@narfcake
Virtual Address eXtension, Ugh how I hate acronyms!
And I had to specifically say computer terminology when searching Google otherwise it only talks about vaccines.
My Yahoo address, which I created when I bought my first CPU and monitor, which was an Emerson from B.J.'s Wholesale Club, just prior to going to PA school in 1991.
An AOL account back when they came on a floppy disk, not even a three and a half, an actual floppy disk. I’m trying to remember I think I might have had a page mail address before that but that’s not an internet account
@jouest people did all sorts of things with those. I also remember when downloading and update to AOL took hours and hours and hours. I know I got paid when that happened and I had to go find a payphone to call in because I was an hour into a download and I didn’t want to stop
I used MSN Messenger and AOL messenger and all that.
The first forum account I made was Facebook. I was pissed when they allowed high school kids in. Effin kids.
Hotmail account and IRC account, probably around the same time, mid nineties. I think I’m solidly a Xennial. While I really like portmanteaus in general, that one is a bit… meh.
Email only internet access thrunsome local BBS setups. I think some of these also imported some newsgroups and account holders could post to them. But this was early 90’s and I’ve forgotten the details.
I wanted more internet access and so I signed up for a internet connection with a company in California at the time I think there were two companies that would sell this to the public and you would have to dial long distance and then you would just get a prompt
No menus and no web
I bought a flat right overnight long distance service for $30 a month and I would play on that at night just fooling around
Then set up my own BBS which didn’t have dial in customers or users it just set up file service that you could request by calling another BBs and it conveyed net mail and internet email
I forgot the names of the software packages I use now but it was a photo setup
I remember when I set up an os2 machine and a friend came over and put an early version of a browser on it and this was the first time I saw the web
My memory is fuzzy but I think this is earlier than any other browser set up except for a text setup such as lynx which we also used to run.
Then I met somebody who wanted to set up a local ISP for dial-up I became an early customer
I don’t remember ever having dial-up CompuServe or dial up AOL or similar
I just upgraded my dial-up and then my ISBN and then my DSL connections as they became available with one or another local isps
I don’t think I ever used an acoustic coupler or anything like that with the internet I think I was up to 9600 or 144 or something like that by the time I was doing a lot of BBS access and then that dial up that went to California for the line command and prompt access
@f00l I actually wrote my own code for a BBS in the 80’s called ‘The SmorgasBoard’. It even had text to speech that said ‘Welcome to the Smorgas Board’ but that never really worked because there was a whole lot of things you needed client side. Sadly, I never had anyone connect because I was connecting it to the home land line and mom and dad weren’t crazy about that. Must have been 1985ish
I did publish the number on a few other BBSs and would occasionally get a call, but I was never up when those came in
@f00l@narfcake I worked in SF for a small Japanese underwear company and they gave me a PC. Signed up with EarthLink and still have the same user name created when I was super stoned!
/giphy memories
The company may have been Netcom.
Yeah think it was.
I and a friend used to sit at the PC all night playing on it.
Then he forkbombed them and they shit off the account. And I had to yell at him and call them and beg. But they let us back on. I suppose he wasn’t the only nerd who tried that.
I think the nighttime PD flat rate provider was Sprint. But not sure.
I think my access was first various BBS systems (usually Fido) and Netcom and also BBS
Then also if you knew someone at the local paper you might get a she’ll access for newsgroups that way.
Then that super early local ISP
All this was pre mosaic.
Then along came OS2 and mosaic. And tcp over IP or whatever it was called protocol dial up at like 9600.
Then 14.4. Then wasn’t there a firm of bonded 14.4?
Then 56K (wow)
Then single isdn (64k) but rock solid unlike regular dialup.
Then bonded isdn at 128k
Then dsl. DSL was what used for a long time.
The cable or fiber depending in availability.
Tried Hughes dish service when out in the country it was pretty awful
Finally went with fixed wireless in some rural locations which was great unless the wind slightly reoriented the dish.
Started being able to use a phone browser back in the 2g days with that Kyocera plan phone.
Now usually all I use is 5g. Fine for my purposes.
My BBS was mostly a file supplier by net Mail request protocol. I had early versions of PGP on there, very popular. We even ran a sysop only PGP encrypted local forum just to see if we could get it to work. Yeah it worked.
My memory is slow I guess but seems to be more functional today
The communication tasks were handled by Binkleyterm. The minimal user interface was Frontdoor.
Got/received no calls except from other BBS setups passing along net mail and requesting files By design.
Fun days to be in fido. Because it was localized thevsysops could actually get to know each other and become close friends.
4 of my current very closest friends were sysops and that’s how I met them. Still talk to them at min several times a week, more than 30 years later.
Weird group tho. Obviously everyone was a nerd.
But one guy who was a huge neighborhood watch guy who worked with the police would wind up going to jail for a decade or so child secual crimes (photographed his daughters preteen friends naked during kiddie sleepovers)
He was also one of those “I love blinking text” guys.
Another was into some crazy shit like anarchy and money laundering. We thought it was all hot air until the FBI called us individually to ask about him. He also went to jail.
