I just miss the sound of a dialing 56k modem.

Back in college around 1992 I remember a friend of mine dialing into the university BB system and dowloading all sorts of stuff. I didn't get my own dial-up account until 1998 or so. A blazing 3KB/s! Then I went to 1Mbps DSL and about a year ago we got a free upgrade to 5Mbps.

My dad got a modem in 1992. I was 10 at the time and watched in awe as my father accessed "EVERYTHING" over the net.

Of course I never got to play by myself on the net until much later partly because it was rather expensive hogging the phone all day.

Seems like a lifetime ago to even remember. Must have been 1995 ish. I am pretty sure it was a Packard Bell and did the dial up with a local company. Yup, had the 3 or 4 numbers you could choose from and hope they weren't busy!

I ran Seti and was sooooo frustrated at how slow it took to get on the internet, for the pages to load, and then for the communication to the server to upload the finished WU and download the next.

I don't know how many times I would have to retry downloading windows updates. Of course everytime it would fail over and over and I would just about want to shoot myself so I wouldn't have to ever feel like that again. I would download programs to help recover the connection and keep downloading from where it broke off, and finally would get the whole stinking thing updated. I mean I could throw a tantrum and just about want to smash the whole thing to bits, but didn't want to ruin Seti. I just loved that program and it was the main reason I even had a computer besides email.

I'm much more calmer now thank God

Interesting thread JP.

Way back around 1998 my company had an internal email system. It was not called email, but I don't remember what it was called. It ran on terminals connected to DEC mainframes. The company had plants across the US and we could send email to other divisions, though I rarely had reason to. I once sent a message cross-country to corporate HQ and was amazed that I got a response back in 1/2 hour. The system could send "external messages" if you knew how to do it and actually had an address to send to.

I later had access to the ARPA gateway computer that had this neat program called FTP that could access files on remote computers. It was just as easy as using DOS. It was so fantastic - I could transfer about 10 MB from Los Angeles to San Diego in only 1 hour.

I later attended a presentation about some new program that read special "markup languge" and used "hypertext" to create a graphical view that one only had to "click" on hyperlinks or pictures to go to new pages. It was alot easiler than the command-line interface on FTP and reading countless README files in each directory. They were calling this the "world wide web". The program was probably Mosaic, but don't remember any more. I thought it would never catch on.

I did access a remote computer around 1978 using an acoustic modem to play ADVENTURE, and accessed the university computer with the amazing direct connect 300 baud modem in 1981 or '82. However, that was not the internet.