How many years have you been online?

How long have you been online?

  • Less than 5 years

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 6-10 years

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 11-15 years

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 16-20 years

    Votes: 2 100.0%
  • More than 20 years

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    2
About 5 or 6 years now I think. It started in my forties, though I may have missed the boat when it comes to understanding a lot of things about the internet. The main thing I am having a hard time adapting to is effective communication without expressing inflection in a text only medium. But alas, I am learning!
 
I designed web sites for a short time, but quit when I realized I'm more of a designer and less of a coder.

That was an interesting post, Milt! Totally relate to quitting web design because the technical side became too advanced and I couldn't keep up. Back end SQL database driven with the horribly arcane protocols of CSS.

I quite like the simplicity of inline frames but apparently there's some terrible consequence or another that I forgot ...
 
1997, had a hangup for geneology research and actually found one relative in the states that i never had heard of, it was magic.
 
Well, I got my first PC computer in 1988, I started with a Timex Sinclair back in 1982.

I think I started using Bulletin Boards when I got my first fax/ modem card which was about 1989.

I used compuserve, and for a little while AOL, and then I was using a small ISP through my modem that my friend had worked for back in 1996.

I think I was one of the first in town to get DSL back in 1999.

Sorry the Poll does not seem to be working.
 
I've been online since 1994. My mom had a new computer with all the bells and whistles at the time. I think it was a Compaq 386 and she had AOL and Windows 3.1.

I was between jobs so I just hung out all day and learned the computer as much as I could. I had some experience from taking a computer drafting class in 1992. When I was in tech school in '88, computers were just starting to be used for drafting, but it hadn't taken off yet. I missed the boat because I didn't take the classes back then. Dammit.

Anyway, I spent time online in the Philosophy chat room on AOL. A lot of stuff I was saying back then seemed "out there" or controversial, but today some of these ideas are widely accepted and common place ideas. No kidding...it takes awhile for everyone else to catch up.

Funny thing is, at my job today, I use a modern computer to do my drafting, but all the field work is still ran through a DOS program on a 486 computer running a dot matrix printer. I think the program is from 1992 and still works great. It's actually kinda cool now working in that retro environment.
 
I've been on the internet since 1994, when my country officially went online. I was teaching in a university which was part of the consortium that set up the connection.

If landline telephone-based BBSs count as the internet, I was on since 1989, first on a 1200 baud internal modem.
 
Oh, gawd. First email account was in 1976 on an IBM 360, but that one was just a number- and there wasn't much interactivity then. First account named "skod" was in 1978 at my old alma mater, on a DEC PDP-8A running Multics. Ended up watching a lot of the growth of the Arpanet from the academic side (along with the birth of Usenet and the painful adoption of DNS). Went off into industry doing DEC-based computer dreck in 1982. Posted my first article to Usenet in 1983, when I finally became convinced that that wasn't a flash in the pan... That's about the same time as my avatar picture was taken.

Then spent a bit of late 1985 and early 1986 doing backup online customer support for Kurzweil at 2400 baud with an original toaster 128k Mac on the old Performing Artists Network on Delphi. Anyone else remember that? Poked around Compuserve some as well, but most time was spent on PAN: Compuserve wasn't very organized at the time. Still have the logs of a bunch of that stuff around somewhere in the archives...

And I remember very well the September that Never Ended, when AOL forums abruptly got gatewayed onto Usenet, and the old netiquette and academically-focused Usenet social structure evaporated forever essentially overnight. Snif. (;-)

Still think this whole world-wide-web thing *is* a flash in the pan (just like MIDI!) but am ready to be proven wrong again. I'm _good_ at being proven wrong, at least!
 
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