Was anybody on here actually using the Internet in the 80s or before?

15 years ago

Way back in the late 80's I had a 300 baud modem to connect my Commodore 64 to Prodigy.

Around '94 I ran a BBS (bulletin board system) and was a member of FidoNet which allowed sending email. It was cool.

I'm really kicking myself now because when the internet became popular I wasn't quick to get on. Didn't bother to even learn HTML until probably 2000. I feel so stupid now for not getting involved early on, where could I be now :confused:

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entrepreneur231 15 years ago

''and maybe play each other in video games.''

i highly doubt it
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callseller

15 years ago

I was involved in the bulletin boards at the time. The closest thing to the present day internet at the time.

I also used the linked network (early internet) for stats to do my masters research in the early 80's but it was not called that and there were no browsers.

Michael

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CDarklock

15 years ago

Originally Posted by misterwrecker

My question is if anybody here in the forum was actually "online" at that time and could maybe share some of those experiences.

I ran my first BBS on a TRS-80 using a heavily-modified copy of Ward Christensen's CBBS software in late 1978. It had a 150 baud modem, which I rapidly upgraded to 300 baud, and files were uploaded and downloaded to cassette tape. I occasionally got $5 checks in the mail from people who just wanted me to mail them a copy of the tape, instead of paying long distance charges to download it.

I could reminisce about this forever. Don't get me started.

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misterwrecker

15 years ago

Originally Posted by CDarklock

I ran my first BBS on a TRS-80 using a heavily-modified copy of Ward Christensen's CBBS software in late 1978. It had a 150 baud modem, which I rapidly upgraded to 300 baud, and files were uploaded and downloaded to cassette tape. I occasionally got $5 checks in the mail from people who just wanted me to mail them a copy of the tape, instead of paying long distance charges to download it.

I could reminisce about this forever. Don't get me started.

Wow, you've been involved in IM since the late 70s that's pretty impressive.

They should of just sent those checks directly to your Paypal account....lol

Feel free to reminisce, I would like to hear some stories.

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debra 15 years ago

I didn't get active on the net til 1980 and didn't really start to get seriously involved til '82. Mainly because when I graduated...my job required it.

Back then BBS was the internet. Bulletin Boards kept up by colleges and universities. Google was no where to be found or heard of. If I remember yahoo was the first or at least one of the first. And there was no access to the public domain stuff you can get now. Congress had to get involved to get the liberaries to include thier materials and docs because everybody didn't believe that the internet would really take off...let alone become a household technology.

There was no paypal either. Paypal was originally x.com out of San Fransico CA. It became paypal when ebay needed an integration with a more universal payment module and x.com was the only taker on the deal. All that happened in 2002 and 2003

Well..i'm going to go now cuz you guys have made me feel really old.
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Loren Woirhaye

15 years ago

We had a modem and a tape drive for our Atari 2600 - I think
the modem and drive were for different things. The modem
would let you rent a game and it would keep it in the memory
until you downloaded another one and wrote over it. It was
a great way to try a game we were thinking about buying.

The tape expanded the memory of the machine. I only remember
a sort of dragon-slaying type of game for the thing. It was
a pretty-darn clever game for the 2600.

My brother and I had a BBS around 1982 I think.

You could set up your computer (we had an Apple II) to
dial numbers at random. We would do that to find other
local BBS's - a surprising number of people had them
up.

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TyBrown

15 years ago

I was born in 1980 and I was in an extra-curriculum group in about 88-89. At that time we played around with the internet to do research. I remember getting online and looking up the star basketball player on my brother's high school basketball team through a news website. No pictures as I recall, just text files.

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Mark Riddle

15 years ago

The first BBS I was involved in was back in 84, and I forget what year we got our fido net node.

Later we were the one of the first boards in Kansas City to have "internet email" I forget the name of the board we called every night to get emails.

The Board was named The Quelle, we had 16 lines, and we were one of the test sites for a graphical interface.

