I don't remember the exact year, but in the 80's I was working as a FORTRAN programmer at my college back in Germany. Mainframe environment. Did a lot of fun stuff over the EARN (aka BITNET in the US). One fun thing was to sneak from that mainframe network into another network dominated by Unix servers. Strange environment called ARPANET, or sometimes also DARPANET. It came up before on this thread - the same net now known as the Internet, but a little bit more exclusive at the time. They had a server at a certain, umm, "range" in White Sands, NM. Downloaded a lot of fun games and utilities from there.
Those were the good ol'e days!

If I remember:

1990 University System
1992 Installed an Ethernet network at work. Dialled into Unix boxes.
1994 Had my own Compuserve 3.0 Internet account on a 486 laptop running Win 3.11


Patrick

Oh I remember it was back in 1998. I wasn't the first one on the Internet in other words. I had a computer (a 486) since 1992 or 1993 if I am not mistaken but we could not afford the internet up until 1998 when we also bought a new computer (a Compaq 400MHz monster :) ).

So, if I am not mistaken we used a 56K modem directly and already in the year 2000 we were one of the very first in our city to receive an offer to try ADSL 512Kbit/s. Wow, what an upgrade!

This should be posted here Hands-On With the IBM 5150, Thirty Years Later

And you . .

If you count the Arpanet, then my first encounter with the Internet was 1972 at the University of Illinois. I remember playing war games at 3 am, on a green screen terminal against people at different colleges!

I had an IBM PC from work in 1981, and the first computer I ever bought for myself was a Commodore 64 in 1982. I now have twenty computers in my house today.

On 1/23/1993, I wrote my first check for internet service. $116.55 for 1yr of service for Prodigy.