Internet Nostalgia, If You Can Believe It
I read an article a few days ago that claimed the internet is now forty years old. Which means it was invented in what, 1969? That doesn’t feel quite right to me, but whatever.
In the early days, of course, it was just two or three university (military?) computers hooked together, passing information back and forth. That’s what they’re now considering the internet. No doubt the receiving and sending machines were the size of a backyard tool shed, or maybe larger.
Obviously, I didn’t read the article too closely… But I did pick up one interesting bit of trivia. Do you know what was the very first bit of information passed between those two enormous computers in 1969? I didn’t either, but here it is. Fascinating, isn’t it?
Anyway, it got me to thinking about my own personal history with the internet. …Internet nostalgia, if you can believe it.
We bought our first computer in Atlanta, in late 1995 or early 1996. It was a Hewlett Packard with a tower like a trash compactor. It had a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive, which made me feel cocky and proud. Few of my co-workers had so much storage in their machines. The gigabyte threshold had just recently been broken.
The thing cost us something like $2500, and it was a monster. I might be mistaken about this, but I seem to remember the lights dimming whenever I hit the power button. As if someone were carrying out an electric chair execution in the guest bedroom.
Our first internet service provider was Mindspring, a small Atlanta company. It was dial-up, of course, and it was slooooow. If I mistakenly went to a page with (gasp!) a picture on it, I could just go downstairs and make myself a sandwich. It was ridiculous. But also magical and exciting.
I remember in the early days I didn’t know you could type addresses directly into the box at the top of the screen. I wasn’t aware it could be altered, I thought it was just a current status or something. So, I’d turn on our computer, sign onto the internet (brrrrzzzz, waaaaaa, bong bong bong), and the Mindspring welcome page would appear.
They always had three or four search engine boxes imbedded there, and that’s how I moved around the internet. I was partial to Lycos, but also used AltaVista, and later HotBot. If I wanted to go to a site, I’d type the name of it into a search engine, and go there using the results.
For the first year or so, I never typed a URL directly into the navigation box. ‘Cause I didn’t know it was possible.
I started hanging out at a Usenet newsgroup for zine publishers, called alt.zines. And that was fun. I also checked a news site every day called Nando. It was updated, like, two or possibly three times per day. It was amazing!
When we moved to California in late 1996 we couldn’t use Mindspring anymore, because they didn’t have any local telephone numbers (heh), so we switched to Earthlink. And I loved that company for a long time.
Someone at work told me the founder was a Scientologist, but what did I care? Their service was hip and fun and cutting edge. They had a great customizable start page, and a little animated mail truck that would appear whenever an email arrived.
Shit, they could’ve been founded by John Wayne Gacy, as long as they kept sending that cool little mail truck!
We lived in an apartment for six months in California. It had three huge bedrooms (you could’ve played Wiffle ball in the master), but the living room and kitchen were tiny. Logical, huh? Our 200 lb. water-driven computer was in the front bedroom, but there wasn’t a phone jack in there. So, I went to Home Depot and bought a hilarious, long-ass phone cord.
I ran the thing across the bedroom floor, out the door, down the hallway, and into the master bedroom. Toney complained about this, so I started rolling it up when it wasn’t in use. So there was often a lasso of tan phone cord in the floor beside the computer. I thought about installing a garden hose holder, but never got around to it.
One day I went to Best Buy in Valencia and spent something like fifty dollars for Real Audio, a new software package which would allow you to stream radio broadcasts from cities around the planet, straight to your machine. I thought this was the absolute ultimate.
When I first got it, I actually set the alarm one morning so I could listen to a morning show we used to like in Atlanta. Because of the time difference, I had to get up at 4:30, or something. And I could only hear little snatches of the program, because it was constantly “buffering.” But I didn’t care, it felt like magic to me.
I eventually got rid of that first computer, and made the mistake of signing a two-year contract with Compuserve, in exchange for a $300 discount on a new machine. This meant I had to say goodbye to my beloved Earthlink, and it was mighty painful.
Since then, I’ve bought two additional computers, and the one I have now is completely kick-ass. It’s got a ton of RAM, a quad-core processor, etc. It cost about one-third of what we paid for that first machine in Atlanta. And we gave up the bong bong bong! dial-up crap the moment our two-year Compuserve contract ended.
And I’m still blown away by the internet. Our kids are growing up with it, and take it for granted. But I remember rotary dial phones, and four TV channels, for godsakes. It sometimes feels like I’ve lived on two different planets, things have changed so much. And I get a charge out of it, I really do.
So, in honor of the internet turning forty (or whatever), please use the comments section to wallow in recent nostalgia, like I’ve done above. How long have you been online? What can you remember about your first computer? What sites did you visit in the early days? You know, stuff along those lines.
Tell us all about it. And I’ll get back to writing about snack food, Target, and diarrhea tomorrow.
See ya then.
Have a great day, my friends.
Filed under: Daily
1st!?!
Good Afternoon Surf Reporters!!!!
I worked in the department here at the U of I where the “internet” was created. Some of the computers were the size of small rooms–one looked like the vietnam wall and one looked like you could stand in the middle and serve drinks. That part was the liquid cooling component. Of course it’s now a conversation piece in some big Microsoft dude’s living room or something.
