Switched to Apple / Mac

My first days on the internet

February 2nd, 2006

I was working at a retail computer in Millington, Tn when an 18 year old customer started telling me about the internet. I believe the year was 1994, but would be at loss to pin down a date. I had already had some exposure to the internet through a few Bulletin Board Systems that I contacted but there was little compelling content during this period. The customer was telling me about the world wide web and in particular about a program called Netscape.

During my early exposure to the internet I had used Gopher, Archie, Finger, Telnet, and FTP in the text based world that existed at the time. While it was fun to delve into a mysterious unknown, I soon learned that the novelty wore off soon. Hopping around locations via Gopher yielded some very dry and uninteresting material. I’ve never developed a love for particle physics or astronomy and this was the kind of academic material I was turning up. So when this customer described a new graphical internet to me, I was intrigued. The customer was envangelizing it to the highest levels and assured me that he would bring me the software on a future visit.

True to his word, he showed up again a day or so later with disks in hand. He had told me that he used a company called Concentric Research Internet Services (CRIS) to provide him access. He told me they had local dial up access at 14400 bps (standard at the time) for $20 a month. The service allowed unlimited usage for the monthly price. Now this may not seem like a big deal at the current time, but in those days, it was a great bargain. Services like Compuserve and AOL were still charging hourly access fees and their internet offerings consisted mainly of e-mail. The ISP moniker was still yet to come.

After a thorough tutorial from my customer, I took the disks home and started the process of installing the necessary programs. One of them was Trumpet winsock. Although dial-up connections still use PPP, it was still a few years away at the time and thus SLIP was the protocol in use. On another single floppy disk was the Netscape browser which I also installed. Getting everything configured and working took some time and the process of connecting to the internet was cumbersome and slow. Nevertheless, I was successful.

I don’t really have any recollection of the first web site I viewed nor could I name any other sites I visited that day. After the long process of getting it working, I just wanted to see something. I was unaware of the ramifications this new online world would have in my computing life.

On another note, after using the Netscape browser for a few months, I was really ecstatic about it. Some of my co-workers signed up on cris.com as well and they loved Netscape as well. In fact, we even called Netscape corporate and told them that we loved Netscape and wanted to buy a copy. After being bounced around a little bit as each person was bewildered by our request, we were finally told that the Netscape browser is free and we cannot buy a copy. Much later, Netscape would start selling it, but made it free again because Internet Explorer was gaining in popularity.

Entry Filed under: Computer Memories