My first connection experience was very very long ago, with Compuserve through a US Robotics telephone modem at 9'600 baud which was very fast by that time. To download a 1Mbyte file was a major infuriating experience. It would take ages (min 1 hour or more) and very often much more because after 30 or 40 minutes the line would go down and everything had to start all over again.
Now 1 Mbyte just comes ina blink of an eye.....usually sometimes if the network and the servers are overloaded we are back to less than 56k.

A few BBS's back in '90 to '96
I was so stoked when I connected to a friends house in '95 or so
and got DOOM working in a PVP mode!
then I was off to the NAVY for 4 years and in 2001 got some
kinda connection and service DSL soon after and the rest is history (currently 12 to 15 megabit DL)
First computer had 540K of RAM, now I have 12 GIGS...
still miss the pioneer days. And Jean I remember making my
own HD disks too! And as for the sound of the modem... my
Dad still has dial up (connects at 31K as of 2 weeks ago when
I was visiting)

I think I first became acquainted with the internet in the mid to late 1990s. At work, we ran UNIX, and one of the apps loaded on it was NCSA Mosaic, THE web browser. I thought it was neat, especially if you loaded a viewer on it, it would say "Spawning Viewer". Later on, for our analytical applications, we moved to HPs version of UNIX (HPUX). I remembered you only got a finite number of colors on it, and if you opened Mosaic on it, sometimes it would steal the red color out of the chromatographic peaks we generate in our work (they would be black instead of bright red). When we went over to PCs, they had no browsers on them, because you had to pay for a browser. So, I installed LYNX (a text only browser).

Actually that helped me out -- one day I needed to download a new printer driver from the HP site, and the site was very overloaded, so that no one with a real browser could connect, because they had to download all the images to open the page. I got in with Lynx, and downloaded my driver, no problem.

Thanks for sharing : ) and who is next : )

Telenet - 1986
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet
Painfully slow 300 bps modem.


Internet - 1995
My co-worker said it was free. Ya right, you gotta pay to get access.
A quick 2400 bps modem.