First computer in 1998. Spent a little under $2000. First internet site visit, Yahoo, to find porn. The rest is History.
top 5- that is awesome!!!!
First computer was a Packard Bell. We had that for about 2 years without internet service.
The kids would play CD games. I even got into one that was a trivia “game show” called You Don’t Know Jack. That provided a lot of entertainment.
We finally hooked up DSL internet through Verizon. Somehow, the Packard Bell couldn’t handle it and constantly froze up or crashed.
Then one morning I turned on the computer, clicked on the internet connection icon and a small DOS window popped up with the message Good Morning Asshole. Suddenly lines and lines of code started streaming across the screen. It was a very nasty virus that absolutely wiped out the entire hard drive, including about 1200 songs I had culled from Napster. That really sucked because I had been downloading as much as possible before Napster had to shut down. I was planning on burning all those great tunes onto CD at a later time.
After that virus, the computer was really never the same.
We switched to Gateway, which was a huge mistake. I think I had to write the disk to zeros and reformat the drive 2 or 3 times. Just a huge pain in the ass.
Last Christmas we got a Dell and it’s been great so far *knocking wood”.
Oh, my computer here at work is another piece of shit Gateway which I believe runs on molasses and quick dry cement.
Talk about a useless turd.
I’m not sure when we got our first system, but I do remember being up in the middle of the night surfing for…ahem, whatever, when the Princess Di death announcement headlined on the AOL. I googled that and it was 1997. Since that crappy Tiger system (I do remember being talked into ordering my first from Tiger) I think I had another cheap, crappy system after that one, then an HP Pavilion with Win 98 which is still set up and operational and was actually fired up this weekend for a brief time, plus my current Dell laptop which I thought died over the weekend due to the Vundo Trojan but was resurrected yesterday finally. We nearly went to the Bestbuy yesterday at 11:00 to replace it–it was bill-paying day and I couldn’t get to Bill Pay. Screw writing checks, I don’t even get paper bills anymore. We were in the high panic mode, for sure. I couldn’t remember the System Restore keystrokes but finally found ‘em. Control F11, dumbass. Ctrl F11.
Although I have been online since 1997, I did not get online at home until 2005.
I think my first computer was something called an 8086?
I don’t recall. The second one was an IBM 386 I think.
I am trying to recall what webased email I had before Yahoo. There could not have been that many at the time.
I may be thinking of Deja News.
That reminds me – when I did I start reading the WVSR? It must have been the year it started.
I got my first email account when I returned to college for a master degree back in 1993. The email address was about 143 characters long. I remember using Veronica as a search tool before switching over to a “browser”. I think the first one I used was Mosaic (?), but that was so long ago that I have lost track of the details. I didn’t even really use a ‘personal computer’ until around then, as the work I was doing required the power of a SUN workstation, or a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe (VAX). I typed out all of my undergraduate papers on an IBM selectric.
Top 10???
First computer was way before ’97, but I forget when. It was a DFI brand. It was 3 feet tall. It took those five and a half inch floppies. (They really were floppy!) It ran Windows 3.1. It had a button on the front which said “Turbo”, which supposedly sped it up. When I got it, it didn’t even have a GUI. I had to download it myself. The case was 3 feet high, 2 feet deep, and 8 inches wide. It was huge and slow, but it was FREE, a gift from a friend who got a new one and gave me the old one. From then on, I’ve kept the word out that I’ll take a castoff, and I’ve never actually bought a computer, yet. Through classes, I’ve learned to reformat, add memory, etc., so my current Dell Optiplex with XP Pro is humming right along. It was free, too.
Top 20???
My first computer was a Tandy of all things. Purchased in 1995?? But I didn’t get online from home until 1999 and then I felt I had to justify such a “luxury” by going back to school to get my computer science degree. (By then I had purchased a Compaq and trashed the Tandy) All that was available to me at the time was bellsouth dial up. I felt soooo special when they started providing DSL. Now I am waiting for Clear to reach my house.
Got our AWESOME Compaq Presario in 1997. Went to Fark.com, along with nba, nfl, nhl, mlb.com a lot. Still go to those today.
Thank you Al Gore!
On IPOD right now- “Dragula”- Rob Zombie
I was sitting next to Al Gore when he came up with the concept for the internet. I told him to invest in porn, it will be the rage of the internet but he just mumble something about it getting warmer. My first computer was an IBM 029 keypunch and an AN/UYK-44.
Had a Commodore 64 in the late 80′s as a kid. I think it had like a 1200 baud dial up modem we would use to log onto bulletin board systems and talk to people or play games. All in DOS…non of this point-and-click mouse stuff….and atari like graphics, when there were any.
In 1996 when I went to College we had to get one for the Business School so I got a Dell…that was really my first experience with the internet as we know it.
First computer was a Kaypro II. A “luggable”. It had – get this – no hard drive. Just two 5.25 inch floppy drives. And a green screen. The operating system was CP/M. I don’t recall what I used that damn thing for. Except I had a cool text game based on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It was truly funny.
I don’t recall my first foray into the Interweb, but it was late in the game. And for the life of me I wish I could remember how I tripped across the WVSR. But I am glad I did.
