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Geek Stuff : When I Started Using The Internet
My dad first showed me the Internet in mid-1994 one day when I stopped over to print out some letters on his PC. He had an account on a local BBS, Flatland Center, that had a connection to the Internet.
I finally signed up for my own account on Flatland BBS on January 28, 1995. Since I worked days, and my wife Erika worked nights, I would get a 6 pack and hang out online browsing Usenet newsgroups reading and posting and I also spent quite a bit of time in the chat room. It was a pretty cool thing.
I didn't do much "web browsing", since at the time there wasn't even a small fraction of what is on there today (no eBay or Amazon.com, and Yahoo! didn't have a domain yet). I was also using a terminal program on a DOS based Compaq 386 20mhz notebook to dial in to Flatland (at 2400 baud) which was VT100 text based, and the UNIX web browser was Lynx and had no GUI (graphical user interface).
A few months later I had purchased Windows 3.1 (on floppy, in the box, from the local CompUSA) and installed it over the DOS system my old Compaq notebook was running. Windows 95 wasn't out yet, and my notebook wouldn't run it well anyway. But once I installed Windows 3.1 I decided to check out America Online since I knew some people that had it, and I wanted to post some ads for a business thing I was doing at the time.
After a while messing around with text based terminal access through Flatland BBS, and a couple of months or messing with the AOL system, I decided to get a "real" full Internet account at Primenet. No BBS or AOL stuff, just a straight connection to the Internet. Woo?
I also played with CompuServe for a while in early 1996 to check out the forums and marketing opportunities on there. I ended up cancelling CompuServe after a couple of months. It got kind of weird having accounts at 3 or 4 Isp's at once.
I even paid $49 bucks for a copy of Netscape 2.02 in June of 1996. I was also using it for business things I was doing so it was a write-off and I didn't mind paying for it.
Then in September of 1996 I got my first geek job at Getnet, and have been practically living on the Internet ever since.. YAY
