online services

[me just sayin]

I am about to show my age. In the days before the internet became popular, there were several online services where you can access different features from news to shopping. In most cases there was a local number you dial into to get access to the service. It was slow, at first the speed was like 1200 baud and gradually rose over the years. it was a pain to get the modem working in order to get online and sometimes took hours to download one meg files. in addition, it took days to send and receive messages via fidonet or within the specific service.

anyway, I was just wondering how many members here remember those days and what services they used?

 

[TisMyDroid]

The first time I ever used a computer was for a statistics course in college. My previous statistics course we had to manually figure out the very very lengthy math formulas and if you were wrong on any part of the formula, the end result was way off. These formulas could take up to several hours to complete. Being able to use a computer to do the formulas was pure heaven. (Dating myself, this was in the eighties).

Fast forward to the mid nineties when I owned my first computer with dial up internet. Can't believe I could sit waiting for internet results slowly load. I would set a timer to make sure I limited my time on that thing.

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[me just sayin]

first time I touched a computer was in 1980 while station in South Korea. I worked in military pay and it was the only one in the finance office. Used it to process pay allotments and such. before we got it, we had to keypunch everything on to cards and sent to a mainframe for processing.

I belonged to every online service that is in the poll. was one of the first to subscribed to prodigy and msn. I used to do bbsing a lot and ran one for a couple of years. In some ways I miss the days of bbsing, especially some of the games like Legend of the Red Dragon and Tradewars. What I don't miss was the 400+ monthly landline bills getting feeds from fidonet and usernet for the users of my bbs.

I guess that is enough ancient history...now back to the poll

 

[PereDroid]

No comment.

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[IIGood]

My first foray into the online world was with Prodigy. Dad had an account, and at the time I was still in high school and I'd dial up to check baseball-related stuff. Then in my senior year, I caught wind of a local BBS that someone had set up which some of my classmates were a part of...so I would log on to that every now and then, chat with some of them in the chat room there, and there was a game hosted on the board as well.

Then around '96 I started getting on the internet via a local dial-up ISP...I learned HTML and coded some personal web pages, took over as "webmaster" for a local Mustang club for a bit, and eventually hosted a mailing list for a while.

 

[xeene]

Yeah I remember tying up phone lines in 91 with my super sonic 1200baud modem to dial into local bbs. And then bam! Incoming call and I get disconnected. Never was a member of prodigy or AOL, but I do remember free service called net zero.