In 1992 or 3, I got sort of railroaded into a position at the company I still work for in a department called Network Services. I carried a walkie talkie and a toolbox unbelievably enough. My job was to cater to the, at the time, minimal PCs on our campus connected via token ring. The vast majority of the users still had dumb terminals at the time and our data entry dept. was still using those giant old IBM ATs with the 5 1/4 floppy drives.
I built my first computer out of scraps in our warehouse. If I remember correctly it was basically an IBM PS2 Model 50? 70? It had a 60 meg hard drive and I remember buying a 2 meg sim card (for $50!) to bring my RAM up to 8 meg. We had no internet connection and I remember having to occasionally uninstall games (Myst) so my kids would have enough hard drive space to save the school reports they wrote in Word Perfect. When I finally got online, I used Mindspring as well.
In the mid-90′s or so when I was a teenager, my parents bought a computer with internet (I think) from a company called Prodigy. I just remember it being ancient because the screen was black with the green writing. Fun.
Later they got a computer and we used AOL to login. I remember the dialing of the phone numbers to get in and then being amazed at the amount of ‘m4m’ chat rooms. Often times I would find other chat rooms and enter and just be in awe at the fact that I was talking to someone who claimed to be 23 and in Louisiana! Wow! And if the phone rang during a conversation? Oh, there’d be hell to pay.
Now we have a computer in every room (all 3 bedrooms and one in the den) and are on them all the damn time. I play WoW so not only do I talk to people from all over, I game with them too which is really cool. I can’t wait to see what will come out next.
On another note, I got my Surf Report shirts in the mail! Loved ‘em so much I posted a pic on my FB. Ch-ch-check it out! http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/photo.php?pid=773207&id=1079749066
Now Playing on iPhone: “Reachin’ for the Bible” by The Southerners
I was in the USAF in the early 80′s. I worked on computers that were the size of rooms. Some of the older guys taught troubleshooting skills that consisted of turning off the lights and looking for the tube that wasn’t glowing! I worked on ancient machines that had an entire circuit board that weighted over 8 pounds that had only one thing on it……..8k of memory. That is right 8K!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Th eentire computer maxed out at 32k and this is what was keeping our country safe from missle attack. It was quite amazing what we could do with so little.
Yeah, that’s a good side bar… how and when did you here about good ‘ol Jeff Kay and the West Virginia Surf Report?
I was on my way into work(old job as an insurance agent) and I was listening to the Bob and Tom show and they mentioned as a good read.
Logged on as soon as I got into the office and I’ve been visiting pretty much every day since. The year was prolly about 2003.
I think we started in ’95 or ’96 with AOL (remember those free disks they always sent in the mail?) I can’t believe we used to pay for internet by the minute, I can’t even imagine how much that would cost now. I think we only got online to mapquest directions or search for something using webcrawler. I remember mostly using the old Packard Bell to play games on discs or through DOS.
My first computer was an Atari ST520 purchased circa 1987. I upgraded in 1989 to the 1040ST. Neither had a hard drive and were used mainly for games and some programming in basic. Sometime around 1992/93 I bought my first clone PC with a 4x CD drive and a massive 750 mb hard drive!!!!. Since most of my friends are/were in Physics or Comp Sci. I saw no need to drop big bucks on a name-brand computer that was full of proprietary components. I’d upgrade various parts every so often as needed: add a second hard drive, swap out the mother board, add a new audio card, etc. It wasn’t until 2007 that I finally bought my current Hewlett-Packard.
My first email account was issued in 1995 by UWO. I used PINE for email, Trumpet for newsgroups, and Gopher to search the net. Soon after I discovered Netscape Navigator 2.0 and abandoned Gopher and Trumpet. Netscape served me well for about 5 years then I switched to IE and then to Fire Fox.
@ Jerry in WV –
was that the computer that asked if you wanted to play a nice game of chess? Or perhaps a little game of Global Thermonuclear War?
I believe the name was Joshua
in the mid-80′s I had a commodore 128. when i was a kid and played games such as “where in the world is Carmen Sandiago” & “Olympic games”
Many grade 7 and 8 reports were typed up on the sucker and printed by a slow ass dot matrix printer.
First computers were as follows:
Victor 9000 running CP/M 86 and one running DOS
Cray-1 (Belonged to the Navy, I just got to use it)
HP-110
Sold more Tandy’s than I can remember all the way up to the Tandy 1000 (IBM Clone).
Built my first PC in 1995 and have bulit them every since. I now own (6) PC’s (4) Desktops and (2) Laptops running everything from Win98SE, XP, Vista and Unbuntu.
I just remembered that the labs here at the university had Zenith brand computers in the early 1990s. I recall the text was orange on a black background.
JCIII,
I believe I found the WVSF through Cruel Site of the day linking to the Walmart Game. I decided to check out the rest of the site and just stayed….I can’t exactly say when this was, at least 6 years ago I think.
I seem to recall the first post I read being about Jeff and the Secrets digging holes in the yard or something. He kept referring to “The Bunker” so at first I assumed Jeff was some sort of right-wing/ David Koresh style gun nut.
Looking back think The West Virginia Surf Report is the longest running web site I still check out on a regular basis. Over time either the site has closed down (like Cruel.com), stopped updating (like fugly.net, and fatchicksinpartyhats.com), or I’ve lost interest (like Rotten.com and consumption-junction.com).
