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.
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.