And there was one with crazy theories about how a claiming specialized form of citizenship that involved not using zip codes or state abbreviations meant that he didn’t have to pay federal income taxes. That one moved away. I never knew what happened with his citizenship and tax ideas.
And some into a few of the crazier health ideas like too much colloidal silver.
But because the sysop groups were small enough headcount’s ot wasn’t all trolling and lies and posturing. Most of them were pretty wonderful people. And getting to know most of them over time was great.
@capnjb@f00l reading your stories got me nostalgic so I had to pile on… people from BBS circles were definitely an interesting bunch… I also know quite a few stories like yours, most involved some amount of recreational drug use mixed in to liven them up. It’s definitely a pattern, my guess is it’s the mix of high intelligence with social outcast culture, just had a high rate of spinning out. Some went to prison, some went to Intel, lol. Amazing no one went to prison for anything computer related, we had plenty of fun on the less than legal side.
My friends and I wrote our own BBS, by which I mean modified some existing one I forget the name of… It was very popular locally because someone in our group was able to keep 5 lines dedicated (or take them down and war dial the entire local city code overnight… sorry anyone we woke up at 2am to a screaming handshake), lol. But with 5 lines you could almost always get on and chat except weekends. I forget the names of practically everything from back then except our BBS which I can still remember the ASCII art for the login page. I had a different handle back then and continued to have it on all the popular sites as they came up, but over time more and more people used it so I gave it up. I thought this one was pretty unique, certainly was back when I created it, but the last ten years I’ve had people steal this more and more too… I’m a bit salty about someone taking it on protonmail.
Anyway, back when ISPs started, I was still on 2400baud, I think the ISP hated me because I was almost always connected (and had an auto reconnect script to call back if it dropped), and always transferring some file…z… Or downloading newsgroups… I had to call up the guy who ran it occasionally to resolve issues, usually with DNS, and I could just tell he wasn’t a fan, lol. I don’t blame him haha. But I did stay with them all the way through all the speed upgrades up to ADSL. They started as a tiny one man show and kept growing and stayed in the game, even doing DSL for years (and of course being way better quality for price than the big names) but eventually they got bullied/bought out when cable companies really started merging and monopolizing. I wish I could remember that company name to look them up…
One of my friends from those days loved running a BBS so much that during college he lived at home and worked a part-time job
His parents were perfectly willing to pay for his college, but they weren’t willing to pay for his interesting choices of how to spend his personal money
Which he spent running 14 lines, old pots lines, to the house because those were the inbound for his BBS
As long as he paid for it, and the ringers were turned off, his parents were cool. He was a responsible kid, and he made straight A’s.
He’s now an expert in computational linguistics or something like that
I guess 30 years later
—-
If I remember the regional guru for Fido South Central US in those days with somebody in New Orleans, whose name I forgotten
He and a few other Fido net gods paid for T1s to their houses
He and a few other Fido net gods paid for T1s to their houses
In the 90’s I worked for a communication company and we had OC-48s from coast to coast. We had all the bandwidth Siemens actually poached a number of our guys to calibrate lasers for their long distance fiber runs. I wish they had poached me because not long after we were acquired by Worldcom and that didn’t end well I got a six month severance package a month before I got married… so no complaints
I used to connect to some bulletin boards on my 300 baud modem on an Apple IIe. Always fun if the sysop was on. I think the earliest I recall was probably a really long number on a Compuserve account.
edit - My name in the text MUDs was Order. That was all on really slow dial up through telnet.
@capnjb oh yeah acoustic coupler days. Going to 1200 was amazing. Then my company agreed to give us prepaid line access to San Jose and a 2400 Baud I think the modem cost $2000.
@pmarin I’ve only had one bottle… 1994ish? was the time frame. I think it was about $125 for one bottle. It was for a very special date with a girl who left me two months later. I now know you can get wine in cans Heh It was pretty remarkable.
@capnjb@jouest Haven’t tasted enough of Josh to know if I like it. Oh no, it’s getting more into the gutter. It’s just that any wine (CA I think) that normally sells for $10-$15 at Target and Safeway might not be bad, but I can probably find much better choices. Some may be hit-or-miss, it’s true. But usually worth it.
Late 70s; my friends ran BBS with dial-in lines. I became “pmarin” which as you see stuck with me to this day. (Until my company forced me to be firstname.lastname, which is when I knew it was time to retire.)
High school had computers but no logins. You needed the key to the back room.
College, PDP-11s and maybe a VAX. We could dial-in to them from “dumb terminals” to do assignments. Then first work also VAX and PDP-11s. My company then did UUNET email so at the time we were emailing each other in field offices around the world. The systems could send us automated status and diagnostics overnight. Over dedicated point-to-point phone lines. Or could work from home with 2400 baud modem.
After all that, a decade later, same story as many of you. AOL, maybe Compuserv. Do you remember needing (at least) 2 landlines because one was for computer… sometimes fax?
