How and When Were You Introduced to the Internet? - Page 2

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[ARCHIVED THREAD] - How and When Were You Introduced to the Internet? (Page 2 of 2)

Posted: 10/28/2006 6:37:19 PM EDT

[#1]

Quoted:
Rewind the clock to 1992. I was just starting college as a mathematics major in Southern Missouri. I was interested in computer security back then and endeavored to learn as much as I could on the university's VM system that I had access to as students for email.

I spent a fair amount of time learning the nooks and crannies of the VM OS (as much as my access would allow me anyway) and learned that we were to get something called a UNIX system during the second semester of '92. It ran on AIX v3.2.1(?) and was a much more fertile environment for experimenting and learning how an OS worked.

As I said earlier, I was interested in computer security and had seen a book in the book store called, "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll before. I went ahead and purchased it, read it in an entire afternoon and lent it to one of my friends to had a room in a frat house in which he had a modem that allowed us to dial into the university's network.

One day, this friend calls me and tells me to come over quickly. He had been reading through there and decided to try one of the commands that Clifford Stoll had put into the book. The command was called "telnet" and there was another one called, "FTP" that worked as well.

One thing lead to another and we discovered that our university's network was connected to something called the Internet that the computer staff of the University was striving to keep quiet. We had attempted to use the "Bitnet" network before at school and had our accounts locked because it was strictly for research only. The same approach was used at the University for this new network called the "Internet" but we started using it just the same.

Yes, our accounts were locked again (we weren't doing anything wrong per se just using the network that our computer staff didn't consider was important enough to allow us to use). We had already let the cat out of the bag though and pretty soon all of the CS students were using it left and right. By the first semester in '93, it was accepted by the computer staff that there were indeed academic benefits to letting us use it and so our use was allowed as long as our actions were "responsible".

I remember being completely fascinated by the fact that I was no longer captive to upload and download ratios of local bulletin boards to obtain utilities such as zip/unzip and graphics viewers, public domain games and so forth. It would take another 4 years though before the computer bulletin boards in our area began to dwindle.

I can't tell you how many hours I wasted farting around with "C" programming and TCP/IP on that Unix system at school but it did pay off even though my grades showed that I spent more time in the computer lab than I did in my introductory undergraduate mathematics courses. A very interesting time.

Well, what about the rest of you? When did you first start to use the "Internet"?

1993 at Loyola
Used PINE for email and LINX for surfing(both were text only) hard to imagine now

Posted: 10/28/2006 7:25:49 PM EDT

[#2]

Was on aol using generated cc#s with a new account each month. Found their winsock.dll for download to get on the internet and found irc and netscape. Then I signed up with a local ISP since aol was banned from everywhere on the internet, and quit using aol.

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - How and When Were You Introduced to the Internet? (Page 2 of 2)

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