Old computers!! Who Remembers Texas Instruments?? To play “games” you had to type in the code for the programs…one letter off and nothing!! hehe. Lets see first real computer was a Gateway..which my ex hubby signed his life away for as it was like 3 grand. (don’t worry he got it in the divorce). dial up Aol from a disk!! woot!
Lets see..HP combo from Sams..not sure about this things stats..it gets me online to my bank and internet, that is all I need. Cable internet…hmm. And a pretty awesome antivirus so nasty things don’t ruin my fav. toy.
the first time I ran in this site was something somewhere about your ratings on fast food. hilarious.
Wifout the Internets, how wud we now things liek this
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33587754/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Monitor covers?!! I usta hafta put a big custom fitted plastic “kozy” over my monitor at night. In theory, it either protected the monitor from dust, or maybe protected me from errant cathode rays. In reality, they caused monitors to burn out quicker.
I’ll bet big money that today’s bunker cam shot was taken in Japan.
First 2 computers weren’t online – Coleco ADAM and a Commodore 64. I had a friend who had a 1200 baud modem hooked up to his C64, and I thought he was the coolest. This was maybe 1988 or so.
In 1991, I went to college at Georgia Tech. The freshman English teacher was way into the internet. I was able to connect to the University of Texas – Austin, and read newsgroups. I think the program that allowed this was called VERONICA. Had my first internet porn experience via alt.sex.stories. The school computers were Macs that had Mosaic as the default browser. If you didn’t disable “auto-load images,” you’d be in for a lot of trouble.
My first post-college personal computer was probably not purchased until 1997. Moved in with my then-GF, now wife. It was an HP of some sort. I remember being partial to AltaVista and HotBot as well, as far as search engines go.
Oops, forgot the TRS-80 Color Computer. What a piece of shit.
My first computer was an Apple Mac Plus (am I really the only one here?!?) but didn’t get online until much later, also with Mindspring, then with Earthlink, then A-O-Hell…nowadays I get annoyed if it takes more than 2 seconds to load a page with cable…heh.
I had to take a computer class in college in 1983 or 4. It was all Keypunch. My program(s) never worked so I’d look like a real loser with a huge stack of cards rubber banded together and a 6 mile long green and white striped computer printout with ERROR spelt out in stars. I think I got a C in that class.
I can’t remember exactly when I got my first computer. Somewhere in the mid to late 90′s. Whenever 4.2GBs was THE top of the line. Cost something ridiculous like 3 grand. I remember crossing my fingers and hoping everyone in the county hadn’t beat me to a dial-up stall. Those were the days when you’d try to call someone and got a busy signal for 6 hours…until I figured out that if they had call waiting I could hit the flash button on your phone and disconnect them *evil laugh*. I only learned that after someone did that to me when they got tired of the 6 hour busy signal. I used to be able to visibly see the “disk space” graphic filling up with useless crap. I’d have to delete the old shit so I could fill it up again with new shit. Now I have endless amounts of disk space that I could never even come close to filling up.
JCIII, I’ve been a WVSR fan for ages — ever since I got the zine as a trade back in 1994 (or thereabouts). I remember laughing hysterically at a joke Jeff wrote about opening a store for fecal-incontinence sufferers (it would sell only brown suits). Plus, he was the best “penpal” — never sent a personal note, just let the zine speak for itself. I didn’t even realize he had a site until about four years ago, when I Googled him to see if he had anything new I could read.
Bryn – Your spell checker is showing!!! LOL
OK, before I get into my stories, a couple of things.
First, while I realize it; not an uncommon name and I certainly have no copyright, the other Jorge is freaking me out a little. Just in case anyone cares.
Second, I got my throwback shirt today and it’s freaking awesome. I shall wear it proudly all day tomorrow.
Third, I took my last final in my Nursing program today! Ihae a few more weeks ofworkin inthe hospital, but that’s more of a formality than anything else. As long as I don’t kill someone I’ll graduate. Woohoo for me.
Fourth, I finally get to read a book that I have been waiting five years for. It came out last week but I needed to wait until I no longer had stuff to study.
So far it’s been a great day.
And we got our first computer aroud 1985, an Apple II plus. It came stock with 58K of ram we “upgraded” to 64K and used a small TV asa monitor. It had dual 5 1/4″ floppy drives and no hard drive. Everything was done in Apple DOS. We had a modem and used it to dial up to BBS numbers that were maintained in private homes and had local phone numbers. The graphics were non-existant and we mostly played games and typed up our papers for school on word processing software that was not WYSIWYG. Ah, the good old days.
Have a great day everyone.
Having been a tech/programmer for about 25 years or so (started programming in COBOL during the DOS days) I have seen the internet become what it is from the beginning. From Juno mail (sucked) to any number of ‘free’ access services. I ran a small online Bulletin Board for a while. I saved many people from the living hell that was AOL.
I remember 300 baud modems…now that was slow my friends. Cable and DSL are heaven on earth compared to the old days of dial-up.
Here’s a funny thats been around a while but still pretty good stuff:
http://chroniclesofgeorge.nanc.com/
My first computer was a commie 64, bought around 1985. Played around with that for a while, and got a handme down modem that I had to hardwire into the phone in order to use it. And so began bbs’ing, ran one as well for a time.
Then on to the amiga and reaching further with this telephone device. Usenet, email, etc. Can’t find my first post, the earliest I could find was from early 1996. But was doing the usenet thing through bbs portals prior to that. Full on “high” speed internet was at work around 1997.