I dialed into a few BBSs, but I think the first place I had a more persistent account was with AOL or EarthLink (we tended to bounce between them on our 1200, then 2400 baud modems). I remember being impressed by the 56k modem and how it didn’t need to be a separate box but rather a card (and how it cost less than any of its predecessors). The oldest account I maintain now is probably my old Hotmail, which I made at the library using their dedicated T1 line some years after that.
I had a shell account on a local dialup Unix box before Compuserve was up and running. I have no idea what the account name was. I also used FidoNet via a local BBS for a couple of its forums. Later, I got a CServe account. Eventually, I moved on to Usenet, and then other Internet resources. I’ve been online since the days when 1200 baud was “fast”.
@werehatrack My Mom used Eudora, but I preferred Pegasus (Pmail). Apparently someone had my email address before I did, so I started getting their awful spam. I had to run my email through Mailwasher before I could open it in Pmail. I eventually had to give up that email address it got so bad.
@heartny Eudora’s support for regex filters made it my favorite, but when the specs for certificates changed, it became a real pain to use. It had been unsupported and abandoned for a while at that point. Qualcomm had more important things to do. Thunderbird inherited the code, but their attempts to utilize the trove were disappointing at best.
And as for “what does that say about your millennial age?”, I’m prehistoric in that respect. Where I came from, there wasn’t any “millennial” unless you were mangling the terminology for the making of women’s hats.
My first internet access account was through a small innovative local company named myriad.net that offered dial-up access (be-boop-ba-beep) through an acoustic coupler. Then it got bought out by a local instance of a larger cable TV company and of course rates went way up and customer service went way down. That was probably around 1993. Previously at college we had a very large WAN but no internet for the common plebe. Think departments had access to ARPANet back then.
Was always accumulating AOL floppies and CDs and hunting some use for them. Came through snail mail and even foisted off inside subscription mags such as PC or DrDobbs. Never bit on them though.
With private internet access, think my first user account other than email was with the small-number-of-deals-a-day retail site called OnSale.com that sold mainly electronics and computers and peripherals . (Taught me bad buying habits i still use at Mercatalyst sites.) No idea what my username for that had been.
CompuServe (not sure of the spelling) dial up modem on my Vic20 contacted me to the computer world. Mostly chat rooms back then. Don’t think I had or used email yet . I remember EarthLink as my first email account Then later an invitation for aGoogle email account! Officially Old!
Looks like I fit right in here. My first account after setting up email was made at TCZ - The Chatting Zone, a telnet MUD. This was early 1995. My university connection was only 2400 baud even though my dad had gifted me his 14.4k fax modem after he upgraded. A few years later, when USR was launching the 56k modem, they did a contest to give away 100 units I think. My boyfriend and I both won one! I miss the days of silly internet contests that were either easy to barrage with submissions or with so little participation that odds of winning were actually realistic.
My university wasn’t letting alumni keep their .edu email accounts past graduation then, so I had to jump to Yahoo, but I still have that one 27-some-odd years later.
@Carebear@yakkoTDI Oh, so you’re the one responsible for where we are today? Remember those 1-900 telephone votes and you could vote as many times as you wanted but it cost you (or your parents) major mula for each vote? I think early days of some of those TV entertainment contest shows that are still on now started that way.
My first account on a computer/forum/etc. was in the early 70s on my university’s DECSystem10, which was one of the first KA-10 DECSystem10s to be manufactured. (I also used our Univac Spectra 70, an IBM 360 clone, with punchcards, for one course in IBM 360 assembly language.) This was in the before-times–the internet didn’t exist yet and if there was email at all, it was not the standard we (still) use today, but more experimental in nature. I remember buying my first Windows PC, a Gateway, in 1995. (Before that I owned a Commodore Amiga and then a Radio Shack “portable” computer.) That was probably around the time I signed up with a dial-up internet service at 300 baud that slowly increased its speed over time as technology increased. My first forum account was most likely Usenet. In the early 2000s, cable internet was first made available in my town via Cablevision (I think), the cable TV provider. Interesting that in those days, the cable companies seemed reluctant to provide internet service to “regular” people in their homes since they were so focused on businesses. Another example of how times have changed.
@ItalianScallion
Back in high school my dad would bring bags of punch card punch-outs home from work and we would use them as confetti during football games!
I mean probably aol instant messenger but that was just like me and one friend. On our limited Internet time via screaching modems. And playing I think medal of honor allied assault.
FPS on a 56K modem and AMD K6… Yup.
Many will beat me on this of course. Do we attract Gen Z lol
@jouest@unksol at least you got some decent specs. Was that post-Y2K? Well K6 was pretty far back there.
Seems like we need gen-anything now. Apparently the stock of goat meat is getting depleted. We either need to get drunk casemates buyers, of which I may be one, or totally unsuspecting passer-bys that come to the adjacent MorningSave from daytime TV shows.
@jouest@pmarin@yakkoTDI Dad took some convincing to get a PC on some black Friday deal. It was a compaq. Had that pretty purple scheme. Yes a k6-2. Just before AMD off their own in house designs I think? I built an athlon when they were kicking intel for the P4 a few years after. Around the GHz war.
