The Steve Rubel Stream

1996. I was an undergraduate student studying accountancy. The internet wasn't actually available in department's computer labs - you had to go to a single computer within the library to access it!!! Seems so bizarre now - it was a text-only browser (presumably to stop people surfing non-work sites), and the first site I looked at was a fansite for Britpop wonders, Oasis, who were in their heyday at the time.

When did I discover the Internet? Gopher-1993. after 6 years of email, a repository of ideas and exchanges was a revelation.

I don't ever recall not knowing of the Internet. In the 70s my mother worked in the accounting department of a company that had a "computer room" (took up a whole room... a big room). In some general sense, I knew it connected to other computers using a phone line. I don't know precisely when the actual term "Internet" came into my vocabulary.

My first Internet connection was a CompuServe account for my Commodore Vic-20 for Christmas in 1982 or 1983 (not sure?). Around the same time, the movies TRON and War Games came out, and I had a subscription to OMNI. I was 12-13 yrs. old. The Internet was everywhere in Pop-Culture. I had friends that had Atari 400s and 800s, Radio Shack TRS-80s, Texas Instruments TI-99s and various versions of the Apple II. But the Internet of the day did not live up to its hype. It was a brain-numbingly slow text-based command line world. I was more interested in graphics and games. Working with a couple of friends, I designed a few games for the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 back in the mid-80s. Briefly experimented with the Amiga before moving onto the Mac in the late 80s. In the early 90s I played with early versions AOL and Prodigy, but was unimpressed.

I didn't get involved in developing for the Internet until 1995 when I designed the interface for Morgan Stanley Trading's first Intranet.

I was working for a small daily in Kansas in the early 90s, it was there that I ceased to be a net-virgin. A huge world of research possibilities opened up and contributed greatly to my overall bliss and insatiable appetite to know everything. By 1994 I'd talked a small group of family/friends into launching an ISP. I think the farmers and cattlemen thought we were crazy and that it made it about 5 times more attractive.

1995 - when I asked my CFO (and head of IT) at the time if we should get a connection to the world wide web and maybe a web page. His answer: "No. There is way too much information there. Nobody will be able to use it anyway."

I discovered the Internet in 1985 when it was still - though just barely - the Arpanet. It was a religious experience that I felt the second I typed in "telnet" and made a disk spin half a world away. Even at 300 bits per second, even though I was a cattle rancher with little computer training, I knew that this thing would one day become the nervous system that would one day lace us all into one Great Mind. It's tracking just fine...

Used compuserve for several years in the late 80's - first real exposure to the internet was in 1991 a Cal Lutheran University - computer lab machines had Netscape and internet connectivity -- soon after got approval for internet access at work to replace compuserve.

It was 1983. I was working for Symbolics in Cambridge MA, which was a spin-off from the MIT AI department. We used Arpanet for MAIL, ftp and so forth. It was lot like magic back then to me and darn exciting. We had offices with Symoblics workstations that provided a graphics user interface, Windows and a mouse - for $80k and the LISP programming lanquage. Our offices used 9600 baud modems. We thought all that was pretty edgey at the time. Anyway, all that technology made a huge impact on me and provided a base of understanding of what was going to happen in the 90's as Arpanet because the Internet and the emergence of HTTP servers and graphical browsers became available.

First discovered in 1993 when we were introduced to mosaic browser and was in awe of blinking text on a grey background

As hard as I try… I don't know!! Must have been in the mid 90s. All I remember is the annoying sound my modem made. And the relief when I actually could connect. I’ll never forget that sound!

It was in 1994 soon after I had went to college. I can't remember much about it except Yahoo!

I remember a university lecturer returning to the UK from the US showing us what he and his engineering colleagues had been playing around with in 1994. We were all pretty non-plussed. But then soon we started to discover we could read papers from around the world online, and then get in touch with the papers' authors and suddenly it became a lot more impressive.

Hey Steve! Thanks for linking my FF conversation. :) All you guys commenting here - why not comment in FriendFeed directly? We'd love to add you to our FF family.

@Tad, agreed.

Late 80's, early 90's I read an article in Mother Jones magazine about this thing, this network of computers, called "The Well" out of San Francisco. I'd just bought a used Trash80 from a tape editor in the newsroom where I was working as a desk assistant. It came with acoustic couplers, so I set up the acoustic couplers and connected to other people for the first time, over a phone line, that way. The Trash80 had a screen that was barely an inch high. You could read about one line of text of The Well. I couldn't be bothered with enduring anymore of that technique on the Trash80, so I went out and bought some kinda desktop Apple shortly thereafter, but I knew the moment I connected to someone else's server that everything had changed. Everything.

I had AOL for email in '94, but didn't really discover the WWW until '97, which is also when I started IMing. Then we didn't get a computer that could handle the AOL with the browser until '98, so the only time I used it was at the library! The first website I visited was Pleasant Company's American Girl site (hey, I was 11). I built my first website and first blog from scratch HTML using Geocities in '98 or '99. I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

January 1996 (500.000 internet users in Spain per month, all through dialup. No google, of course). I visited the web site of Musee d'Orsay in Paris (www.musee-orsay.fr). I found them through Yahoo.com... or was it altavista.com????

I first used the Internet around 1994. Our company had only about 6 computers that could actually connect to the Internet. One of the first things I found online was the Project Mercury Robotic Excavation project (http://www.usc.edu/dept/raiders/) at USC. You can still see my name in the operator logs.

I don't remember the year. I used BBS, Commodore & Amiga, Lynx browser. Nostalgic post: http://bit.ly/OWJCT

I first discovered the internet while at Illinois State University sometime in 1995. I was in the computer lab (nobody has those anymore) doing a paper and noticed that the computers were able to connect to the internet and there may have been a Yahoo shortcut on the desktop because that is where I ended up first.

I remember searching on some of the things we were into at that time and being totally suprised that there were web pages of pictures of people doing burnouts/spinning/smoking the tires in their camaros from all over the country just like my brother did. I promptly saved them to a 3.5 inch floppy disk and brought them back home to share.

1993 - Gopher, actually paid for University "programming" Gopher sites for Gov agencies. But wow, when Mosaic came out and I saw images - LOOOOOOVED it.

The Microsoft Network (MSN), 1995. I remember initially thinking that the Internet was a complex maze of folders, which was as Wikipedia describes the early MSN, an "artificial folder-like interface integrated into Windows 95's Windows Explorer."

Those were the days.

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