The thing that really blew my mind was in University I got into talkers - chatrooms you visit by telnetting into them. Think the one I used to haunt was "The village". I was just amazed at how cool that was and trying to figure out how the hell it all worked and how you could write a server. I wanted to have my own chatroom. For me that was so much more useful and clever than what at the time were pretty static websites.
Now years later I sort of do with Mibbit ;)
I remember fondly telnet'ing from machine to machine (back then, most were PDP-10's running TOPS-10 or TENEX, and all had open guest accounts), seeing how many telnet sessions one could chain before something broke.
And I remember the first ARPANet mailing list, hosted at BBN (the inventors of email), which was about (recursively enough) email clients and mailing lists.
I remember sitting at a TTY (physical teletype--no CRTs yet) next to the IMP (the ARPANet node processor) late at night and getting calls from BBN to reboot the IMP if it hung. We had high-speed 56Kb leased lines to MIT, BBN and a few other local nodes!
FTP seemed like a miracle at the time, and we had access to a data store at CCA down the street which had an IBM data cell, which could hold gigabytes (which seemed infinite, given that our PDP-10 had 256K of 36-bit words and maybe a few hundred MB of large disk storage).
I certainly do miss the days before commercialization and marketization of the internet, when sites were genuine repositories of information and not cash grabs or click-thru whores, and you didn't get 100 times more spam in your inbox than legitimate email even after the filtering....
This is likely because I used (and at one point ran) BBS'. We had FIDONet, CyberCrime net, Usenet gateways, phreaking, and other ways to communicate internationally. The Internet just made it faster and more graphical and allowed you to multitask.
It was like D&D, we all had a certain amount of health and used dice rolls to attack.
Someone even made a whole program out of it based on Final Fantasy, that kept track of health and automatically did dice rolls for you. It even had great music clips to go along with it.
Oh man, those were great days. Making fan sites of Final Fantasy and other games just for fun.
I'm glad my girlfriend doesn't read hacker news or she'd dump me.
But the internet didn't really make a big impression on me until I saw NCSA Mosaic (precursor to Netscape) on a Sun workstation a few years later. I knew the web would be huge.
The first time I connected to an online service was fun. My cousin was over and we had pooled our money($20) to buy the Internet Phone Book. Thick book filled with several thousand websites. It came with a CD that offered dialup access to a company in Portland. Obviously my mom had a problem with long distance fees, so we ditched that before we started.
I had no software to actually do a connection, but my computer came with Clarisworks. Clarisworks actually had a COM program built into it. I got the number for the Tallahassee freenet from my local library. After a lot of trial and error we were able to type in the right modem commands (ADTD... etc) and it dialed up. Woot, we were "online"!
Pretty quickly we figured out about local BBS's. Spent most of 94 and into 95 on those. By this time had upgraded to an actual telnet client. One of the BBS's also offered dialup PPP access. Finally got that working in late 94 and was on the Internet itself finally. My cd from the Internet Phone Book had a copy of Mosaic 1.0, so I installed that. Then we loaded our first webpage. Forget what it was, but it took forevvvvver to load.
Spent a lot of time over the next couple years on BBS's, then MUDs, and a LOT of time on IRC. As I upgraded modems over the next couple years access got a bit faster. GlobalVillage modems FTW! My first exposure to firmware was when my 28.8k GV modem was upgradable to 33.6 via a software update. Talk about me being a newb and having no idea how software could update hardware. =)
* Going on Newgrounds and being utterly awed; submitting something to Newgrounds and realizing that the people I fawned over were actually people.
* Going to my home town's message board and fearing for how incredibly stupid a lot of people sound online. Realizing that having a commanding voice online doesn't make you cool offline and vice versa.
SLEEPY, where are you? I still remember your text files.
Cheers
More though, I remember the fist fights between my older brother and I for who was going to get to use the connection.
*netzero, lycos, altavista were some of the people who offered free dial-up internet.