@jouest@pmarin@yakkoTDI and actually that’s a little freaky because I remember installing a Samsung CD burner for him after he bought it. I didn’t notice that at first lol.
Some library material may have been…preserved… For the good of posterity
@jouest well the mid life crisis wave of millennials will be inbound then. Somewhere. I’m… Things… Some days lol. And on the elder millennial end. God help us all
@f00l Remember the little novel printed along the edges of the pages?
I used to browse through those and imagine a kind of pastoral future life (that I didn’t end up living.)
First dial-up account and email address from Juno.com. i still use that as my throwaway address for registering for things that may inevitably spam me.
My Yahoo address is old enough that I was able to associate it with my last name as the one without having to attach a number…
Pre-Internet, (early 1980’s) Chicago BBS. That was with a home built computer and a 120 baud modem. Early internet days was Hotmail.com, before MS bought them out.
@alnielsen I remember working in telemarketing and this older coworker who knew nothing of the internet is smoking a cigarette at break and was like…
“hey are you guys getting a lot of gigolos or male models or something with these leads? It’s like every other email address they give me is for this hot male dot com…”
I misread the original q a bit. Only saw the “internet” part.
Stupid me huh?
Online w no internet that I was aware of:
80’s. Various bbs systems (prob mostly Fido but I’m not certain) plus the local paper put some news articles in text format online for their home subscribers.
Weird memory: The AIM away message that my buddy’s little sister posted on 9/11. I don’t particularly remember her or much else from that day, but damned if I can’t recall that one message exactly.
My first handle on HCC (Houston Chat Channel) bbs was Tananda. I was a big Robert Aspirin fan at the time. I didn’t get a personal email until years later.
Houston folks will get this… While trolling the database at work for test ID’s to play with, I found someone with a HAL-PC.org address. Talk about a blast from the past.
As an elder millennial, it has to be my OG aol.com screen name, right?
Back in my college years, I had an email that was ran off a VAX machine. Is that old enough?
@narfcake
I don’t even know what a VAX machine is! I thought it was a typo. What does that tell you about MY age?
@narfcake
Virtual Address eXtension, Ugh how I hate acronyms!
And I had to specifically say computer terminology when searching Google otherwise it only talks about vaccines.
For everyone else, here’s the Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX
My Yahoo address, which I created when I bought my first CPU and monitor, which was an Emerson from B.J.'s Wholesale Club, just prior to going to PA school in 1991.
It says I’m old, but not dead [yet!]…
@PhysAssist the real score is your Meh username
@jouest
?Huh?
An AOL account back when they came on a floppy disk, not even a three and a half, an actual floppy disk. I’m trying to remember I think I might have had a page mail address before that but that’s not an internet account
@Cerridwyn I wallpapered a wall with AOL trial CDs (shiny side out)
@jouest people did all sorts of things with those. I also remember when downloading and update to AOL took hours and hours and hours. I know I got paid when that happened and I had to go find a payphone to call in because I was an hour into a download and I didn’t want to stop
@Cerridwyn @jouest
/image Mojave phone booth
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mojave-phone-booth
The pink phone booth is gone in Cima, CA too.
/image Cima pink phone booth
@Cerridwyn @jouest @narfcake
@Cerridwyn I have a box of floppies I can get to right now in my ottoman (that used to be my 286DX)
I used MSN Messenger and AOL messenger and all that.
The first forum account I made was Facebook. I was pissed when they allowed high school kids in. Effin kids.
Hotmail account and IRC account, probably around the same time, mid nineties. I think I’m solidly a Xennial. While I really like portmanteaus in general, that one is a bit… meh.
@mschuette I was big into watching Xena back in the day, so I’ve always kind of liked that generational mashup moniker.
@Carebear I could support that interpretation. Such a fun show!
AOL when you paid by the minute.
Email only internet access thrunsome local BBS setups. I think some of these also imported some newsgroups and account holders could post to them. But this was early 90’s and I’ve forgotten the details.
I wanted more internet access and so I signed up for a internet connection with a company in California at the time I think there were two companies that would sell this to the public and you would have to dial long distance and then you would just get a prompt
No menus and no web
I bought a flat right overnight long distance service for $30 a month and I would play on that at night just fooling around
Then set up my own BBS which didn’t have dial in customers or users it just set up file service that you could request by calling another BBs and it conveyed net mail and internet email
I forgot the names of the software packages I use now but it was a photo setup
I remember when I set up an os2 machine and a friend came over and put an early version of a browser on it and this was the first time I saw the web
My memory is fuzzy but I think this is earlier than any other browser set up except for a text setup such as lynx which we also used to run.
Then I met somebody who wanted to set up a local ISP for dial-up I became an early customer
I don’t remember ever having dial-up CompuServe or dial up AOL or similar
I just upgraded my dial-up and then my ISBN and then my DSL connections as they became available with one or another local isps
I don’t think I ever used an acoustic coupler or anything like that with the internet I think I was up to 9600 or 144 or something like that by the time I was doing a lot of BBS access and then that dial up that went to California for the line command and prompt access
Wow this is a really long time ago
@f00l EarthLink? They were based in Pasadena, CA before they went public at the beginning of the dotcom boom.