First internet access was free thanks to bbs contacts and doing testing for a couple startups. Then I managed to get free dialup via work. I think I only started paying for internet access in 2000.
My first pc was built from randomn components around 1998, still used the amiga for just about everything at the time, but the pc got more and more use due to working on them at work, not to mention it was easier to find stuff for the pc than the amiga. Things where shifting.
Hey Jorge the 1st – Congrats on the upcoming graduation! I am about 3 weeks fresh off the NCLEX myself. I have never experienced anxiety like waiting for those results to come back. Biggest relief of my life when I put that behind me.
Started with a TRS80 in 1981 with a whopping 16K!
I bought a 128K Macintosh from a guy who flunked out of Drexel University here in Philly in 1985. I loved that beige toaster.
Bought a Mac Plus from another guy in 1986 with, get this, a 20 meg external hard drive that cost new as much as a good used car. I Frankensteined that with a new processor to 32Mhz. The damn thing still boots up.
Current is a 24″ imac Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.93 GHz, how things have evolved.
My dad bought a Texas Instruments “computer” back in the 80′s. He used to hook it up to this old B&W TV for a monitor. I remember, one night, he sat at the kitchen table typing in code for about two hours. Then he called us all in to see the results – a little ball bouncing around the screen like a screen saver does today.
Instead of disks, he would connect a cassette player to it and hit Record to save data.
After that we had a series of massive IBMs running MS-DOS. That was actually a blessing, knowing DOS commands comes in handy from time to time, even now.
Those machines were also my first porn experience. My brothers and I found this pixelated image of a nude red head called “Hobble.” To this day, that’s the name of the folder where I hide my stash.
I don’t know if it was even called the Internet, but I used to log on to “bulletin boards” and later Prodigy, as early as 1992 or so.
I don’t remember when I first visited the WVSR (7 or 8 years ago?), but I think I entered “large pics of girls gunged in pie” into a search engine and it led me here.
When I was a freshman in college I took the first comp sci class ever offered there – structured programming in BASIC on a PDP11 (Digital Equipment Corp made them down the street from the school, and we had a hand me down).
I remember that if it crashed you had to reboot it with toggle switches at the front. There was a kid who ran it who was about 17 – he didn’t even graduate high school before DEC offered him a job at $17,000 a year – pretty serious cash back then and than little geek is probably a bajillionaire now.
I learned to program well… took a degree in Math & Comp Sci eventually – assembly language, IBM mainframe JCL, the works.
I still love the looks on my coworkers’ faces when I go to the DOS prompt on a Windows machine and start typing things in and it does stuff. They worship me for C:\\DIR *.
I also remember my first year of grad school (1983-84) when one of my advisors brought in a PC – the previously mentioned 8086 machine, which went through versions 80286, 80386, and 80486 until !light bulb! Pentium came along (I have lots of ‘puter trivia, too much really, but that’s why Pentium was called Pentium).
We were super impressed by the 8086 machine having two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives – later on he brought in a 10 Mb hard drive and we all just shot our loads to the ceiling.
Later on we figured out how to buy crystal oscillators that would increase the clock speed – we had the balls to unsolder the timing crystal right off the motherboard and replace it – these days I think it is hermetically sealed. But, we got 2 MHz machines to run at 10 MHz, which was quite an accomplishment back in the day.
At home, I bought a Mac in August 1984. 128K system memory, a second hard drive, and a dot matrix printer for $2200 ($4565 in today’s dollars according to my inflation calculator). It wasn’t quite the first generation Mac (they debuted in January 1984), but it was great and I wrote a 270 PhD thesis on it in 30 days in 1988.
First internet at home was dialup with I forget who, but Earthlink DSL came along soon after, ca. 1998.
We’ve been having a lot of discussions lately around the house about how much productivity goes down the toilet when the internet is available. A lot.
Oh, and I found the WVSR quite by accident through one of Jeff’s friend sites (I think it was a direct link to the “Mountain”) – what happened to that list of sites, BTW?
My dad bought us a Packard Bell in 1993, so the Evil Twin could do freelance work. Oh yeah, on that smoking dot matrix printer! It wasn’t equipped with a modem, so eventually I had one installed and we got AO-Hell dial up! By that time, we had upgraded to a Compaq, which I used for about 7 years. When we moved to our current house 5 yrs ago, we signed up for cable internet, ditched AOL and have never looked back. We’ve been through a couple of Dells and I’m on my 2nd HP laptop.
i live in doddridge co west virginia
we have way outdated phone lines
verizen[phone co] promises to replace in the next decade or 2
can only get pokey dialup
takes several minutes to load wvsr
if there is a u tube thing forget , unless u got 45 min to spare
I got my first computer in 1980 – a ZX80 (look it up) with 1KB of RAM. It would crash when you touched it due to the static electricity charge on your body.
Wait, y’all use COMPUTERS? And here i was thinking everyone had the terrabyte brain chip and the fingertip pressure sensors, like me.
I’m working on getting the new high-density carbon ceramic processor and ditching this old flex-light system. I might be able to sleep at night then. Anybody heard a review?
