[digitalsushi]

When I was 14, my dad got us dialup internet in 1994. At the ISP, I had never paid more attention in my life, and when we got home I rushed to install the tcp software and 'internet in a box' for windows 95. My dad got irate at how quickly I was moving through it and told me that he wouldn't help me fix it after I messed it up.

When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a deadly serious warning - that he had a report he could run on the computer to list everything I was visiting. I was dubious. So I proved to myself that he didn't.

18 months later I was working at the ISP. I always wonder if that threat by him to avoid smut and bomb making was a deliberate seed being planted, or just a panicked father veneering over a complete loss of control.

[yardie]

So many memories. I remember riding my bike to the local ISP's office to get my internet welcome packet. Because I wasn't going to wait 5-7 business days for it to arrive in the mail. It came complete with a dozen floppies for Mac and PC, account details, and the Internet Yellow Pages. Which is sitting on a shelf in my parents garage.

At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was some local guy with enough scratch to afford a T1 and a bank of modems.

[digitalsushi]

The memories indeed! We had a T1 and a pile of Livingston Portmaster 2e terminal servers, connected with a centrex hunt group to a single dialup phone number.

I learned a lot about people very quickly. As we got more popular, we started to get busy signals, because we couldn't grow our hardware fast enough - and then people learned how to do keepalives, so that they wouldn't get stuck offline on a busy signal. That was a race to the bottom. Sharing a physical resource like a phone port is a dark ages thing I am glad we no longer contend with.

We have it much, much better than we did back then.

But I'd still like to go on a time-vacation to enjoy the selection bias of the times - I'm glad we made the Internet easy enough for everyone to get online, but it would be neat to visit 25 years to visit the greener pastures of old.

[yardie]

LOL. I was one of those keepalive hackers. Once I discovered newsgroups and IRC I'd leave the line up to download while I was at school. Downloading a single MP3 over 19.2kbps took the better part of a day.

[PhasmaFelis]

I remember discovering MP3s. My computer at the time could run Winamp and play music, but not do anything else (like web browsing) at the same time.

[LocalH]

I remember learning about the existence of the Internet from encountering a local ISP's kiosk in the mall in 1995. They had an ISDN line serving the kiosk, and as long as I didn't outright block anyone from trying the Internet out they didn't mind me sitting there and surfing. That was also when I discovered the concept of emulation, and I feel I was very fortunate to have been able to had my first experiences with both concepts simultaneously.

[cr0sh]

> At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs.

In some areas - probably. Here in Phoenix, I got the internet in 1993 - dialup shell access - from Internet Direct.

Yes - that Internet Direct.

[Diederich]

Do you remember netcom.com? https://web.archive.org/web/19981212031322/http://www.netcom... I got dialup access from them in 1992 or 1993 after college. My first access to the Internet was in 1988 via https://web.archive.org/web/19970628122429/http://www.csupom... (Of course that was before the www. Everything was via telnet, ftp and gopher.)