@f00l I actually wrote my own code for a BBS in the 80’s called ‘The SmorgasBoard’. It even had text to speech that said ‘Welcome to the Smorgas Board’ but that never really worked because there was a whole lot of things you needed client side.
Sadly, I never had anyone connect because I was connecting it to the home land line and mom and dad weren’t crazy about that. Must have been 1985ish 
I did publish the number on a few other BBSs and would occasionally get a call, but I was never up when those came in
@f00l @narfcake I worked in SF for a small Japanese underwear company and they gave me a PC. Signed up with EarthLink and still have the same user name created when I was super stoned!
/giphy memories
@narfcake
I’m pretty sore this was pre-EarthLink
The company may have been Netcom.
Yeah think it was.
I and a friend used to sit at the PC all night playing on it.
Then he forkbombed them and they shit off the account. And I had to yell at him and call them and beg. But they let us back on. I suppose he wasn’t the only nerd who tried that.
I think the nighttime PD flat rate provider was Sprint. But not sure.
I think my access was first various BBS systems (usually Fido) and Netcom and also BBS
Then also if you knew someone at the local paper you might get a she’ll access for newsgroups that way.
Then that super early local ISP
All this was pre mosaic.
Then along came OS2 and mosaic. And tcp over IP or whatever it was called protocol dial up at like 9600.
Then 14.4. Then wasn’t there a firm of bonded 14.4?
Then 56K (wow)
Then single isdn (64k) but rock solid unlike regular dialup.
Then bonded isdn at 128k
Then dsl. DSL was what used for a long time.
The cable or fiber depending in availability.
Tried Hughes dish service when out in the country it was pretty awful
Finally went with fixed wireless in some rural locations which was great unless the wind slightly reoriented the dish.
Started being able to use a phone browser back in the 2g days with that Kyocera plan phone.
Now usually all I use is 5g. Fine for my purposes.
My BBS was mostly a file supplier by net Mail request protocol. I had early versions of PGP on there, very popular. We even ran a sysop only PGP encrypted local forum just to see if we could get it to work. Yeah it worked.
@capnjb
My memory is slow I guess but seems to be more functional today
The communication tasks were handled by Binkleyterm. The minimal user interface was Frontdoor.
Got/received no calls except from other BBS setups passing along net mail and requesting files By design.
Fun days to be in fido. Because it was localized thevsysops could actually get to know each other and become close friends.
4 of my current very closest friends were sysops and that’s how I met them. Still talk to them at min several times a week, more than 30 years later.
Weird group tho. Obviously everyone was a nerd.
But one guy who was a huge neighborhood watch guy who worked with the police would wind up going to jail for a decade or so child secual crimes (photographed his daughters preteen friends naked during kiddie sleepovers)
He was also one of those “I love blinking text” guys.
Another was into some crazy shit like anarchy and money laundering. We thought it was all hot air until the FBI called us individually to ask about him. He also went to jail.
And there was one with crazy theories about how a claiming specialized form of citizenship that involved not using zip codes or state abbreviations meant that he didn’t have to pay federal income taxes. That one moved away. I never knew what happened with his citizenship and tax ideas.
And some into a few of the crazier health ideas like too much colloidal silver.
But because the sysop groups were small enough headcount’s ot wasn’t all trolling and lies and posturing. Most of them were pretty wonderful people. And getting to know most of them over time was great.
@capnjb @f00l reading your stories got me nostalgic so I had to pile on… people from BBS circles were definitely an interesting bunch… I also know quite a few stories like yours, most involved some amount of recreational drug use mixed in to liven them up. It’s definitely a pattern, my guess is it’s the mix of high intelligence with social outcast culture, just had a high rate of spinning out. Some went to prison, some went to Intel, lol. Amazing no one went to prison for anything computer related, we had plenty of fun on the less than legal side.
My friends and I wrote our own BBS, by which I mean modified some existing one I forget the name of… It was very popular locally because someone in our group was able to keep 5 lines dedicated (or take them down and war dial the entire local city code overnight… sorry anyone we woke up at 2am to a screaming handshake), lol. But with 5 lines you could almost always get on and chat except weekends. I forget the names of practically everything from back then except our BBS which I can still remember the ASCII art for the login page. I had a different handle back then and continued to have it on all the popular sites as they came up, but over time more and more people used it so I gave it up. I thought this one was pretty unique, certainly was back when I created it, but the last ten years I’ve had people steal this more and more too… I’m a bit salty about someone taking it on protonmail.
Anyway, back when ISPs started, I was still on 2400baud, I think the ISP hated me because I was almost always connected (and had an auto reconnect script to call back if it dropped), and always transferring some file…z… Or downloading newsgroups… I had to call up the guy who ran it occasionally to resolve issues, usually with DNS, and I could just tell he wasn’t a fan, lol. I don’t blame him haha. But I did stay with them all the way through all the speed upgrades up to ADSL. They started as a tiny one man show and kept growing and stayed in the game, even doing DSL for years (and of course being way better quality for price than the big names) but eventually they got bullied/bought out when cable companies really started merging and monopolizing. I wish I could remember that company name to look them up…
Goood times.