I started using monolithic computers at work in the 80s, but didn’t bother having one at home (because there wasn’t much of an Internet to speak of) until I went back to school in 95. That was an AST piece of shit with a dot matrix printer, and it did run around $2,500. But, the hubby, who is a programming king but not a “software guy” at all, was working in computing when I hadn’t even heard the word computer.
I still remember the excitement of clicking my first link (could’ve been Justin’s Links from the Underground or Chuck Sheppard’s News of the Weird or Beulah’s Smut Shack) then waiting and waiting and waiting. Go to the bathroom. Come back to see that it was still working on the waiting.
~ Malcolm
The Mountain is under the “Best Of” tab on the header of the page.
The first computer I ever used was in high school in 1978 – I don’t think it had a name well maybe Univac 3 or some such thing.
The “computer” was a giant box the size of a big wardrobe closet with honest to God tape reels about the size of LPs
We used a teletype machine to “program” in BASIC. there was no backspace if you made a mistake you had to retype the whole line. We got 15 minutes to use it so if you had a long program you couldn’t finish you had to print it out on paper tape and reinstall it the next day.
In the early 80′s I got a Vic 20 – that used cassette tapes to store programs.
Then a Tandy 1000 HX – 256K of RAM, no hard drive but 2 -31/2 floppy drives
Next was a Packard Bell – my first tower – it came with a 20 MEG hard drive and and everyone said – you’ll never fill it up.
That was my first internet computer; I took a class in BBS then I got a free month of Sprint from Blockbuster.
Brother worked for Pr1me Computer….got to go see his job and saw the HUGE ROOMS of systems…then went back to his office to play some kind of text-based star-trek game with photon missiles and moving asterisks….ca. 1979.
Got a Sinclair ZX80 for Christmas 1981. 1 K Ram, and my Electrical Engineer brother made me an expansion pack memory to 16k…..you had to record programs onto cassette….hook it up to your computer as a monitor (Motorola Quasar ‘works-in-a-drawer”)
It cost 200$, and came with, basically, nothing. I still have it somewhere…..flex-pad keyboard….the thing was about 8 inches by 6 inches by 1 inch….every key had about 4 functions to it.
Took a computer class in Fortran in Spring 82…..They had a Data General Mainframe. I just missed the punchcard era….
Off to real college fall 82…They had a Sperry Univac…..Sent my first email on that machine…..27 years ago!
Then I went to work for Digital Equipment and used the ‘real’ internet, with Notes files and ‘node names to send email. 1986.
Man I feel old.
@JCIII Re: You Don’t Know Jack
Remember Ticklish Restroom?
Me and D turned that into a drinking game
My dad was a geek and Radio Shack was his favorite store
We also had a Commodore 64 but I never used it personally. I was too busy playing pitfall on the 2600 Atari.
BTW:
My dad built the first projection television screen
and developed the first cable channel descrambler
(to see those channels you have not paid for)
And the first VHS descrambler
(ET was the first protected VHS movie he wanted to add to his immense movie library.. he cracked out of sheer anger it and sold the patent that was soon buried)
So I come by all this naturally
The first internet site I typed in was Cosmo.com
Magazines were my tether to the real world back then so when I found myself at the local library with my first choice of sites to visit, it was all that came to mind.
It was the year 2000 when I finally checked out the internet at home via the Sega Dreamcast gaming system.- remember that?
Both search and email was handled by excite.com
(still exists)
I was a late bloomer but fell in love immediately. I still remember hovering over the search bar wondering what I wanted to know about next.. the feeling of knowledge at my fingertips astounded me.
Still breathless.
Breathless in love watching where this is all going
My D bought me my first machine after doing hard time on webtv and I cried. Still on dial up But Win98 and GASP! a hard drive! No more transloading!
I fell so hard that I used the internet to keep the love affair going. I learned everything I could about fixing/repair that the internet would allow THEN decided I needed to take a solid A+ class (computer hardware) to understand and create a solid base for knowledge.
Many around me “got over the internet” but I never did.
It feels like home when I am tethered and when I am way I think about my next session and what I need to look up.
I envy all of you that started back in the day.
I was too busy raising babies. Today, I cannot imagine my life without it.
Nice post, Jeff.
Right up my alley.
– still waiting on my Tshirt-lady shirt.
I know it is en route.
Hold on:
I have to give props to the Apple II
I remember playing Lemonade Stand in the 7th grade
but that was not internet based.
That was my first classroom introduction to computers.
@JCIII – THat was a great movie. I think the movie called it the WOPR! The real computer that did that function was called the ICP. After the movie came out, we actually got a Burger King Whopper box and put a few blinking lights on it and taped it to the top of the ICP. Good times!
1986.
Atari 800XL. 64k ram, 2 – 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, one modified with a “happy chip” that would let you copy any software out there.
A 300 baud modem to start with. A 1 meg, 512 color smut pic would take an hour to download. When the 1200 baud modems came out we thought those were screaming.
Dial up BBS. P-80 was the hacker board in South Charleston.
Move up a few years lates to an Atari 1040ST, with a meg of ram, & built in 3 1/2 floppy an 1 external. My 1st HD was 20 MB and cost almost a grand. Built in MIDI interface. You needed two monitors if you wanted “hi-res” Hi res was B& W, Medium and low was color.
It was great for games, music and word processing.
Topped off with an Epson dot matrix printer and an Okimate color printer, it was the shit.
