SO my 1st setup was a 486 dx 66 with {I think} something like 32 megs of RAM, and a 14.4 BAUD modem     lol {Think it was a Packard Bell}
 Running WIN 3.1 on it. there were 2 company's I can remember offering you online service.......AOL, and Prodigy.
I used to use TELEX for BBS's on dial up...I tried AOL...back then you paid by the HOUR on it...each month they give you some free time...lol
 I remember saying this "Internet" thing ain't going to fly...NOBODY is going to pay that much money for it    Back then when you looked for "porn"
You would get a photo....click on it....go smoke a cigg, come back and the image was ALMOST loaded.

 I thought I was the SHiznit when I upgraded to a 56k modem and my processor speed was 100...lol I think I upgraded my mem to 56 megs... and WIN 95    whoohooo  

 So......YOU?

Pretty much ditto to everything you just said.....

my first was a 8086 with the 5 1/2 disk to boot up. DOS, 2Mb memory... man that was a speed demon!  The I upgraded to a 286 SX33 with 4Mb Ram and 40Mb HDD

14.4 kicked ass in online gaming.  The old Neverwinter Nights, DOS based game.  I think I still have my DOS 6.2.2 book around somewhere.

Yeah I had to mess around with DOS the other night when my laptop caught the Vista recovery virus.....I couldn't remember hardly any commands...lol
  I ended up killing it with Ubuntu in my dual boot....

486 acer with a 270mb hard drive ($2000 at Best Buy) ..had a Prodigy account ..Met a law professor in Nebraska online and drove up for a date with her..1993 I think

1991 and I started using coldair as part of my email adddy

DAmn, that is old school....lol

My first personal computer was a 486 sx33 or something like that...

It had a 56K modem.

I've played on older PCs...but my first was a 486.

I was using modems and acoustic couplers to log in to remote computer systems in the 70's

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, upgraded to 16K RAM.    Later, my first online experience was with an Atari 600XL

with a 300 baud modem that could be pushed to a blistering 450 baud.    Connecting to local BBS'es (Bulletin boards).





I think I'm winning at the moment....

yeah, I cn't remember if it was Duke Nukem or what game it was.....it was some shooter, German Nazi game....I spent MANY hours on that...
 I wished back in the day I would have invested in AOL...I really didn't think it was going to last though  

First online set up was a Mac II and a 2400bd modem.

I had a Mac before that; I think it was a 8Mhz processor.

Wolfenstein ?

This was my first computer - the Canadian Hyperion http://oldcomputers.net/hyperion.html

8088 @ 4.77 MHz, 300 baud internal modem.  About 90% IBM compatible...

hahahah oh hell..... Man,  I wish the "kids" today could have exp. the hell we went through back then with 14.4 or less Modems...lol  They would have a new respect for the Internet they have today  

Commodore64, 64k of ram
300 baud cartridge-type modem
tape cassette drive, then a 5 1/4" floppy drive later

YYEEESSSSS!!!  Loved that game!!!!!!!!

I think the only way to top that is an abacus with two tin cans connected by a long string.

Hey man, it wasn't easy before Al Gore invented the internet.

Wolfenstein 3d

I don't believe it supported Multiplayer though. Doom which followed did.
Duke Nukem 3D did as well, but it didn't have Nazi's

Descent was my baby.


my first PC was a 100MhZ Pentium 1 with 8 megs of ram and a 14.4 modem. the shitty phone lines rarely allowed me to connect above 9600 baud though.

My first online experiences though were at a buddys who's house I spent many a night.
His dad had a 386 with every pirated game known to man. (he was an automation specialist  or something at dulles airport)

Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem. I bought a 1200 baud modem off my friend shortly after and thought I was pimp-king-of-BBS-universe.

BBSes over 150 baud modem.  Then went to Genie and then to Prodigy then AOL then the real internet.

Commodore 64 and a local BBS in about 1991

Apple 2 Plus with 3 5.25 inch floppies

IBM PC, circa 1985, dialing into BBSes, at a friends place.

I always wanted a modem for my commodore, but never did get one.

Later, in jr. high or just before I finally convinced mom to buy us a real computer.  She got a no-name 286 based machine from a store in the mall, running DOS w/ a 32MB (20MB MFM formatted to 32 on an ARLL controller) HDD.  I saved my money and eventually bought a 2400 baud modem and a kickass Trident SVGA card with 1MB of dual-ported VRAM!  Both of those were around $100.

From there, it was game over.  Wardialing, BBSes, and tons of 'free trial' accounts through Delphi –– an ISP in the back of computer shopper with a 1-800 dialup #.

This. Moved up to 1200baud ca. 1984 or so and thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Even ran a BBS on a C64.

Compuserve was the best national BBS until AOL bought it and ran it into the ground.

^ same here......i guess I'm just 2nd  

1200 baud modem on a green screen IBM AT hacking exploring Telenet. 1989 or so. I was 6

8 bit paper tape teletype connected to Bucknell. 1973. Junior in HS. Computer Programming class. Roulette program for my final. Tape rolled up was the size of a salad/dinner plate.

Hah. an Altair and an IMSAI S-100 bus computers had to solder together. Remember the kid's computer in the movei War Games? looked like that. 55/110 baud acoustic coupler.

And an Apple ][ (not ][+, not ][e, an actual ][), Commodore PET,  TRS-80 Model 1, a Sinclair (not timex-sinclair), an Altos, and I forget what else.

1979 I had an account on Compuserve and one on The Source. I still have my compuserve account only because when I wanted to cancel about a dozen years ago,  they saw how old it was and offered to keep it live free of charge.

Oh and before AOL was AOL, it was Peoplelink.

ETA - I was 12 in 1979. I carried on email discourses with all kinds of people on the nascent internet, and it was safe. I learned things.