@bobthenormal @capnjb
One of my friends from those days loved running a BBS so much that during college he lived at home and worked a part-time job
His parents were perfectly willing to pay for his college, but they weren’t willing to pay for his interesting choices of how to spend his personal money
Which he spent running 14 lines, old pots lines, to the house because those were the inbound for his BBS
As long as he paid for it, and the ringers were turned off, his parents were cool. He was a responsible kid, and he made straight A’s.
He’s now an expert in computational linguistics or something like that
I guess 30 years later
—-
If I remember the regional guru for Fido South Central US in those days with somebody in New Orleans, whose name I forgotten
He and a few other Fido net gods paid for T1s to their houses
Yeah, those were some fun times
@bobthenormal @f00l
In the 90’s I worked for a communication company and we had OC-48s from coast to coast. We had all the bandwidth
Siemens actually poached a number of our guys to calibrate lasers for their long distance fiber runs. I wish they had poached me because not long after we were acquired by Worldcom and that didn’t end well 
I got a six month severance package a month before I got married… so no complaints 
@bobthenormal @capnjb
Glad Worldcom didn’t take you down.
I was read and posting to Usenet newsgroups in the very early 80s.
I used to connect to some bulletin boards on my 300 baud modem on an Apple IIe. Always fun if the sysop was on. I think the earliest I recall was probably a really long number on a Compuserve account.
edit - My name in the text MUDs was Order. That was all on really slow dial up through telnet.
@capnjb oh yeah acoustic coupler days. Going to 1200 was amazing. Then my company agreed to give us prepaid line access to San Jose and a 2400 Baud I think the modem cost $2000.
My first AOL name was Bordeaux85. Because if you haven’t had an '85 Chateau Lafite Rothschild you ain’t living
@capnjb if you were affording that in the 80’s, your parents gave you way too much allowance.
@capnjb I was a coxswain on the rowing team and saw no reason that CoxinJosh wasn’t a great username.
my dad had to explain that it could be misconstrued.
@capnjb @jouest Why does that seem like something the dad would have to explain in American Pie?
@jouest Well, my first name is Josh, so now this is awkward
Heh
@pmarin I’ve only had one bottle… 1994ish? was the time frame. I think it was about $125 for one bottle. It was for a very special date with a girl who left me two months later. I now know you can get wine in cans
Heh 
It was pretty remarkable.
@capnjb @pmarin I lost track of this thread and people were talking about joshes so I thought you meant Josh wine and had GROSSLY overpaid.
@jouest @pmarin Heh… I do buy Josh wine frequently. Also J.
edit - Also occasionally J. Lohr. The tenth letter of the alphabet needs more respect
@capnjb @jouest Haven’t tasted enough of Josh to know if I like it. Oh no, it’s getting more into the gutter. It’s just that any wine (CA I think) that normally sells for $10-$15 at Target and Safeway might not be bad, but I can probably find much better choices. Some may be hit-or-miss, it’s true. But usually worth it.
@capnjb @pmarin as a Josh, people bring me Josh wine and J wine constantly. I don’t even drink wine. Everyone who visits gets to leave with a bottle.
Late 70s; my friends ran BBS with dial-in lines. I became “pmarin” which as you see stuck with me to this day. (Until my company forced me to be firstname.lastname, which is when I knew it was time to retire.)
High school had computers but no logins. You needed the key to the back room.
College, PDP-11s and maybe a VAX. We could dial-in to them from “dumb terminals” to do assignments. Then first work also VAX and PDP-11s. My company then did UUNET email so at the time we were emailing each other in field offices around the world. The systems could send us automated status and diagnostics overnight. Over dedicated point-to-point phone lines. Or could work from home with 2400 baud modem.
After all that, a decade later, same story as many of you. AOL, maybe Compuserv. Do you remember needing (at least) 2 landlines because one was for computer… sometimes fax?
@pmarin I’ve been werehatrack since the days of Usenet; that was my nick in alt.callahans back then.
@pmarin thought you were shotgunning it (you could use your phone and fax line combined, with a special modem, to double your connection speeds)
My Microsoft account in 1984, used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot.
@mvromig RIP Lotus Notes
Probably my Slashdot account during the mid 1990’s. I have a really low user ID!
My first non-academic email was with prodigy. I may still use it all these years later
@tinamarie1974 ah yes, the glorified BBS (go arts & crafts board!) that was *P before it became P-net
My first was on AOL. Also IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
Now get off my lawn.
@heartny AOL? Newbie posers!
@blaineg @heartny guilty
Outside of my internet provider’s e-mail address I had a pre Microsoft Hotmail account.
@yakkoTDI I still do!!! Well it’s now Microsoft but I created it in middle or high school.
ICQ was my jam!
@sillyheathen there it is!
@sillyheathen I had a six digit ID. Then some russian guy stole it.
@capnjb Uh-Oh!
Also you have to see if I still have mine. Would be interesting to see how close our numbers were. 