Pretty cool stuff, I started selling online in '83 with CompuServe classifieds.

Mark Riddle

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Max Whitson

15 years ago

What were the speeds during that time? 1 kb/s?

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CDarklock 15 years ago

Originally Posted by Max Whitson

What were the speeds during that time? 1 kb/s?

1 kb/s = 1024 bytes/second

1 byte/second = 10 baud (8 bits/byte, 1 stop bit, 1 parity bit)

So when I started my BBS with a 150 baud modem, the speed was about 15 bytes per second, or 0.014 kb/s.

You have no idea how good you have it.
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- raiko 15 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by CDarklock
  
  You have no idea how good you have it.
  
  I always laugh when the kids complain about how "slow" the internet is. It's usually when they can't download a 3meg mp3 in under 10 seconds.
  
  I can't even really get them to understand just how slow it used to be with a dialup and 300 baud modem. It's incomprehensible to them. I do remember when I upgraded to a 56k modem and couldn't believe how fast it was. I remember thinking "this is the life". It's all relative I guess.
  
  The one thing I really wish I had gotten into early on is domains. Man, I could have grabbed some seriously good one word domains back then. I would be on a yacht sailing the world about now if I had.
  
  Thanks
  
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MichaelHiles

15 years ago

Wildcat BBS in 1990. Was also using NSFNet in around the same timeframe at school.

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CDarklock 15 years ago

Originally Posted by MichaelHiles

Wildcat BBS in 1990. Was also using NSFNet in around the same timeframe at school.

Mustang software had some cojones, man. I used their OLX (Off-Line eXpress) mailreader for years. Remember when Wildcat tried to trademark the phrase "The world's most popular BBS"?

One of my proudest moments was when I found one of my original taglines in the OLX install: "He's dead, Jim... but you still have to use a condom." (The Star Trek echoes were not happy with me for that one.)
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Kyle Tully 15 years ago

Me and Al Gore used to trade w4r3z on a BBS.
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callseller

15 years ago

Didn't Al invent the internet?

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Dan C. Rinnert 15 years ago

Originally Posted by callseller

Didn't Al invent the internet?

Yes, but as it grew, all those tubes began to heat up and cause global warming.

Originally Posted by MichaelHiles

Wildcat BBS in 1990. Was also using NSFNet in around the same timeframe at school.

I remember the Wildcat BBS. I don't remember if I used it, but I recognize the name. There was also Spock's Adventure.
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promediasys

15 years ago

Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem here...early '80s, I'll never forget the first time I connected and entered chat, you typed a key, and it would appear about 5 seconds later...all the local bulletin boards ran CNET at the time and it was alot of fun!

-David

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sevenish

15 years ago

I did bbs beginning in '85 or so. IRCs came shortly after that, then the usenet sometime thereafter ... as I recall.

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rainyclayday 15 years ago

I had a Commodore 64 and a LOUD modem which I used to connect to Compuserve and used to talk in the chat rooms. There weren't even that many at that time, it was actually fun. At one time I also used GEnie because they had some free thing going on for a while. I remember it was really expensive back then to be online.

Good times though!
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Liquification

15 years ago

I didn't get involved quite as early as some of you but, i did start in 88 or 89 and thought i was burning up the phone lines with my 2400 baud modem and i almost cried when i could connect to a multi-line BBS system with my new 14.4k modem and talk to someone real time instead of just leaving posts.

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Johnny Slater

15 years ago

I first connected to the local college BBS using my Commodore 64 in 85 or 86. I used that for a few years then stopped around middle of 88. It wasn't until I built my first pc clone in 93 that I got serious about being online, since by then the Internet was made public and I could connect through AOL and have internet access.

I can remember starting a download of a 1 meg file around 9pm and having it finish about 9am the next morning.

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skippybosco

15 years ago

Started out like many of you using a Commodore 64 to connect using a 300 baud modem. Compuserve, Prodigy, Juno..

