Do you remember your first internet experience?

It was a long time ago...but... I seem to remember that the first site I went to was http://www.bigfoot4x4.com if not http://www.ford.com

> It was a long time ago...but... I seem to remember that the first
> site I went to was http://www.bigfoot4x4.com if not http://www.ford.com

Ahhhh... So you should really be Bigfoot4x4Guy....

that's funny. But it's much more difficult to type.

nope

No. I remember the time around when I first got online. I remember the first community that I got into. But I certainly don't remember the first time, no.

yeah - I think I was looking up some genealogy sites for my mom who was trying to find more on our family tree. It worked very quickly too....I found out alot my very first time on the net!

I spent a lot of time surfing family history sites too. Most exciting was about 5 years ago when a response to a surname query I posted included a mention of my 91 year old great-great uncle that my grandmother had last seen sometime in the 1930s being alive! I was able to get in touch with him and we wrote to each other for a while. We still send Christmas cards He's 96 now.

No.

wow!

Yes, it was almost exactly ten years ago. I went to the library with a friend, and she showed me how to search for stuff. We looked at the website of our favorite television show, My So Called Life. I'm surprised I remember it so clearly. I think we even used the lycos search engine.

I can't remember anything past yesterday

No, but it was through Prodigy becuase that's what my parents had at the time.

yes, i remember getting online and then it was 20 hrs later all of a sudden and i crawled into bed, exhausted. i found this place within the first month or so of starting out!!!!! i do not remember the first website other than the aol home base and chat rooms.

nope

No, it's been far too many years.

My first Internet experience was well before the World Wide Web was invented. Romkey and I were part of a project to attempt to bring the Internet to personal computers (it ran only on larger, timesharing systems at the time) and I remember getting a stack of protocol specifications for the Internet Protocol (IP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP), the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Telnet. I took those specs to my dorm room and read them through that night. Thus my professional career was set in motion though I didn't know it at the time.

I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure it was something like downloading Mosaic, then viewing some of the Mosaic pages and other pages by those people (was it NCSA?)

Yes, it was yahoo and i signed up for an email address in the year 2000.

Ah, that's true, I did use the Internet before web browsers. I remember using ftp (which I still use a little), and archie and gopher some. Oh, probably the thing I used the most was USENET newsgroups, in the mid to late 80s and into the early 90s. I use them rarely now. My first experiences were on text terminals. Maybe the first thing I did was send email.

I think so. I was over at my friend Sarah's house...she showed me how to "chat" in chat rooms.

I cant remember

No. I just remember really wanting to SURF!

I remember my first BBS though...

BBS? Boring Biggles' Survey?

> Yes, it was almost exactly ten years ago. I went to the library with
> a friend, and she showed me how to search for stuff. We looked at
> the website of our favorite television show, My So Called Life. I'm
> surprised I remember it so clearly. I think we even used the lycos
> search engine.

I remember discovering lycos! I was using Yahoo because it was the home page for Compuserv users when we'd go to the WWW. Then my sister told me about it and I used it until I discovered Alta-vista - then came GOOGLE!! I like that one now.

Did you have a BBS?

> My first experiences were on text terminals. Maybe the first thing
> I did was send email.

In that case, my first connection was Xerox's own internal system. I could e-mail France, Phoenix all through their own private web. We could log on to our desktop from any computer in the company anywhere around the world. It was pretty impressive at the time, come to think of it; the mouse was invented by Xerox... Man! They sure missed the boat when they decided to "shelf" computers and stick to their original vocation in copiers. From their misguided decisions, MacIntosh and Bill Gates were born!

Well yeah, it was kind of a combination of Prodigy and early AOL in the mid-90s and I was VERY impressed with all the info available... I was totally SOLD on it even back then and would surf for hours, fascinated.

I recall it being on Telnet (thanks dab, I had forgotten ) and my very first email addy was sftpsd2@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us No us emailing it as it's gone far far into the world of being inactive. This was back in 1995 or so as I recall when I was about 16. Telnet based, and a bunch of periodicals.

I hope google outlasts me, I don't know if I could bear to search with anything else!

no. but i am sure it was an msn homepage or something like that.

Did you ever try mama.com? I heard that their engine is more effecient...

Of course, I heard that from an employee of mama's!

Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is credited for inventing more than just the mouse... also the windows, icons, desktop, etc. graphical user interface, and the idea of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (especially with document editing). Apple copied many of this ideas for the Macintosh and later Microsoft did it with Windows. Yes, their networking ideas were also way ahead of their time, reflecting a kind of ubiquitousness similar to the way the WWW is today. And all of this was in the 70s, I think. They were the driving force for a kind of quantum leap that computers took in the 80s and 90s. It's sad that they didn't get much credit it for it, not much much profit for Xerox. Learning about Xerox PARC was part of one of my computer science classes in college.

I skipped the whole BBS thing and jumped straight into the Internet. Since it was so clearly superior, I just waited for everyone else to catch up to me. I was a total Internet bigot, it was clearly superior to BBSs, UUCP, Chaosnet (though there were a few things that Chaosnet did really well), XNS, DecNet, the WELL, and CLNP. Though, for a while, I did use a computer that was only on UUCP, we fixed that and got an Internet connection as soon as we could.

That's a cute name, I'll give it a try!

no, not really. When my house first got the internet, I randomly searched news sites (even though I didn't really care) just to test it out. Then I started playing stupid internet games. Then I started using email on hotmail. Then I started exploring, got into my "extreme left-wing activitist wanna-be" phase and all hell broke loose.

Yeah, I know all that - I just didn't want to get into it. Few people know any of this... I do, I used to work for them!

> I skipped the whole BBS thing and jumped straight into the Internet.

Well, not all of us were so lucky. BBS's were the only thing available to me back then.

> That's a cute name, I'll give it a try!

So what do you think of it?

I haven't had to search for anything yet. Patience my friend!

Yes, it was the fall of 1982, I was dialed into the ARPANET from my dorm room at MIT and telnet'ed to a machine at Stanford where you could type

help rocky

at the prompt and it would display the script to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Which is pretty much what it does today, too.

I'm not sure if I ever did make it through that stack of RFC's... they were pretty obtuse.

I'd seen the 7-layer model before and it made no sense at all. Reading those RFC's finally made things clear to me; I just needed the concrete example.

I did better with reading the v6 unix code, I think

That's something I never tried. Might have done me good.

Ah yes, I remember it well. My former son-in-law bought a Sony webtv thingy and he and I sat up all night playing with it.

Aweful aweful awful. The internet is BAD place.

I had two computers given to me which, without spending a large amount of money (for me) could not be connected to the Internet. When I was able to purchase this computer which had the capacity to be hooked-up, I was really happy because the project I had in mind necessitated (sp?) the use of the Internet. I'm on disability and don't leave my home very often so working on this project needed the availability of information which could only be acquired over the Internet. I have spent the last several years working on my family genealogy using only the information I gathered from Internet sources. I am now working on my family in the year 0750! My first website was a genealogy source. I love the Internet!! Of course, I use the Internet to purchase products from books to toys for my great-grandchildren to clothes! The wealth of information available on the Internet in simply incredible!! I'm also able to keep in close contact with my family and friends through email even though they live from California to Alaska.

If you've used only information from the internet to build up your family tree, then the majority of it is likely to be wrong. US tree builders in particular make *huge* errors yet don't double check because they want to believe that they really are descended from British royalty.

but no im not sharing it was quite funny though

I don't remember my first WWW experience, but I remember my first transcontinental email experience. I was using the Easynet at work and I sent email to someone in Scotland to ask them what the weather was there. It was so cool. I got an email back in under half an hour. I think there were 12 router hops between us.

Yes. Not having much of an idea what it was all about, I hunted up a chat room and was instantaneously bored silly.

Some time later, I discovered allmusic.com and that hooked me.

nO

Yes at University. Was very confused about it, had no idea what impact it would actually have on my life!!

The first website I ever saw was the Shayna website. I thought it was a beautiful site with beautiful songs. Our chat room had a special room song called The First Time, and she had the song on her website.

Oh, yes. They had an internet setup in a local Radio Shack where customers can try it out, and it impressed me so that I just had to sign up, so I did. But I was very disappointed at how slow dial-up operates. I later learned that Radio Shack's setup was the expensive DSL instead of the affordable dial-up. But that's okay--I love the internet so much that I can take the bitter with the sweet as far as that goes.

it was horrible!