Yeah, that would’ve been the easy way. I learned how the hard way.
When in college (late 80’s, early 90’s), “Internet access” meant using a terminal emulator (Datastorm’s Procomm, on a DOS-based PC) and logging in to a university mainframe, running apps (e-mail, news, FTP, etc.) from there.
During my first job (later 90’s), it wasn’t too much different. My employer had an Internet connection. And they had a callback-modem for dial-up access. A really cool approach to security - you dial in and provide user ID and password. Then the modem hangs up and calls you back at a pre-registered phone number. You then answer the call to establish the connection. Still using a terminal emulator, however.
The next step was still using that callback modem, but I found that I could launch a PPP app on my work computer, then run the corresponding client on my PC and transfer the call from the terminal emulator to it, establishing a TCP/IP connection over that link. So I could run Internet apps from home over that (very slow) connection.
I did quite a lot of web surfing and news reading over that link until I decided to go and get a proper ISP account and relegated that callback modem for only those times where I actually needed to access the company network.
Oh yes, and to make it all the more fun, I was running OS/2 on my home PC at the time I worked for that employer. So there wasn’t a whole lot of packaged commercial or shareware software. So I found myself downloading a lot of open source code, mostly written for Unix environments, porting it to OS/2 using the EMX system.
Going online on the road could be a real adventure in the old days. In 1998 I was a reporter covering a major science meeting out of town, where I was both writing news stories for a British magazine and meeting with the magazine’s editors. I was hauling around a PowerBook 5300 with modem connections for phone lines. After the talks I had to go to my room to write up news reports and file them with the news editor. It was a minor adventure connecting through the hotel’s phone system to the dial-in server for Software Tool and Die, one of the first companies to offer internet connections to anyone. But when I tried to send email to the editors’ British email addresses, I could not send or receive anything. I tried and tried and go nowhere. I eventually called Software Tool and Die to ask what was wrong. The tech said they were under a spam attach and had cut off all connection to the whole United Kingdom. (It might have been all of Europe. All I was worried about was the UK because all the editors had UK emails.)
I can’t remember what I said to the tech, but he wasn’t going to do anything about my problem, and whatever I said wasn’t very nice. As I recall, somewhere I found a floppy disk and copied the files onto it so I could give it to the editor, and my stories ran. When I got back home I began finding a better internet connection.
And of course, MacTCP and InterSLIP was the newfangled way of getting Internet connectivity when I wrote the book. Before that, I used uAccess, which relied on the UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) protocol to transfer email and Usenet news in a store-and-forward technique. When we moved from Ithaca to Seattle in 1991, it took me a month or so to find Ralph Sims, who ran a UUCP node called halcyon and would let me call in. He later merged with Northwest Nexus and they were the company I worked with to make the first flat-rate dialup graphical Internet account. Before that, it was all charged by the minute, and at rates that meant Northwest Nexus had Internet Starter Kit readers from Japan calling in because international long distance was somehow cheaper.
My first proper ISP account was with Erol’s Internet, a local service provider. I was one of those customers who took advantage of their incredible “5 years for $300” subscription deals. I paid once up-front (in person with a cheque) and didn’t have to think about payments for quite a long time.
Erol’s was a no-frills ISP. You got dial-up access via PPP and they forwarded your packets to the Internet. E-mail and newsgroups were provided, but not much else.
Especially nice is that they ran their own corporate newsgroups and their staff (including support and engineering) were active participants on those groups. So it was really easy to report and resolve problems - just post a question/comment and typically get a response within the hour.
And the engineers all had the most awesome pseudonyms. I still remember the names of the news admins: Afterburner and Nyarlathotep.
I stayed with them for many years until my employer started providing 128Kbps SDSL (a nice perk resulting from us selling the ISP lots of back-end equipment). And the rest is history: 128K SDSL to 1.5M ADSL to 25M FiOS to cable modems after moving (initially at 50M, currently at 300M).
First online: dialing in to BBS systems using a 300 baud modem and some kind of Mac terminal emulator for an original Macintosh, around 1985.
I remember posting a long, well thought out argument as to the superiority of the Amiga over the Macintosh II, and how the Amiga would definitely win in the end.
And I posted my first Macintosh program: Data Disker. Which seems to have not made it to the Internet.
First Internet: Dialup to NETCOM (via Apple’s Internet Connection Kit) using a 56K 3com modem, later upgraded to V.90. This was in 1997. I soon switched to Texas.Net.
Notice the gap. I stopped using the original Mac in 1986, and didn’t have a computer at all until 1996. Nor did I have a TV!
Instead I spent way too much money on calculator accessories. I have an HP-41C that actually has a third-party clock speed upgrade to make it calculate faster.
I think I first started online via the FirstClass BBS system, as a member of NYMUG (that BBS had great contributors, BTW). I also used Delphi (anyone remember them?) for a while. (Delphi (online service) - Wikipedia)
CompuServe and AOL followed. One of the first to provide dial-up internet service to Mac users, IIRC, was Earthlink so sometime in the later 90s I switched to Earthlink. Time Warner Cable was required to share bandwidth with another provider in order to get their franchise in NYC, so around 2000 or so we had Earthlink broadband at home.
