Internet? I remember bitnet, usenet, arpanet, and the (then) ultra high bandwidth supercomputing backbone between universities (late 1970's to early 1980's). Of course, there was all of the bulletin boards we dialed into using our 110 & 300 baud modems! How happy we were when 9600 baud became widely available and the phone line actually allowed it to work (any static on the line killed the bandwidth).

I don't remember when my first http experience was, but I do remember thinking that "this is a lot easier". As I already had experience creating documentation using GML, http was just another mark-up language to learn.

My first machine was a pentium 2, 350Mhz, 64 MB of RAM, 6.4GB harddrive. Thankfully things have moved on since 1998. At the time I thought I would never fill the hard drive, now I have over 2 TB of storage.

At the time I downloaded alot of music using napster at 56K which got disconnected every 1 hour. At the time you could not restart napster downloads, so if you didnt get it within the hour, you had to start again. As you can imagine, my first experiences with the internet were more frustrating than anything else.

I first got connected in 1998 and my BT 56K never connected at more than 44K. I still thought it was pretty marvellous and cannot think now of the three previous years when I had a home PC without connection.

I does, however, take me back to the early eighties when I had one of the first IBM PC's at work and was doing some work on possible networking which I suppose was the precursor of internet.

I always remember the reference to one in the States that was called Ivan - Insurance Valued Added Network.

The first time I think I heard about the internet was when I was taking a Unix course at a local college. The geeks were all atwitter about being able to send an email around the world via a string of email servers. Damn, that still sounds lame. If you had "root access" on the "mainframe" then you were the Alpha Geek - Nirvana.

Meanwhile, I was working as a P/A in an IBM shop where the attitude toward Unix was 'here's a quarter sonny, go buy yourself a new computer'.

I didn't try the internet until a couple years later when you could get access through retail services like Prodigy. Once I did get on, my focus shifted from surfing web pages to downloading binaries off of usenet. I had a second phone line installed and would run my newsreader 24/7 downloading all sorts of cr@p I never used or looked at. I bought one of the first consumer CD burners (Sony Spressa) just so I could archive stuff and get it off my hard drive.

I still download from usenet extensively (and no, its not p0r/\/), but now, even with dl speeds for around 12mb/s, I almost never burn anything. With 500gig hard drives going for $100, what's the point.