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!