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"What made you get connected to the 'net?"

I expect most of us couldn't imagine life without our Internet connection but what made you think 'I really need a connection to this Internet thing'

At the time I was a student and persuaded my folks to let me connect a modem to the phone line so I could e-mail myself work I was working on to my e-mail address at the sixth form college I was at so I didn't have to carry floppy disks around.

So what made you get connected?

I expect most of us couldn't imagine life without our Internet connection but what made you think 'I really need a connection to this Internet thing'

At the time I was a student and persuaded my folks to let me connect a modem to the phone line so I could e-mail myself work I was working on to my e-mail address at the sixth form college I was at so I didn't have to carry floppy disks around.

So what made you get connected?

Sex, drugs and rock'n roll

DL wrote:
Sex, drugs and rock'n roll

I wasn't asking about your browsing habits DL :)

Because my Dad's old Carry On calender could only take me so far

See ... even Alfonse agrees :¬)

Great calendars Alfonse

If I recall, when I first got the internet pictures like those would be in very low resolution and take about 6 months to download.

I first had experience of the internet at Uni with bulletin boards (Fortean Times) and decided it was good enough to install a 33.6k modem in the flat, though it proved pretty expensive being on there for too long.

That eventually turned in to 56k then 128k ISDN line. That line moved with me to my house and then eventually became broadband, which has slowly increased to the amazing current speed of just less than 3mbps. er...yey.

One day the country will see sense and strip BT of their over-reaching powers and get other companies to lay their own cable at greater speed and over a decent amount of the country rather than just in the middle of towns.

The thing I love about modem internet is it was always regarded as slow and awful. I have great memories of sub-1gb hard-drives, Voodoo graphics cards, single core processors, but when I think about the noise and the lack of being able to use the phone and ridiculous wait times for downloading a single song I just want to cry

pb wrote:
One day the country will see sense and strip BT of their over-reaching powers and get other companies to lay their own cable at greater speed and over a decent amount of the country rather than just in the middle of towns.

With this I can agree :¬)

@Alfonse ... that's what I like and remember ... at the edge of technology ... two hard drives (total 11Gb), Rage II graphics card and then Voodoo3 16mb coupled with AMD K6-2 ... 'trifick stuff' and also the memories of trying to log into AOL with its 'golden' key logo....ouch painful!

I still have the old RS-232 US Robotics V92 modem I used to use (not sure why I'm keeping it as last two PCs didn't have an RS-232 serial port) but a couple of weeks back I did have to use a dial up modem at work to test our network's external connectivity and the office test ADSL connection was down,

It was so slow it was painful,

screech, screech, dong, dong and then waiting for the page to load.

That sounds 'quick' to me ... but perhaps Hmmm might enlighten us further.