In the late 80s (86?) started up a BBS based on the WWIV software. It allowed you to network your site with thousands of other sites around the world for shared discussion. It had a call tree algorithm to dial out as far as it could without being long distance to transfer messages back and forth.

It also had a few favorite multiplayer games (Food Fight, Trade Wars, Geopolitik, etc)

My first entrepreneurial venture on the network was to post job posting from my company that had referrals associated with them. I would vet out the best resumes, interview them myself initially to help prep them and then submit them to HR. Made quite a profit on it :-)

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Dan Liptak

15 years ago

C64 represent! C64 basic was the first programming language I learned. I too had a 300 baud and was very excited when my family installed a 2nd phone line, so I could be online anytime! I remember my first PC clone and using procomm. What were the transfer protocols? I remember zmodem, but none of the others.

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CDarklock

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Dan Liptak

What were the transfer protocols? I remember zmodem, but none of the others.

Ward Christensen's protocol was frequently called XModem, error correction was added to produce YModem, it was enhanced by CRC to produce ZModem, and then you had all kinds of modifications... bidirectional ZModem, ZModem with autoresume, HydraCom was another good one. (It could upload and download simultaneously, while you were using other parts of the board.) And then there was Kermit. There were a bunch of others, but these were the only ones anyone actually used.

Here's a blast from the past for you... I wrote the 1993 version of Dopewars that ended up being run through Doorway.exe on BBS systems worldwide:

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/librar...S/dopewars.zip

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promediasys

15 years ago

I remember using the Punter protocol as well...amazing how much this topic brings back...

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Ward Christensen's protocol was frequently called XModem, error correction was added to produce YModem, it was enhanced by CRC to produce ZModem, and then you had all kinds of modifications... bidirectional ZModem, ZModem with autoresume, HydraCom was another good one. (It could upload and download simultaneously, while you were using other parts of the board.) And then there was Kermit. There were a bunch of others, but these were the only ones anyone actually used.

Here's a blast from the past for you... I wrote the 1993 version of Dopewars that ended up being run through Doorway.exe on BBS systems worldwide:

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/librar...S/dopewars.zip

Thanks
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JohnMcCabe 15 years ago

Back in the mid-70s, my high school had an arrangement to get access through a Honeywell mainframe. The interface was a manual teletype and tape reader. The most complicated game I recall was a version of Star Trek RPG, purely text-based.
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- Jeremy Morgan 15 years ago
  
  When I was a budding geek in middle school in 1989, I was introduced to the internet. It wasn't much then, just some gopher stuff but we had a blast. I remember my buddy had a telenet account (probably illegally), and we used PC pursuit to cruise around looking for boards across the US without paying long distance.
  
  When I was in high school in 1992, I built a 386sx machine with 4 megs of ram that was purely for bulletin board service. I got my own phone line and everything. I ran DOS 6 and Spitfire, and I remember having bulletin board users send in money to purchase a full registered copy of Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD).
  
  At night, at 10pm I would turn off the ringer on my parent's phone, and hijack their line for, you guessed it, a second line for the BBS. I remember how thrilling it was as a teenager to have people sending donations to pay for the phone bill, and eventually two 40 meg hard drives to store more stuff for them. I never actually made a profit off the BBS, but I used the money to buy upgrades, and I remember spending countless hours finding text files on hacking and cracking, tutorials on C and C++, and newsletters from boards around the world.
  
  I can remember being one of the first BBS in the Portland, Oregon area to get a FAST 28.8 modem (purchased by the users) and man did that make the site blow up. I remember thinking I was the luckiest guy in the world to have 500 accounts on my BBS. I met up with some other guys in Portland and they were shocked that I was only 16 years old.
  
