I just found a letter from my first ISP dated 9th December 1994 telling me my username and password. Back then I only had DOS so it was all good fun.

I also found a booklet giving a brief history of the internet.

So when did you get online?

I'm pretty certain it was around August of 1997, so not quite ten years for me. I'd had my computer since '94, but took awhile about getting online. I had to buy my modem when I was in England on holiday, because they were much more expensive in Spain (and not available anywhere close to where I lived), then get the local computer wallah to come and set me up. I had Windows 3.0 (or maybe 3.1) when I started.

In December of 1994, my husband was so excited about being able to access the internet. Unfortunately, he never got to...but that's another story.

I myself didn't go online until December of 2004 - some ten years later. What an amazing tool it's turned out to be.

We bought our first computer in 1995, and was online less than six months later. That particular system was an 75MHz Pentium, and had an 850MB hard disk. The newest system we bought is a AMD 3500+ (runs comparable to a Pentium 4 3.5GHz), and has an 80GB hard disk, and was 1/5 the cost!

Like spanishliz, I had DOS 5.0, and Windows 3.11...boy does that bring back memories!

I bought my computer back in February of 2005, so that is when I experienced the internet for the first time!

It must have been around 10 years ago. I still have nightmares about loading Windows 3.1 from 14 floppy disks.

I was virtually computer illiterate until April, 2006, when my employers put in a computer where I work so we could do DMV registrations. They allowed me to do my thing, once all the work was done. (And I always did extra work to earn the privilege.) I posted my first story, and was hooked.
When the store was sold in December, 2006, the privilege went with the old owners. (*sniffle*) My daughter gave me her old computer for my birthday in December, and on January 16 of this year, I finally went online at home.

I feel old. When I first installed Windows I had to have my RAM increased from 2mb to 4mb and I don't think it had a version number! This was on a 386 which I sold a few months later and bought a 486.

Certainly when I first installed Netscape (for there was no IE) it had no version number and the default page colour was grey. You had to specify in your html coding to change the background colour.

I first went online in 2002 when I bought a Tiny laptop and was so terrified of things going wrong (I had no idea of what I was doing) that I took out a 5 year guarantee/assistance package which cost, unbelievably, £475 extra! I could buy a new one now for that. However, all is not lost, as next month the 5 years is up and as I never contacted them (very smug and pleased with myself expression here) I should get it refunded. However, one slight problem - Tiny went bust and it's taken me the best part of 6 months to track down a means of reclaiming this, but I do think I've nearly got there....

I got my first computer in 2000. I guess I figured I would wait to see if the Y2K bug would hit *sarcasm*

Actually that's when we could first afford it. I remember using Napster for the first time and ICQ.

Good times. I hated dial up as much as I do now though.

I don't know if it's considered "online," but in 1986 my sons had a Commodore 64 and we used to go on local BBSs (Bulletin Board Services). We had to load programs from clunky tape cartridges.
That summer there was a test project called "The Victoria Project," by the telephone company, which was live chat in a radius of about 50 miles from here - fun - my screen name was "Trivia!"
I began using the current form of the internet in 1996, but for all that I am still a novice.

We bought our first computer in 1990 (The year we got married). It was quite cool because not many people had one in South Africa at the time (at least not in our town). We started going online in 1995 when the local internet company was looking for people to test out the internet so my husband signed up (He was a computer programmer at the time) and we got free internet usage for a year. He taught himself so much that he later became a webmaster. To cut a long story short we have had internet ever since and for the last year we have a DSL line and I can't imagine how we survived with dial up. How quickly we take things for granted.

I used the Internet occasionally at work during 2001, but the machines were amazingly slow. One of the sites I discovered was Fun Trivia.

I got a real computer at home in October 2001 and one of the first things I did was to register here. To get on line I had to get one of BT’s new-fangled telephone sockets installed: I must have been one of the last people still to have an old-fashioned hard-wired dial telephone.

TW, that was not really helpful, but it did bring a smile to my face on a very wet and humid day. Thanks.

It was either 1998 or 1999 and I'm still learning, but I can't remember what I did before the internet

We 'got online' on Halloween night, 1997. Picked up our computer early that day and our friend came over to hook us up as we had no clue as to what to do. It has been almost 10 years and I still have a lot to learn It was an IBM and we paid around $1,300.00 for it. Grandkids use it now for their games. We bought a Dell for a few hundred bucks a couple of years ago. Just finally switched from dial-up to dsl last month. Can't believe how much faster it is.

Have A Good One

I left High school in 1990 - we didn't have the Internet then. I've heard about the Internet, but we didn't have our own computer - Mum and Dad thought I'd spend too much time on it (I really can't think why they thought that! ) but my local library got Internet access in about 1998/1999. Then in 2004 (January), we got Internet at home. And if you look at the date that I joined Funtrivia - this was the very first website I joined as soon as we got Internet at home

Would have been April 2001 I guess, just going by my registered date here that is. I know this is one of the first places I ever got to and joined up on.

I've moved a lot, so if I want to remember when I dd something, I just remember where I was living at the time.

So, it was late 1993/early 1994. On Compuserve, with a 386. Yikes. I couldn't do much then, but by late 94 I was definitely hooked and going all over the place!

The internet used to cost an arm and a leg here, you had to pay a monthly rental plus the time you used, and when I used a friend's the bill was phenomenal. I used the library or anywhere I could find from about 1997 until I arrived at home in early 2000 to find my neighbour had left an old computer in my room so I could do his accounts from home.

It took a few days to find an ISP that worked, but at least they dropped the monthly charge so only paid for the calls I made, and the day it did the first thing I searched for was trivia. Still here 7 years later! And thank goodness for broadband.

1992 or 1993, I believe. Back then we could use 'gophers' as search engines. Anyone else remember those? Also, the first browser I had was text-only.

I think I still have a 3.5 floppy that has Netscape 1.6 loaded on it - yup, fits on one disk.

I remember my friend had a Compuserve email address that was all a bunch of numbers - what was that company thinking?

Well CompuServe is still out there. I still use it for some of my email. Like in Fun Trivia! It is now owned by AOL.

It's been so long, I cannot even remember when I first got on line. Of course I'm lucky to remember that our first computer was a KayPro II way back in the early 1980s!