Ask HN: Tell me the story of the first time you connected to the internet

The sound of a 56K Modem dial tone was like heroin coursing through my veins. Probably because the Internet was still a rabbit-hole back then, and not the commercialized echo chamber it is now. I would spend hours just hopping from link to link, grabbing some software, music, and other things.

I don't really suffer from a nostalgia about them days, since I was naive and young, and didn't understand concepts like privacy, so I was very exposed as an Internet user (although I made sure my systems were hardened and used oldskool antivirus programs to catch malware).

Now I'm on a gigabit line and I can spawn two Windows VMs at the same time whilst running Spotify and other programs in the background. If I had that kind of hardware back in the day, I would be a different person entirely. So now I just relish my connection speed and beefy setup, and savor it, because the olden days were difficult when you wanted to grab a 700MB CD from an FTP index site.

What do you mean “the Internet”?

I can go back to my days in college (84-89), where we communicated with UUCP to various other universities and organizations. I occasionally read USENET news at the time, and also sent e-mail. But we didn’t have a direct always-on connection, instead we had old-school 300 baud modems. At the time, I also had a 300 baud Hayes modem at home (connected to my Apple ][+ with 64KB of RAM, thanks to the 80-column card), and could use that to dial up to BBSes in the area, and connect to the university computers.

Later, as I recall, the university did get always-on connectivity to ARPAnet (via a T-1, I think), which later became the backbone for “the Internet”.

Then I went to work at what was then the Defense Communications Agency in 1989, and we had a group inside the agency that was responsible for running the one-and-only Network Information Center for the Internet, although the actual work was contracted out (to SRI?). At the time, I was doing classified work elsewhere in the agency, but I did stand up the first recursive DNS server on our internal network, because I was sick and tired of always updating the HOST.TXT tables on our machines.

We moved to the US from a post-soviet country when I was around 12 and one night a few weeks or months later my dad came home with a Dell PC. It _may_ have been a Dell Dimension 4100, but I can't remember for sure. Pretty sure it was running Windows 98.

I can't remember the exact timeline, but in my memory I felt like we spent all evening setting it up. And finally, I heard the dial-up sound and saw the AOL logo. I can't remember what website I looked at first when I was finally alone and able to explore the PC by myself: I think I may have clicked to go to the AOL chat rooms, then typed random stuff into the search engine (I remember my best friend at the time had this idea that if you tYpE SeArCh PhRaSeS iN lIkE tHiS you would get different/better results). I may have also created my first email address that night.

I spent a lot of time in AOL and later MSN chat rooms, just arguing on the Internet or hanging out in the "speed fighting" rooms. It's how I learned to type quickly. I also discovered Geocities and started making my own websites right away, inventing role playing worlds and creating manually-managed games that nobody ever played (but which were very fun to invent and build websites for).

1991. UUCP to run a node off my local network group. For us back then, there was no active connection, it was called 'store and forward'.

Each node would dial in to the node upline and get whatever was waiting, be it email, usenet articles, etc. In turn each of the nodes downline would login and get what ever was waiting for them.

Did I mention that this was in the days of 300baud modems?

There was quite a bit of excitement in the group when one of our members told us that he had sent an email to the US and a reply had come back in less than 10 minutes.

Oh, and did I mention that this was also the time before those newfangled "billsmith@somecompany.com" email addresses became common? When we used email addresses like "!company1!company2!company3!departmenta!manager2!peasant4" (if I remember the format correctly) which showed the actual path to be taken by the email from the sender to the receiver.

I had access to ARPANET[1] (which later evolved into "the internet"[2]) in the early 1980s when I was in academia. In those days, long before the web, most people just used it for e-mail, FTP and TELNET. This was before we had .com, .edu, etc. - the top-level domains were .ARPA (civilian) and .MIL (military). We were connected to the net via a BBN IMP[3] in the computer room.

In 1991, I first had dialup internet access from home with a small, local ISP using a 14.4k modem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor

My father set up a brand new computer with the help of some friend. I remember they installed America Online, and then let me take a turn to try it out.

I think it was running Windows 3.1. I remember going on the “Kids Only” channel and glancing through something about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

This was using a 14.4k modem, and I think the machine was a 75MHz pentium with 8MB or 16MB ram.

There was this local BBS. You dialed into it on a modem and got a text terminal that listed forum messages, last one at the bottom. I added a message "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to continue" and then the mods booted me. Bored teenagers trolling is as old as the internet itself.

U.S. Robotics 56k Modem with dial in with per minute costs. Yahoo hast been concurrented by Altavista. Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator was my entry door.

Still remembering the first software I downloaded without really knowing what has been downloaded was a whopping 5x4mb Photoshop 4.0 lol

In 95 IIRC I had a modem from work and a Win 3.11 machine. I went to a computer show with my teenage son we and decided we should try it out. A company called Demon were offering connection for a small fee. In those days (maybe now too) companies could make money from receiving phone calls so I think that provided some of the 'rent'.

We installed Trumpet Windsock and got going. Excited at first, the web, through Mosaic, was a much smaller place than it is now. Yahoo was the go to for finding stuff.

Got a free sub domain, again paid for by dialing into their numbers to update it.

Paid for a copy of Netscape.

Broadband, when we got it, was fantastic.