I don't recall when I first read about the Internet ..
.. but I guess round 1994. It was a very different internet from the internet today, but the hype had started to hit the mainstream media. I would read about the phenomenon in international magazines at the local public library.

This was also the year before I started at university and a friend who had already enrolled at the place told me that they had a dialup to the internet. Being a bit of a hacker he managed to provide me with a telephone number and login credentials. He told me that I would probably have a few days before they discovered and closed the account.

I was a bit concerned about the legality of the whole thing but curiousity won. So I dialed in from my dad's work computer and got a unix prompt. At the time, the whole graphical WWW layer was still in its infancy, and the dialup connection had none of that. As far as I recall I managed to telnet to some server on Hawaii and fetch some files from there. Also, as far as I recall, the dialup connection was a bit slow, even for its time, so I eventually lost interest.

Once I started at university the autumn of 1995, I finally met the WWW. I could reach this from unix based computers in a dungeon-like room in the basement. The browser was called Netscape and the first stop for finding things was called yahoo.com.

There were also ways to pass around electronic things before the internet.

In the late 80's I would get most of the (pirated) software for my Commodore 64 by mailing 5 1/4 inch floppy disks using good old snail mail. Some of the more hardcore "swappers" would cover the stamps in a thin layer of glue, allowing the recipient to wipe away any ink and recycle the stamps. I never did that for fear of getting caught, but I did return their stamps.

There were also bulletin board systems that you could dial in to. At one point my dad got a modem on his PC so I could dial into BBS systems. First experience of being connected.

Early 90's I had a friend who ran a pirate software BBS in his living room. He had a gigantic an very fragile looking external harddisk with a whopping 1 GB of storage space. He would dial up to boards in the US, and people would dial up to his board from around the world. To avoid paying for the phone calls, they all circulated long lists of stolen AT&T calling card codes, God knows from where. I could go to his place and just pick any software that I liked. Also, occasionally you could chat with the people calling in. I recall one time that I chatted to a chap from Chelyabinsk, Russia -- I had to look it up on the map afterwards.

I have kids these days. If I tell them about these things they will think I am a fossil :-)

Sorry about length.
(spinoza, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 8:50, 2 replies)

When I was little, my grandad would show me his war memorabilia,
and tell stories about how he looted it from recently deceased Germans.
I feel sorry for today's youngsters: a stack a floppies, backed up by tales like the one above, really aren't going to cut it.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 9:09, closed)

So true ..
Still, if there had been any major war in the neighborhood when I was 18 I'm not sure that I would have lived to tell about it.

So I'll settle with the floppies, I guess :-'
(spinoza, Tue 27 Mar 2012, 12:52, closed)