@sillyheathen I’m not 100% positive but 590194 is what I remember
I dialed into a few BBSs, but I think the first place I had a more persistent account was with AOL or EarthLink (we tended to bounce between them on our 1200, then 2400 baud modems). I remember being impressed by the 56k modem and how it didn’t need to be a separate box but rather a card (and how it cost less than any of its predecessors). The oldest account I maintain now is probably my old Hotmail, which I made at the library using their dedicated T1 line some years after that.
I had a shell account on a local dialup Unix box before Compuserve was up and running. I have no idea what the account name was. I also used FidoNet via a local BBS for a couple of its forums. Later, I got a CServe account. Eventually, I moved on to Usenet, and then other Internet resources. I’ve been online since the days when 1200 baud was “fast”.
I miss using Eudora as my mail client.
@werehatrack My Mom used Eudora, but I preferred Pegasus (Pmail). Apparently someone had my email address before I did, so I started getting their awful spam. I had to run my email through Mailwasher before I could open it in Pmail. I eventually had to give up that email address it got so bad.
@heartny Eudora’s support for regex filters made it my favorite, but when the specs for certificates changed, it became a real pain to use. It had been unsupported and abandoned for a while at that point. Qualcomm had more important things to do. Thunderbird inherited the code, but their attempts to utilize the trove were disappointing at best.
And as for “what does that say about your millennial age?”, I’m prehistoric in that respect. Where I came from, there wasn’t any “millennial” unless you were mangling the terminology for the making of women’s hats.
@heartny @werehatrack
Spam
One of my best friends owns his own domain since forever. Personal use only.
During the worst of the spam era he was getting like 20000-40000 spam a day most originating in Brazil for some reason
He had an online server with a crazy filtering system and then a second qmail server and that washed most of it. Expensive and time consuming tho.
Eventually he took steps to blow up his own system and do a better job of just bouncing most of the garbage and his life got much better.
still using my first initial last name (6-letter) aol email address.
Oh gawd, BBS days. Oops.
What happened to ufonet
@tkaos how’s your back doing these days?
My first internet access account was through a small innovative local company named myriad.net that offered dial-up access (be-boop-ba-beep) through an acoustic coupler. Then it got bought out by a local instance of a larger cable TV company and of course rates went way up and customer service went way down. That was probably around 1993. Previously at college we had a very large WAN but no internet for the common plebe. Think departments had access to ARPANet back then.
Was always accumulating AOL floppies and CDs and hunting some use for them. Came through snail mail and even foisted off inside subscription mags such as PC or DrDobbs. Never bit on them though.
With private internet access, think my first user account other than email was with the small-number-of-deals-a-day retail site called OnSale.com that sold mainly electronics and computers and peripherals . (Taught me bad buying habits i still use at Mercatalyst sites.) No idea what my username for that had been.
@phendrick It appears that the onsale domain name has been squatted for a number of years now with no takers.
Email hotmail account.
CompuServe (not sure of the spelling) dial up modem on my Vic20 contacted me to the computer world. Mostly chat rooms back then. Don’t think I had or used email yet . I remember EarthLink as my first email account Then later an invitation for aGoogle email account! Officially Old!
Looks like I fit right in here. My first account after setting up email was made at TCZ - The Chatting Zone, a telnet MUD. This was early 1995. My university connection was only 2400 baud even though my dad had gifted me his 14.4k fax modem after he upgraded. A few years later, when USR was launching the 56k modem, they did a contest to give away 100 units I think. My boyfriend and I both won one! I miss the days of silly internet contests that were either easy to barrage with submissions or with so little participation that odds of winning were actually realistic.
My university wasn’t letting alumni keep their .edu email accounts past graduation then, so I had to jump to Yahoo, but I still have that one 27-some-odd years later.
@Carebear I miss the days of being able to easily submit to contests/surveys. I skewed the results of a few surveys back in the days.
@Carebear @yakkoTDI Oh, so you’re the one responsible for where we are today? Remember those 1-900 telephone votes and you could vote as many times as you wanted but it cost you (or your parents) major mula for each vote? I think early days of some of those TV entertainment contest shows that are still on now started that way.
My first account on a computer/forum/etc. was in the early 70s on my university’s DECSystem10, which was one of the first KA-10 DECSystem10s to be manufactured. (I also used our Univac Spectra 70, an IBM 360 clone, with punchcards, for one course in IBM 360 assembly language.) This was in the before-times–the internet didn’t exist yet and if there was email at all, it was not the standard we (still) use today, but more experimental in nature. I remember buying my first Windows PC, a Gateway, in 1995. (Before that I owned a Commodore Amiga and then a Radio Shack “portable” computer.) That was probably around the time I signed up with a dial-up internet service at 300 baud that slowly increased its speed over time as technology increased. My first forum account was most likely Usenet. In the early 2000s, cable internet was first made available in my town via Cablevision (I think), the cable TV provider. Interesting that in those days, the cable companies seemed reluctant to provide internet service to “regular” people in their homes since they were so focused on businesses. Another example of how times have changed.
@ItalianScallion
Back in high school my dad would bring bags of punch card punch-outs home from work and we would use them as confetti during football games!