I’ve said this before…in my humble opinion, Apple’s HyperCard/HyperTalk apps were the precursor of online digital communications. It was so easy to learn even I could put together HyperCard database stacks.
It was another great innovation developed by Steve Jobs.
My first foray was via the Nova Scotia Technology Network (NSTN) in 1991, using my new Powerbook 100 and its internal 2400 baud modem. I think my customer number with them was in the 20s or 30s, so early days. They sent out software on a floppy, and it consisted of MacTCP, Eudora, Newswatcher, Fetch and Gopher. I still use Fetch, though now in a much later version. An IRC client (can’t recall which) came later. I think this service was just about the first ISP for private consumers (as opposed to university access) in Canada.
My first online experiences were accessing early games held on University College Cork’s system via the Trinity College mainframe. I recall an early Star Trek, bouncing a capital E around a dotted grid off capital Ks. The techs in Trinity would clear it off, and we would go to Cork to get it.
Going online in Ireland in the early days was painful. BBSs were expensive for a recent grad, there was a few in Dublin, or at least with a Dublin number, telephone rates were high and an extended call beyond your local area code out of the question. I would read of the offerings in the US and UK in Byte and try to find equivalents on the much more limited offerings here.
Like Michael above, I too was an early Amiga advocate, still have my working 2000D in the attic, any info or software or chat about it happened in computer stores where I would hang out, or in in software swap meets where illegal cracked software, principally games, were exchanged.
You got info via magazines, meetups, and the odd useful item online. The amount of data pumped through magazines in particular was huge.
By the time I emigrated to the States, Compuserve had begun its offering in the UK, I accessed it via work. In the US, I signed up for AOL, Mindspring was my ISP, and I was working with Macs and Tidbits became indispensable.
Sounds like you’re referring to the 1971 Star Trek game. This was very popular, was written in BASIC, and was published in several books, including BASIC Computer Games, which was incredibly popular at the time. It was ported to a lot of different systems over the years since it’s first release.
Dial-up was my first online experience, except for maybe a demo terminal at a local college. Borrowed a friend’s 300 baud modem for a short while for use with my Commodore 64. Soon got a used 1200 baud Hayes (with metal case!) and spent a bit of time on various BBS’ like the Well.
In the late-80s I started running my own, customized Color64 BBS on a 2nd, dedicated phone line. Upgraded to a USRobotics 2400 modem, and from 5.25" floppy drive to an 800k then to a “massive” 20 MB hard drive with the Lt. Kernal expansion kit and then moved to a Commodore 128.
While many BBS’ of the day focused on games, software trading or dating, I emphasized the user forums and an information library that included an evolving list of BBS’ around north America. We also had a “debate” forum that remained fairly civil for quite some time, including a discussion about religions. Made a number of friends along the way through the BBS networks.
First “internet” access was through my employer in 1991 which had a lot of UNIX workstations and a 128K dedicated connection. Eventually some of us used 56k modems to dial-in from home and gain access the internet.
One of my dumber moves was failing a FORTRAN class because instead of attending, I was trying to change a roommates Apple ][ computer so the Star Trek game would display little icons of the Enterprise and Klingon ships instead of E and K.
So I wasn’t the only one running OS/2 back then. Was fun for a while. I remember my various dial-up modems and an pretty sure I used ProComm as well for quite a while.
In the mid1980s I used a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer with a dial-up modem to do “home banking” with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. It was a clumsy teletext display but it had simple functions like account balances and transfers between accounts.
I seem to remember it had other features like stock market information.
Not much has changed really, except for the speed!
My first remote computing was in 1981 when I was just out of high school. I borrowed a dot-matrix “portable” printer “terminal” with a modem cradle for resting my parents’ telephone handset in from my employer (Honeywell Information Systems). I dialed up them up, connected to their Multix machine, typed the magic incantation, and read
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
Ah, the days of the “twisty little maze of passages!”
But that wasn’t the internet, of course. I was briefly an early Delphi user, and for quite a while I dialed in to BIX (BYTE Information eXchange). Using BIX in 1989 I (legally) got in to Sabre, the airline reservation system, and purchased a ticket (Seattle to Boston). I remember the Northwest Airline agent in Seattle was completely mystified as to how I could possibly have purchased the ticket myself without going through a travel agent. “You’ll get used to it!” I confidently chirped — having no idea, of course, of the wonders that KAYAK and Expedia would bring us…
But as for internet qua internet, that would have to be when I began working for an affiliate of MIT in Cambridge in 1990. We were on BITNET, and that’s when my boss introduced me to MacWEEK and to the weekly TidBITS newsletter that some guy Adam Engst was putting out. Oh, how we used to look forward to Tuesday mornings!
I was a ][c user and first online in 84 or so…there was an Apple II group that met Saturday evenings on Compuserve. We moved from San Diego then to the DC suburbs and I signed up for the Twilite Clone BBS run by Paul Heller and then eventually email from them as things started transitioning to the internet. Still have those emails since they’re our oldest ones and our personal domain is managed MX wise by them still.
neil
The three kinds of stress…nuclear, cooking and a&&hole. Jello is the key to the relationship.