  Thanks for bringing back some great memories. I was pretty sad when the internet took over, and BBS's weren't cool anymore. I signed up for my compuserve account and used it to snag content for my BBS, but in 1994, I signed up for AOL. I was, like so many others, hooked on the internet. By 1996 my BBS had died a slow death, mostly because I moved out of the house and only about 5 people a day were showing up (on a good day). I reluctantly powered down the machine, and installed linux on it.
  
  Those were great times. I remember using Telix to dial into my favorite spots, and I remember spending a bunch of time Learning "RIP Graphics" (anyone remember that?) only to find out later that nobody really cared much about it.
  
  I remember spending hours on "The draw" creating awesome interfaces in ASCII so my board looked awesome.
  
  Until tonight, I had almost completely forgotten about those days. What a nice trip down memory lane.
  
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  raiko 15 years ago
  
  Not exactly internet related but I have not one but two old Osbourne 1's. They were basically the first portable computer (laptop) and were made in 1981. They are hilarious to look at now. They weigh about 25 pounds, had 64k ram with a built in 5" (yes, 5 inch) monochrome monitor and dual 5 1/4" disk drives. Not only that but they were around $1700 each new. I take them out of the closet once in a while to show people how good they have it with their laptops nowadays.
  
  On the gaming front I also have a Magnavox Odyssey from 1972. It actually has plastic screen overlays that you tape over the tv screen to create the game background. I think pong was its main game but I have some other games that go with it as well. Compared with today's game technology it's pretty laughable but still fun to mess around with. These types of things really give you a perspective on how technology has advanced over the last 40 years.
  
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skippybosco

15 years ago

Here's a blast from the past for you... I wrote the 1993 version of Dopewars that ended up being run through Doorway.exe on BBS systems worldwide.

We're not worthy! I loved dope wars.. thank you for the good times!

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CDarklock 15 years ago

Originally Posted by skippybosco

We're not worthy! I loved dope wars.. thank you for the good times!

There are many versions of Dopewars out there. John Dell wrote the original in 1985 or so, mine was just the first one that ran over a modem.

My version was also the first that named the loan shark (Vinnie). If your loan shark had a name, you were either playing my version of Dopewars, or a derivative of it... previous versions of the game just called him the loan shark.
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"The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." - Lord Dunsany, The Messengers
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linkbeasts

15 years ago

Originally Posted by misterwrecker

I also read that in 80s you can attach a modem to your Atari

I still have my atari lol , I love frogger and pit fall and the smurfs game lol. Funny thing is that atrai still works and is still played now and then

I didnt get online till the late 90's but I did have a very old computer called a wang lol , it stood pretty dam tall like maybe 3 feet ? been forever. Some museum took it off my hands when I put up a free classifed to get rid of the thing for free since I didnt feel it should have been thrown out. Someone gave it to me in the early 90's maybe..... it was huge and a beast.

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Cosmo Demopoulos

15 years ago

1979, freshman year in college, we were connected to the net and could do a few things with other colleges/universities. Distantly remember being required to get freshman calculus homework via email (the word "email" did exist yet, it was called "blitzmail" at my school).
In 1985 or 86 I remember email between different organizations. As well as things like ftp etc., many of which we still use today.

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peter gibson

15 years ago

I was too drunk back then to remember exactly when, but I'm sure it was the '80's. I had a 2400 baud modem and an AOL connection that cost me around 300.00 per month lol! Of course back then it was called America Online.

Sheesh I'm old.

)

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Jeremy Morgan

15 years ago

Originally Posted by peter gibson

I was too drunk back then to remember exactly when, but I'm sure it was the '80's. I had a 2400 baud modem and an AOL connection that cost me around 300.00 per month lol! Of course back then it was called America Online.

Sheesh I'm old.

)

I had the address "jmorgan@aol.com" from about 1994 to 1999. That's how early I signed up for AOL! I was a part of the Portland, Oregon test market.

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CDarklock 15 years ago

Originally Posted by Jeremy Morgan

That's how early I signed up for AOL!