…!decwrl!esunix!blgardne
@blaineg I’m sorry, @blgardne. I can’t route that message. My UUCP node went offline in 1993.
I mean probably aol instant messenger but that was just like me and one friend. On our limited Internet time via screaching modems. And playing I think medal of honor allied assault.
FPS on a 56K modem and AMD K6… Yup.
Many will beat me on this of course. Do we attract Gen Z lol
@unksol inexplicably, you might be the youngest person on this forum
@jouest @unksol at least you got some decent specs. Was that post-Y2K? Well K6 was pretty far back there.
Seems like we need gen-anything now. Apparently the stock of goat meat is getting depleted. We either need to get drunk casemates buyers, of which I may be one, or totally unsuspecting passer-bys that come to the adjacent MorningSave from daytime TV shows.
@jouest @pmarin @unksol The K6 was launched in 1997 and replaced by the K6-2 in 1998.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K6
@jouest @pmarin @yakkoTDI Dad took some convincing to get a PC on some black Friday deal. It was a compaq. Had that pretty purple scheme. Yes a k6-2. Just before AMD off their own in house designs I think? I built an athlon when they were kicking intel for the P4 a few years after. Around the GHz war.
Looked like this
https://images.app.goo.gl/6Ec4Qe7P64pfj6WX6
@jouest @pmarin @yakkoTDI and actually that’s a little freaky because I remember installing a Samsung CD burner for him after he bought it. I didn’t notice that at first lol.
Some library material may have been…preserved… For the good of posterity
@jouest well the mid life crisis wave of millennials will be inbound then. Somewhere. I’m… Things… Some days lol. And on the elder millennial end. God help us all
Oh and I was on The Well for a while. I miss The Well.
Last of the reliable online gatherings of hippies and dome builders and WEC type people.
@f00l
Curiously
Fur me … I suspect for so many of us … Internet access was when the local world stopped being necessarily provincial.
Before the internet there was old media. Books magazines film tv radio etc.
Also the digital world was just fun to play with.back when it was shiny and new and relatively uncorrupted and relatively non manipulative.
@f00l
/image whole earth catalog 2
@f00l
/image whole earth catalog
@f00l I LOVED those.
@Kyeh
Yeah I think I wasted decades going thru them wanting all the books and at least half of everything else.
/image the last whole earth catalog
@f00l Remember the little novel printed along the edges of the pages?
I used to browse through those and imagine a kind of pastoral future life (that I didn’t end up living.)
@f00l @Kyeh
Those were a tremendous amount of fun to read, as were the Banana Republic catalogs.
Also had a Mother Earth News subscription for years and years.
@f00l when people made stuff for the hell of it and before anyone was tying to build a personal brand.
First dial-up account and email address from Juno.com. i still use that as my throwaway address for registering for things that may inevitably spam me.
My Yahoo address is old enough that I was able to associate it with my last name as the one without having to attach a number…
@chienfou oh!!! I had one too!!!
@sillyheathen
Have you checked to see if it’s still active?
Pre-Internet, (early 1980’s) Chicago BBS. That was with a home built computer and a 120 baud modem. Early internet days was Hotmail.com, before MS bought them out.
@alnielsen I remember working in telemarketing and this older coworker who knew nothing of the internet is smoking a cigarette at break and was like…
“hey are you guys getting a lot of gigolos or male models or something with these leads? It’s like every other email address they give me is for this hot male dot com…”
@alnielsen and apparently 86’d it; all you get now is Outlook.com
I misread the original q a bit. Only saw the “internet” part.
Stupid me huh?
Online w no internet that I was aware of:
80’s. Various bbs systems (prob mostly Fido but I’m not certain) plus the local paper put some news articles in text format online for their home subscribers.
That was acoustic coupler time.
/image acoustic coupler
@f00l well that’s freaking cool
@f00l @jouest At the time, being able to connect to a computer from your home was pretty cool!
@ItalianScallion @jouest
The internet seemed such a thing if wonder once.
And now …
So much if it us purest shit.
/image shit emoji
Weird memory: The AIM away message that my buddy’s little sister posted on 9/11. I don’t particularly remember her or much else from that day, but damned if I can’t recall that one message exactly.
My neighbor was Bob@aol.com
I’ve had professors with @cs.com
I still have my name @prodigy.net (.com was discontinued)
@pakopako so Im not the only one!!!
@tinamarie1974 They (first Yahoo, then AT&T) tried to take that address away. But I’m somehow still around.
My first handle on HCC (Houston Chat Channel) bbs was Tananda. I was a big Robert Aspirin fan at the time. I didn’t get a personal email until years later.
Houston folks will get this… While trolling the database at work for test ID’s to play with, I found someone with a HAL-PC.org address. Talk about a blast from the past.
@ironcheftoni
/youtube HAL 2001 space odyssey
@f00l actually, in this case HAL stands for Houston Area League of PC users. Back in the day they were a pretty formidable group.
@ironcheftoni
Ok my bad. Thought the link was NASA …
Did anyone in here ever play acrophobia???