sorry. double post.

it was when my dad just got a pc when i was like 8, and we had bt dial up.. (ive had bt dial up for over 5 years now, but now im bt broadband)

LouisTypo Wrote: How/when were you introduced to the computer/internet? I don't exactly remember my first computer experience... but.. I remember my dad and I going through BBS' lookin' for movelists for videogames and such. Then... the internet.. ahh well.. as far as I can remember, AOL was my first intarweb trip. How 'bout y'alls?

The computer:
Well, in my case, I was totally tormented at school, I got beat up outside (all the time), and I never really had any friends.
So, the logical thing was stay inside.
Well, what do you do when you stay inside?
Play games, and help do stuff with your dad (helping out with his PC and stuff, as best as I could -- I was about 10/11 at the time).

He (my dad) then showed me the internet, so I could look up cheats for games and just surf sites.
Which got me started on the web (I could go on for an hour or so, when my dad said I could).
I enjoyed it, and started to wanting to have my own website.
Then I found this small steps-program on how to do it, from scratch, in one of my dad's magazines (a music mag.).

Well, you all may already know the rest, heh.

The first computer I used was back in about 1989. I don't know what OS it was. My mom was taking an accounting course or something and a computer came as part of the course. We got to play a few games on it, though I didn't know much about computers, nor did I inquire for more information. I remember playing a few games, and writing a poem with some "pretty pictures" on it (a pixelated bordr with cherubs), that I printed out. And I remember my dad smashing it when it stopped working, hehe.

I had a computer class in 6th grade. Still black screens with green text like the one we had at home. There were a few new colors thrown in (ooo red and blue and stuffz! omg!)

From there I mostly used school computers as we no longer had one at home.

In about 1995 my dad got a new computer for business stuff that he let us use on rare occasions. We had one of those free disks for AOL, which we used to try the internet for the first time (omg, codes and stuff! lolz). AOL then charged us like $200 on some hidden charge (hey we were net n00bs), so we ditched them and have hated them ever since, not for their general crappiness alone, but also for that reason.

A few years later my dad got a job as a graphic designer and he got a new computer with his job. He took and hoarded that one and tossed us his old machine. We didn't complain. Somewhere along the line we got 56k dial-up, we had like 3 phone lines, one house, one fax, one internet, and we switched internet providers a lot (anyone remember K-Mart's Blue Light? hehe). A lot of little things happened between then and now.

We have fewer phone lines now. Since the time we moved to this new house I moved up from my dads old 500MB business computer (which had a 2 gig HD added as time passed). To an old, previously leased 4GB HP. I was a pretty big step up for us, heh. My dad still his business computer. The old business computer lay unused (we were using the monitor).

I then got some money from being a Veteran's dependent (my dad's a vet), so I bought the computer my dad had been using from his graphic design job(XP Pro, 1gig cpu, 1 gig ram, roughly 14 gigs, heh, with the old 2 gig HD) and my dad got a new computer(40 gigs, less ram [forgot how much]). My mom has a new laptop which is about how our HP was. My brothers have the HP with an added HD (I don't know how much space) and extra ram that my dad must have gone to the end of the Earth to find (or the same place with the leased computers, heh), and we have Comcast.

I only genuinely got interested in computers in about 2000 when I took a business planning/web design class where I learned HTML. Web-design became like 2nd nature too me. It felt like i had been doing it forever, like my art, and the two sometimes fought for my affection :P. Since then I've been sort of playing catch-up, learning bit by bit about computers, and web-design, getting confuzzled, but still knowing generally more than my offline peers (er, except in offline programming classes. I still don't Visual Basic and Windows and Linux Command Line even though I just took classes...required for my web-design program -_- *sigh*. I still need to find someone on campus to argue with over this screwy web-design program that doesn't even have a class on basic HTML (that's what I get for going to a junior college, heh).

So I basically dabble in a little of everything skill-wise and am a n00b at most, with the exception of HTML(xhtml) which I have progressed the furthest with. There's still so much more to know, more about CSS, JS, and so many things that I've barely even thought about. I still would like the time to get better in things like Command Line so I can, as my instructor put it "Know what to do if my computer boots and all I see is a C prompt")

I think coming here has been a huge wake-up call, seeing all the uber-skilled peoples, especially ACJ who has been a wonderful help to me in introducing me to web-standards. If it weren't for him, I'd still be typing some of my tags in caps, hehe. And there are several more here, whom I hope know who they are, that have been a great inspiration to me with their skill and dedication to computers, both on and offline.

It's been a great ride, but it's far from over, I'm barely up the first ramp ^_^.

My first time on a computer was at my friends house. We were looking for porn

Well, the first computer I used was a Macintosh, I was so amazed by its colors and way of showing things, and I loved that big apple with colors. :P
My first internet experience was in my old computer (the 166MHz Pentium MMX I used until 2 years ago) around 1996 I got a 14.4 Kbps modem (It rox), and I think that one of the first things I saw online was something related to MK3. :P

me too!

Back in first grade, when I had to learn the alphabet with the worm game and the owl game; on the black and white monitors... they were Apple computers.

I got the internet in the early/mid 90's. I got the net when I got my first computer. A Pentium 120Mhz with 16 MB of Ram and a 1.2 GB HD...what a beast. Anywho, I had a 33.6 modem and a mother slow connection since I was way out in the middle of no where. The internet was beautiful back then tho... no pop ups... it was a pleasure to surf.