I was fired by AOL in 1993, because Steve Case is a jackass. But at least I got to be there for the "one million users" party.

I used to be on Quantum Link, the online service for Commodore users. They later became AOL. Part of the big dispute that led to me leaving AOL was that they intended to terminate all QLink services, requiring the people using it to switch and start using AOL.

Except AOL wouldn't run on a Commodore. So they weren't just saying "please get our new service" - they were saying "please get a new computer." I thought this was really scummy, and argued quite strenuously that Q-Link consumed a small and ever-shrinking quantity of AOL resources, and the lifetime memberships purchased by Q-Link subscribers like myself had funded the development of AOL. I believed they should stand by the few hundred customers they still had on Q-Link, and support them as long as they still wanted to be supported.

But Steve Case is a jackass, so he was going to terminate it anyway. They did give people one year of notice, but they kicked me out the door just before they made the announcement. (Of course, it did also have something to do with an unofficial patch to Neverwinter Nights... but that's another story.)
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"The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." - Lord Dunsany, The Messengers
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jewin

15 years ago

Regarding the question, did anyone use the Internet in the 80's - that's just a myth, the 80's never existed.

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Dave777

15 years ago

Some of you may be interested in the Computer History Museum...

Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum - Exhibits - Internet History

Dave

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jakesellers

15 years ago

My first direct Internetting was downloading shareware from white sands missile range about 1986, borrowing a friend's connectivity via his university.

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Vince N

15 years ago

I wasn't even born then..

i've heard of many stories though.. even seen some video where a guy boasts of having megabytes of memory in his hard disk or something like that..

makes me feel thankful for living in this age with broadband and all, i am really impatient with even a small delay in loading pages freaking me out

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JohnMcCabe

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Vince N

I wasn't even born then..

i've heard of many stories though.. even seen some video where a guy boasts of having megabytes of memory in his hard disk or something like that..

makes me feel thankful for living in this age with broadband and all, i am really impatient with even a small delay in loading pages freaking me out

Yep, I remember sliding that 20 Mb drive into my TRS-80 and wondering what I was going to do with all that room. :rolleyes:

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GeorgR.

15 years ago

I did BBSing too in the mid 80s...but internet i the early 90s. Started with IRC and MUD (multi user dungeon) and. BBS speed was like 254 bytes/second with those 2400 baud modems

Actually...i THINK my first modem ever i actually built myself and it was 300 baud (bits per second)

Does anyone still remember FIDO net, ZNET..those BBS networks...

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Steven Carl Kelly 15 years ago

Originally Posted by GeorgR.

Does anyone still remember FIDO net, ZNET..those BBS networks...

Yup, I was a big dog on FIDO Net way back in the day. I was co-mod of a 6-line BBS that ran on a bunch of PC's networked together using LANTastic. I remember when we bought the first-ever available 1 GB hard drive so we could up the storage on the BBS. That drive was massive, and it cost almost $1,500.

Interesting story: we were approached by a company that wanted to form a network of BBS's back in the day. They paid to have a T1 installed at my buddy's house where the equipment was all set up, and when all the docs were in place they would add our six-line BBS to their network, allowing users who logged in with them to access our BBS. I'm not sure what happened to that company, it was called something like... hmmm... "USA Net"... no, that's not it... hmmm...

Oh yeah, I remember. They were a company called "America On Line".
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Steven Carl Kelly

15 years ago

I was on the internet since it was just a dot prompt. Before that, on BBS's. Before that, on a TTY terminal that used a roll of paper and had a paper tape punch on the side.

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Michael Motley

15 years ago

I have an uncle that is a university prof. back in ye olden days I was actually on 'arapanet' a couple of times.

In the early 90's i ran a 2 line renegade bbs, played around with majorbbs (mutants rocks).

