. 1997 - didn't see much use for it then though

[applegrove]

40. In about 1997. I was looking for an expert on a certain matter and found him in one try.

[bikebloke]

41. Around 1995

Via the Seattle Public library. Text only. After a couple years, I bought a PC clone.

[dropkickpa]

42. Wow, 91/92 via Prodigy

Long time ago. My family was one of the first I knew that had a computer back in the early 80's, My teachers used to complain when i would hand in typed first drafts of stuff even though my handwriting was/is atrocious. Now it's pretty much expected.