Stupidest mistake was insulting Bill Gates and telling him that the Integer BASIC in the Apple ][ ROM sucked. I was an opinionated child.


ETA2 - I mowed a LOT of yards. I babysat. I bought it all myself. Probably owned $15k worth of equipment before I was 14. I didn't sleep much, playtime with computers was limited by working to get the computers.

First program I wrote was on a punch card machine.
Learn Basic and Fortran programming on a TRS80 with 5.25 floppys.
Did some programming on the Apple II.
IBM PC, XT, and AT.
Apple Lisa, anybody remember?
Mechwarrior on DOS.
8086, 8087, 80286, 80287, 80386, 80387, 80486, Pentium
My first email address was [email protected] (long dead)
When I worked for McDonnell Douglas, we have the first high speed internet connection, and there are no conduct rules.
rec.guns
There are more type writters than computers.
Wrote quite a few college reports with a type writter.
I am dating myself.

First PC, Commodore Vic20, something to do other than my Atari 2600.

First PC and/online, was a 28612 with VGA monitor that cost me $1200 or so, had a 2400bps modem. I remember paying $300 for my Soundblaster card and playing Wing Commander 1.0 on it. Luckily, ExecPC "the world's largest BBS" was local to me in the Milwaukee metro.

Had access to some online access through Prodigy/AOL that was free for people who worked at various computer co's.

In college first internet was vt100 then SLIP, using my UNIX shell account, using TIN as a newsreader, reading rec.guns etc.  In 92 I went to a 486-66DX2 with 16mb win 3.1, and a 56k modem, and VESA localbus ATI graphics with 2mb of VRAM and an NEC high end 15" monitor. Whole rig cost me $3000 at cost from the computer company I was working for.

I cry when I think of the gun shit that money could have bought me pre-'94... however that PC kept up for years, and it wasn't until Pentium 1's at more than 200mhz were common that it started to fall behind a bit. So it wasn't such a bad investment, I used it from '93 until '98, five years of solid use, and acting as a decent not too slow/behind was unusual.

i remember playing that weak robot game on the old trash 80s back in the mid 80s. tape decks and 5 1/4 " floppies.

I had a TI99A first

Then I had a 486 x 66 when it first came out circa 1993?  If I remember right 32 megs of RAM went for $1000. I only had 4 megs.

Then I built 2 identical Pentium 133s from parts.

Oh... I forgot, remember when about 1/3rd to 1/2 of your porn stash had MCHENERY BBS tags on it?

I was on ARPANET in 1983.

But I wasn't supposed to be.

My old man worked for Wang Laboratories. My playhouse as a kid was an old mainframe case....that was the size of a smaller tent.

I played Duke Nukem by modem computer to computer. Circa 1993 or 4

God you guys are nerdy. You seem to remember lots of things about computers long gone.

My first computer, circa 1981 was a Timex Sinclair 1000.



That little  box on the back of the computer there is the 16K (yes, 16 kilobytes about the size of a Windows 95 icon).   That little box cost $800.  It loaded programs off a cassette tape.   It could not both display stuff on the screen AND load stuff of the tape at the same time.    It ran BASIC though and I had fun with it.


Next was the Commodore Plus/4.


All my friends had C64s.  This was the next gen.  Only it wasn't.   It had a better version of BASIC, including some good graphics drawing commands; however, it had NO SPRITES and sucked ass for games.  It did have a built in word-processor on which I wrote many a school paper.   It was my first "ONLINE" setup, as I got the 300 baud modem and called into BBS services.    16 Color PRON baby!


Next after that was a Commodore 128.   I brought that to college and used it for the first two years, 1991 and 92.  



Dont' really have much to say about that.   It was nice to get to finally play some games; it was nice to be able to type in the long programs in Commodore magazine; it wrote decent papers.   Meh, good deal in general.   Didn't really do much "online"


Sophomore year  I just used a 386 we had in the Fraternity House, and that was my paper writing computer (word perfect for DOS baby!) till I graduated.  

 
By junior year of college, though, I was shacked up with a little sorority girl who had a top of the line "Packard Bell" 486sx  ––$ 3000 from Service Merchandise.  


I still remember playing Warcraft 1 and 2 on that sucker (the later after upgrading the computer to a whopping 16 megabytes of RAM and a 486 dx/2 66 processor.  Lets see:  Doom, Descent, all could be done online.   Oh and she had:


Got to grad school and got me one of these with the Pentium 100 upgrade chip:



That's an IBM Aptiva with the VESA slot and space to add banks of extra "external cache"


After that, I've built my own systems –– at least three:   A K6-III at 400mhz with a Voodoo Banshee and Win 95B;   An Athlon 1ghz with whatever GeForce was the rage at the time and running Win 98; and  since 2005 I've been running an Athlon 3000+ with a high end nVidia card desktop using XP, and a series of much much more powerful laptops with dual core processors bought by work.

Wow, kind of a fun trip down memory lane.

Anyone remember checking email on PINE?

lol... the screen was tiny but resolution wasn't bad, for the early 80s.  My eyes were a lot younger back then too.  It was the "not quite IBM compatible" part that was a PITA.

Saw an e-mail demonstration as a Cub Scout in '89, but didn't get my own e-mail account until '97.



Thing that impressed me most about the Internet when I first tried it was all the free guitar tabs.

Old enough to remember using these to connect to compuserve and fido.net and various other BBS's.  Pre online days my first computer was an Altair kit that me and my father built together.

define "on-line"

BBS's - yep

TCP/IP via radio through digipeaters and satellites - yep

packet radio (HF and VHF) - yep

RTTY/PACTOR/AMTOR - yep

then came teh interwebs - yep

BTDT



eta: DRIG via landline... $1-200 long distance phone bills, just to connect to DRIG for a cheezy file