I don't go back as far as some of the folks here, but I think my first ever sip of the Internet was maybe...'90 or '91? The Web had been invented but wasn't really something people used for a few more years yet.

My first ever connection to the Internet came from a local, but large, Bulletin Board System that prided itself in lots of dial-in numbers, large file and message board collection and good FidoNet service. You could dial-in for 20 or 30 minutes a day for free and a couple hours if you paid something like $10 or $15 a month.

At some point they thought it would be cool to provide an internet email gateway for a couple dollars more which I excitedly paid until I realized I knew literally nobody else I could possible message with.

It's hard for modern users who didn't see the emergence of the Internet as basically the Web and highspeed always on connections. Before that time it was expensive, slow, and highly geared towards universities and whatever people could personally offer. Most of the university stuff I knew about were sites run by enthusiastic faculty or students who had found an unmonitored corner of a server somewhere on their university network and put up various interesting collections of things they had pulled together.

Maybe around '91 or so my friend's father got a very limited usage dial-up shell account from a local ISP that dropped you into a shell for 30 minutes a day. You could use various text-only tools to send and receive email (we never did since it was a corporate account), and a couple megabytes of diskspace we could use to stage files we ftp'd down from other sites. Then we'd login over the next couple days and use most of his account time to download whatever random thing we had found somewhere.

Gopher was also a common tool that made getting around and finding things faster, if and only if you could find a well maintained gopher site. For those not familiar with gopher, it was a bit like an easy to navigate text-only hypertext system that predated the WWW.

I think it was in '92 that I was selected by my county to participate in a special sponsored program that would give a few students at each school a dial-up internet account on the local mainframe with 30 minutes of time per day. They had no idea at all what we'd do with it and had rigged the accounts to first drop into a school-system gopher screen. It took a few days to figure out how to kill the gopher client and get back to a shell. I think telnet and ftp were also installed and I was able to connect to various sites I knew about (and kept a little notebook with information about).

One thing I remember distinctly, having been a heavy BBS user was not really understanding that I could connect to remote servers and it was using a different information network than the phone system to do it. What this meant was that if I dialed into a BBS in a different state or country I'd get a huge phone bill. But if I dialed into my local ISP, and then telneted to a server in a different state or country it didn't matter. That first month waiting to see if we'd get a bill for all the time I spent connecting to servers all over the world was terrifying (as was the relief when the bill didn't arrive!)

It's important to remember that at this exact same time BBS usage was at its peak and there were several very large and competitive BBS services around: America Online (did not provide Internet Access originally), Prodigy, GEnie, CompuServe and a handful of more local offerings (like I mentioned above). We never really had the money for these services, but a few of my friends did and they were interesting in different ways, often trying to figure out how to get around the very low dial-up rates of the time (typically 1200 or 2400 baud). For example, Prodigy offered a vector-based graphical interface with nice splash screens for various games and services. It took a while to load each screen, but they charged you by the minute so they didn't care.

At some point, the hobbyist BBS scene also tried to provide graphical interfaces. There was a handful of various client/server software setups available, often with a text-only fallback. I remember a the names of a few pieces of software, Excalibur, there was an interesting Macintosh only system I think called FirstClass that had a special transport layer protocol and so on. The reason I bring this up is that when the WWW first really started appearing it wasn't really understood that this could become "the interface to the global supernetwork" and it was just assumed that some kind of graphical interface to local systems was a natural technological evolution of BBSs and that they would continue to compliment if not dominate internet access.

I think around '94 or '95 it started to become pretty common that you could just find an ISP in the phone book, call them up and get some kind of "getting started" software kit or a dial-up shell account. The getting started kits usually had some kind of dialing software, a TCP/IP stack (OSs didn't ship with them in general at the time), Mosaic and some kind of Email client...all on a couple of floppies! Usually with some large number of minutes of time per day your account would connect for (or a per minute charge after). People used to keep usage logs in notebooks to make sure they wouldn't blow their connection cap and either run out of internet or end up with huge monthly bills.

The transition away from BBSs and onto the web happened very quickly after that and I think coincided neatly with the transition of MS-DOS users to Windows '95 (which didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack!). You could kind of feel BBS's start to decay right around this time as users just started moving wholesale onto the web.

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