Still have both of them and all their software boxed up in my basement.
@WVHillbilly
That was geek pr0n right there.
I might have to go rub one out
(That was very Tammie of me to say -grin)
All in jest.
When I was in college in 1984, I signed up with the Engineering Office to try to get an internship – probably at an electric utility since I was an Electrical Engineer working toward a specialty in electric power. But I got a job in the fall of that year with IBM in Austin, TX. PC’s had been out for almost 4 years but they were still using the original PC for applications. It had a 4 MHZ clock and NO hard drive! By the time I left in 1986, the fastest machine was 8 or 10 MHz and the biggest hard drive was 30 Meg. That’s MEG! And Windows hadn’t been invented yet.
We were married in 1990. My mother-in-law asked “What do you want for a present? A PC or a camcorder”? PC???? Who the hell would want at PC? Especially at home??? We’ll take the camcorder thank you very much!!!!
The camcorder was about the same SIZE as a PC at that time. We used it probably 6 times, lent it to someone and never saw it again. What idiots.
We’ve probably had 16 different computers in the house since then. We also had the phone cord going across the hallway!!
ps. I got my t-shirt today also!! Going to wash it and wear it next week to India/Dubai!! Watch for smoking fish sightings!
Heh, early 1980′s, a radio shack trs-80 16k “extended” model. Learned fortran, DFU, Cobol programming around that time too – Ibm systems 34,36 and 38. The “mainframe” was about the size of a car. Not even sure what it had memory wize, probably less than a damn cellphone does nowadays.
Anyhow, I got on the net in 1998, because I had heard there was money to be-a-made on some Ebay thing selling junk you had laying about the house.
So I bought a webtv (stop laughing!) for $159, borrowed a casio digital cam, and sold enough junk on ebay to pay for the damn thing in a few days. I spent a year or two of my spare time thereafter scouring local yard sales for old 1980′s electronic handheld games, buying them for a quarter, and reselling them on ebay for as high as $50 to $100 bucks each. I was in pig heaven! I even recall selling one to a “prop purchasing dude ” for one of the west coast movie studios. Probably should’ve saved those emails……….
Eventually, I got over user the internet for personal gains / wealth, and fell in with the rest of society, using it mostly to waste time.
First visited thewvsr when I was still on Webtv, some years back, when a search engine recomended it, after I typed in “Wilkes Barre Pennsylvania armpit of the known universe”.
Yep. Can’t live without it now. Go figure.
First computer was a Texas Instruments something or other that used cartridges for the OS and applications. Dad could hook up his Sony Walkman and play special tapes into the thing that sounded like a modem to load programs too. Even at the time it seemed S-L-O-W!
First real computer was a Mac Plus in 1987. 1 Megabyte of RAM, 20 Megabyte external Hard Drive! 1-bit Black and White screen.
We got Internet in 1995 or 1996 on our Mac Quadra 610. I distinctly remember being ushered out of the room that first day so my Uncle David could show my Dad some porn.
All this computer talk makes my head go googly. I remember my brother having a Commodore 64 back in the 80′s. He must’ve had some sort of modem too because the families I babysat for would complain about calling our house and getting a busy signal for hours. I always blamed it on my brother and his computer, but it could’ve been me on the phone because we didn’t have call waiting. My mother thought it was rude. Of course now she has two phones, each with call waiting, and it has made her horribly rude. Anyway, back to the topic at hand…
I was introduced to e-mail around ’95 through work. This was back in my radio days and all of the on-air talent were provided with e-mail addresses so listeners could e-mail us. We didn’t get a lot of e-mails back then, but there was one person who was e-mailing me somewhat regularly, and he (presumably a he) would call me his little pork chop. I don’t remember what else he said, but I found him to be creepy. This was also right before I met my husband, and at the time he had a computer at home that he used to chat with a girl in California, and he would tell the girl in California about the girl he was listening to on the radio who thought she was funny, but wasn’t.
Didn’t own my own computer until 1999 when we bought a 2nd (?) generation iMac. She is pink, named Barbie, and I still have her. I don’t use her too often anymore. All of our other computers have been built or rebuilt by the husband. Our basement looks like some sort of computer graveyard. I dream of the day that he won’t be offended by the purchase of a brand spanking new computer.
Found the WVSR a few years ago through TILLY.
I found the WVSR sometime early in 2008. Have no idea how I stumbled across it but it was a link related to the fast food comparison. Then I found the beef macaroni diarrhea post, never read anything so funny in my life. I am not an avid blog reader but this one had a sarcastic, smartass quality to it which kept me coming back. I think I just read the blog for quite some time before I checked out the comments section…and that’s when I was really sucked into the madness. Smartasses galore can be found here! Actual people who can form complete sentences without any of that abbreviated internet jibberish. So yeah, I <3 U guys, UR the g8test! Now excuse me while I go wipe away the single tear rolling down my cheek.
The first time I was exposed to the internet, I IMMEDIATELY typed in http://www.bigtitties.com which linked to http://www.thewvsr.com I’ve been hooked ever since.
Buck Out
I didn’t buy my first computer untill the late 90′s, connected to the web via dial up. Porn took forever to load. Played some computer games online as well but it wasn’t much fun if you ran into someone on DSL as they would have you waxed before you even knew they where there.