My first comp was a commodore64. Hooked to your television, if you wanted a hard drive you had to buy a cassette player. The only removeable media was 5.5" single sided, single density floppy. Modem was 300baud. If you wanted to run any kind of program, the computer came with a book about 1/2 in thick of dos programs that needed to be hand programmed everytime you wanted to use them Unless you saved them to cassette or about 500 floppies.

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successify 15 years ago

Yup. Got my first PC in '81 along with my employer at the time.

Got heavily involved in BBS & their chat rooms. 300 baud modem. My bro'-in-law was with AOL and I gave him all kinds of feedback - even @1200 baud, it was freakin' slow.

Put up my own BBS (Wildcat) for the company at which I was in their tech support so that the sales force could download the latest software and patches when they were out in the field. It was a blast.

I remember taking a few classes to learn to use the Internet BEFORE the user interface was visual. Typing in IP numbers and playing around with Usenet was BRUTAL!

You youngins don't know how HARD it was back then. Why I remember walking to school.....
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pur113810

15 years ago

I thought in the 60's they are all like code based operating system wasn't it? I think the ratio of update in the computer and technology sector has improved more comparing to automobile.

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I.M.Retired

15 years ago

CDarklock: You should write a book! The amount of information you have is incredible. There really are so few people that were involved in the early days - I think books and stories such as these would become important historical documents for future generations.

I started online in about 1986 or 1987 - I remember going to a local computer club meeting for instructions and discussion on how to use the bulletin board system. What a hassle!

I also remember trying to figure out some of the early browsers - NCSA Mosaic. What a delight when Netscape Navigator came out sometime in mid or late 1994. When Microsoft released their Windows 1995 software, IE came along and eventually overtook Netscape in popularity. But this was the 90's - not the 80's or earlier.

Sure was an exciting time!

Thanks
1 reply

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Dan C. Rinnert

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Val.S.

I started online in about 1986 or 1987 - I remember going to a local computer club meeting for instructions and discussion on how to use the bulletin board system. What a hassle!

I gave one of those presentations.

Of course, that wasn't the 80's, and it was for my service. That was interesting though. I had started preparing a presentation, then the (I think) president of the computer club told me it was going to be a Q&A type deal. When I showed up, they asked me to start my presentation which would be followed by a Q&A session.

So, I had to wing it.

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GeorgR.

15 years ago

when i had a C64 i was trying to write a BBS program which was supposed to run from datasette. That time i didn't have a floppy yet. Enough said

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CliveG

15 years ago

1978. From a terminal attached to a "network" of university Control Data mainframes we could send messages to friends at other universities. Would not really describe it as email though.

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babushka99

Banned 15 years ago

BBS (lots of 'em) and CompuServe - these were to two main ones. But towards the tail end of the 80s got connected to Fidonet and Bitnet.

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Shane Hale

15 years ago

C64 here and a old BBS Bulletin Board System Looked like a jacked up library CRT lol.

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ecoverartist

15 years ago

I had a TRS 80 when I was a kid but I only used it for playing games. I remember getting a 14.4 modem in 93 or 94 while I was still in junior high but it would only run to 2400 baud because that was the highest level of internet service that compuserve offered in my town.

I thought for a good year that compuserve was "the internet" (remember how they made you go through their browser, their pages, etc.). I remember having an email address made of numbers and it was a big deal to get yourname @ compuserve.com

I wanted to create my own web page on compuserve's "our world" (hahahaha) so I remember going to Yahoo with my trusty SPRY Mosaic and typing in "web design" and getting 3 results. One of them was Yale's web style guide.

I met the man I married originally through IRC

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misterwrecker

15 years ago

It seems like the majority started out on a Commodore 64. The first time I remember playing around with a computer was also on a Commodore 64 at my school when I was in third grade. I think we just used it for games. I remember a racing game I don't know if it was called crash n burn or something with burn in the title and then there was the centipede game and asteroids (Gallaga?).

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Was anybody on here actually using the Internet in the 80s or before?

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