I don't recall the year or the grade, but I know it was before 6th grade, but they were just simple games and what not. After 6th grade we played 'Turtle' or something. Basically it was a black and white game and you told the turtle:

Move left 4 or something like that

And it would 'walk' for 4 steps and draw a line..basically it was like a crude electronic 'Etch-a-Sketch'..

As for the Internet, sometime in 10th grade is when this thing hit really hard, and we started using it in school and stuff.

I will never forget, the first thing I looked for was Mortal Kombat information

Then pr0n

Intelligent topic Louis, very well constructed.

As for an answer to your question. I used computers for years. I graduated to windows 3.11 for workgroups in 1994 using an early version of MS Works. The Following year in August of 1995 Windows 95 was installed and internet access was granted on a dedicated T-1 line in the High School I was in. I started surfing the net officially on August 23, 1995. I have been online ever since. My first account was for Nintendo.com to access the code page. This was before the N64 came out at that time. My first email account was shoe64@hotmail.com which was created 2 days after I started probing the internet. Shoe64 was chosen, because Shoe was already taken and the (then) Ultra64 was prepping for release. Thus it amalgamated Nintendo and myself.

-Shoe

Man. I remember this drawing program I used to play on back in kindergarten (oh, say, 11 years ago). As for the Internet, I'd get to play on it now and then at school, up until a few years ago when I got it for my own. Go me.

Hmmm, I had old school black and green screen computers at my old elementary school. I got a computer in 98 or 99. THis site was one of the first sites I found.

i have been using computers since the late 80's early 90's, everything from bbc micro's to 286's,386's 486's,pentium upto what i have now which is a P4, My OS's started with Dos, everything was text commands only such as cd, chkdsk, mem,move,copy etc and configuring system files such as autoexec.bat and config.sys no windows, then windows 3.11 with Dos 6.22, then win 95,98,and now XP, i still have my dos 6.22 and win 3.11 discs. Those were the days just a dos prompt,you had to write a boot menu within the config.sys and autoexec.bat if you wanted a easier way to run programs and games i can just about remember how, and i strated using the net around the early late 80's early 90's and i have to say you didn't get the problems you do now even tho it costed a lot more to use.

Terranova Wrote: i have been using computers since the late 80's early 90's, everything from bbc micro's to 286's,386's 486's,pentium upto what i have now which is a P4, My OS's started with Dos, everything was text commands only such as cd, chkdsk, mem,move,copy etc and configuring system files such as autoexec.bat and config.sys no windows, then windows 3.11 with Dos 6.22, then win 95,98,and now XP, i still have my dos 6.22 and win 3.11 discs. Those were the days just a dos prompt,you had to write a boot menu within the config.sys and autoexec.bat if you wanted a easier way to run programs and games i can just about remember how, and i strated using the net around the early late 80's early 90's and i have to say you didn't get the problems you do now even tho it costed a lot more to use.

You should try out Linux.


Yeah, I forgot to say, my first OS was Windows 95, for a short period.
Then moved to Win98, which I stayed on a long time, and moved to XP.
Now I'm using Linux and Solaris, and am moving towards a fully-fledged UNIX environment (probably a SPARC machine to begin with, with SunOS on it).

Sorry for the bump.
It's a shame to let a topic such as this one die out.

C'mon people, what're your first contacts to the internet/computer?

I've had experience using every x86 revision. I didn't particularly like computers until I got a 286dx... I was 5 around that time. My father would trade consultant work for old computers, for my brother and I to play around with. I coded some simple and stupid BASIC programs, like a hangman game. I remember my friends looking at my computer running the hangman game, saying, "What's that game? It looks stupid." :( But yeah, it had dual floppy drives, a math coprocessor that made it pretty much outperform my brother's 386, 30MB hard drive... Windows refused to install on it, even though I had enough space. So I used DOS the entire time that I had that computer.


As far as the Internet, I didn't know what it was until I went over to my cousin's house, who had a computer running Windows 95 (can't remember the specs). My mom bought me a copy of Mega Man X, but I could only play it on his computer. It was great, though. I only went to Yahoo.com, because that was the homepage and I didn't know what to do beyond that.

My first really nice computer was a laptop that my father never let me take anywhere. It ran Windows 95, and I had a bunch of games, like Duke Nukem 3D, Doom 1 and 2, Quake... Eventually the keys messed up, computer started to suck ass immediately after buying it, so we traded it in for a desktop, which I still have at my house (but now with Windows XP). Heh, my first Internet account on it was NetZero... a little while after using it, I had found a program to remove the ads, so I had free unfiltered Internet for the better part of a year.

Then a few years passed, got better computers, blahblahblah, Internet turned to shit, and that's where we are all at now. Ah, memories.

Agilo Wrote: You should try out Linux. Yeah, I forgot to say, my first OS was Windows 95, for a short period. Then moved to Win98, which I stayed on a long time, and moved to XP. Now I'm using Linux and Solaris, and am moving towards a fully-fledged UNIX environment (probably a SPARC machine to begin with, with SunOS on it).

LoL yep i know what you mean about linux, Unix is just as bad, good luck with it