Found the WVSR from a link through a link for the fast food review in early March of this year and haven’t put in a full day of work since.
Wow…old memories. My first experience with a computer was in the Air Force, back in the late 70s. The first actual Personal Computer I saw was in that same time frame…a friend of mine in the barracks was BUILDING one. I mean, he was actually soldering stuff together! We all laughed and joked…but he’s a gazillionaire now, and the rest of the us work for wages.
First real internet experience was at the South Pole. Anyone else out there ever use Lynx as a browser? It seems like Flintstones now, but, oh, back in the day I felt like I was George Jetson!
First computer I owned was an IBM running an Intel 386, it cost about $1200 back in 1995. Have owned two other desktops, and 2 laptops since then. I recently switched over to a Mac Mini…and it was the best move I have ever made.
Having a techno-geek of a father in the early 80′s, we had all the “latest.” Our first computer in 1983 was an Adam, that used our giant console TV as its monitor. All the software (or whatever you call it) was on cassette tapes! Cassette Tapes! And talk about cables running through your living room…
Built my first computer in 1988. 8MHz, 640K RAM dual 5.25″ floppy drives and composite green screen 12″ monitor, 1200Baud modem
Monster power for playing dialup chess!!
My first year in college, I took a computer class and wrote programs on punch cards. Punch cards.
Much later, early 90s, I remember having to use Lynx as a browser, making HTML pages of bookmarks and using Archie as a search engine. All text based.
I remember telling the IT guy in the department where I worked about this new thing called Mosaic, a browser with graphics! He had to do some kind of magic to get it working, but after he did it was amazing.
Late to the party again…oh well.
My first computer was a used Atari 400 with a cassette drive (and I agree, they were slow even back then), got it in the early 80s pretty cheap. I remember loading Zaxxon from cassette and it taking forever. Played pretty well, though. The computer also had a cartridge slot, you could use BASIC through that as well as some other games. Later on, I got a used Attari800XL. Played Castle Wolfenstein from floppy disk on that one! Both are in storage somewhere.
I got my Tshirt yesterday – Thanks Jeff!
There is a convenience store here in Morgantown that still has floppy discs for sale. I think the box has been on the shelf for over a decade.
Now I’m hungry for some delicious toast!
I don’t remember what kind of computer my first one was. I had the AOL dial-up and I’d basically spend my time in chat rooms pretending to be a lesbian.
I bought a HP Pavilion about 8 or 9 years ago, I think. It has WindowsME on it, I’m using it right now.
For a long time I didn’t know there was a WVSR. I would go to a page called “The Mountain” and look at bizarre links.
http://www.thewvsr.com/mountain.htm
One day I decided to scroll to the bottom and click on the link to the home page. I’ve been reading here since then. That must have been several years ago.
Jason,
I have an HP Pavilion at work (vintage ~2005). HEAVIEST. FUCKING. LAPTOP. EVER. When it finally dies I’m gonna rip apart the case to confirm my suspicion that it’s lined with either lead or depleted uranium.
I loved playing “You don’t know Jack”! Does anyone remember playing Acrophobia? That was sweet! Especially dirty word Acrophobia.
That was the first shit someone thought to send on the internet??? WTF You’ve got to be kidding. And you got 4 stations? We got three and some fuzzy nonesense on the UHF dial. Dial? OMG I just turned into my father. The first computer we got at work took an hour of flipping switches just so it would read a punch tape which then let you use a teletype keyboard for data entry. The second computer we got at work had a whopping 16K of memory – no hard drive at all. And I had a Timex Computer. it had 4K of memory and you hooked it to a cassette player to download a program. It never did tick. Much less keep on ticking. It just made you want to kick John Cameron Swasey. I traded it for a 1960 Coke machine and got the better end of that deal. Keeps my beer REAL cold.
Must have been 1983? My mom worked for Compuserve and we logged on using a small b/w tv as a monitor, radioshack keyboard and hillarious cradle modem.
hehe. First computer I used was a Tandy Radio Shack computer in a BASIC computer programming class. I remember when 40mb was a HUGE hard drive upgrade! That was a packard bell….
And when I discovered mirc and forums – I was stratospheric!
Like going to a color tv after watching a black & white tv for a couple of years….
I remember acrophobia!!!
9th grade, in 1977. My school had something called a Texas Instruments 990/10, which was donated by the company. It was a large desk sized machine with a 12” white plastic floppy drive that could be inserted and a black and green screen. The machine would boot up with cassette tapes, and one would store written programs in cassette tapes. It also had a 9 pin dot matrix thermal printer. I remember studying basic Fortran, and to one had to write the program, run a “fortran compiler” and if no errors were found, then run a “link editor” to execute the program.
Later that year the school bought an Apple II which had a cassette player and a 12” color TV for a monitor. It was big deal when the next year the school bought two 5 ½” floppy drives. The machine had 64K of RAM and we wrote programs in Basic. This cost about $2,000.
In 1987 I bought an IBM PS/2, which was an 8086 machine, with a color screen, and 20M hard disk and a 9 pin dot matrix printer, it was about $2,500.
Last week I bought a new computer for my office about $700: 500 GB HD, 4G RAM, etc etc.
What other commodity has experienced such development over 32 years? Maybe other consumer electronics like VCRs, TVs, video cameras, but certainly not things like cars.