Sorry, I never did the AOL thing.

I remember that for a long time, most of my clients thought the entire internet was something that was within AOL.

BTW loved Trade Wars, (won twice)

I remember running up a five hundred dollar phone bill connecting to BBS's playing a primitive version of Mafia Wars.

Totally worth the grounding.

Not me. I was a GEnie kid back in the day.

mr_a: AOL?

I still remember when my entire online identity was 74227,3299...at $10/hr.

I had a Compuserve address on my business card! (still have a few of them)

I didn't go on until it was a monthly instead of a minutely cost. Then I did Earthlink (free, ad supported dialup) and Bring Your Own Internet so AOL was only 9.95. It must have been 1996 or 97. So I'm still a noob compared to some of the BBS users around here.

But I did meet my wife in the AOL Hot Bed chats in '97.

we're old.

Never used AOL. I used AIM but that was when you could just download it from AOL.com. The first dial-up service I had was One.net.

Ahh, the days of one.net....literally days. A little bit after getting one.net, our local phone company started offering discounts for one.net subscribers for their new DSL service. I was the first of my friends to boast about how badass broadband was.

Before AOL, the commodore offered:


/We still joke about upgrading from 300 baud modem to 1200!
// Did not make the jump to AOL at their name and my computer change, used local BBS's and local ISP.

b0rscht: I remember an metric asston of HEY EVERYBODY IM ON THE INTERWEBS posts to rec.every.gooddammed.newsgroup from someassholes2345[[nospam-﹫-backwards] image 7x13]loa[* image 7x13]com all pretty much happening over a few days' time. I believe the term AOLuser came out right about then.

The September that never ended

~SCOFF~

My first Internet homepage was a blinking cursor.

/AOL Indeed... pitooie.

when you signed on to play Air Warrior or something, you could listen to the dialup connection and tell if you got the full 56k. BONG BONG

Anyone remember Prodigy aka "plodogy"?
(on a 300 baud modem)

Haha! I still have my original Netscape email thru AOL. I'm surprised they haven't made me convert to *­*­*lo­a­co­m but let me keep @netscape.com.

1993 was about when the tide turned from local BBSes to AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy. First month on AOL it was by the minute and racked up over $500. Parents cancelled AOL after that. Was a couple more years until AOL dropped their price then had it back again.

/Ran a BBS and was connected to FidoNet!
//upgraded from 2400 to 14.4 which was amazingly fast, only 10 minutes to download a 1MB file!

Yeah, I got Prodigy in '94. No graphical browser yet, just Lynx. There was nothing useful on the Web then yet. For my 5-year class reunion they collected e-mail addresses if you had one. Out of 160, six of us did and I was the only one with a private (non-university) address.

I had AOL a couple years late. What I remember about that was what seemed like interminable hours downloading artwork.

I was doing the BBS thing in the mid 80s with my Hayes. Back when you needed to know all the A commands to get the Modem to pick up the like and dial, handshake, etc. I did that until early 90s and then went to university shell accounts with ARPAnet access which was pretty kewl. (Packet switching for the win). I went from that to PPP dial up account at home which was pretty kewl. Now my home machine was a nod on the internet. By 1995 I was in Seattle working toward the launch of win95 for MS (I know, I know) and we had T1 lines which felt like a whole new thing, making the possibilities of streaming content and the like imaginable. Today I have Fios at home 100/50 and I watch HDTV in realtime over it.

Crazy that in 30years the world has changed so much, but I guess everyone says that. My Great-grandmother remembers when everyone used horses for local transport but lived to see cars, flight, people on the moon and the space shuttle (1887-1989).

I remember the first time I used ARPANET back in the early 80s to download DoD newscopy (worked in an Army newspaper office)from something called an "electronic mailbox." Amazed and blown away by this new technology, I ran over to show my boss. "This changes everything! We won't have to wait for paper documents to get mailed to us anymore!"

"Bullshiate," he said. "The Army and every other business out there runs on paperwork. Nobody's going to do anything without hard copy. That electronic mail stuff is just crap. Nobody's gonna use it."

300 baud acoustic "singles" BBS trolling is where I got my start - with a machine (Heathkit H8/H89) that featured an octal keypad.

/still have that machine

DPSturm: when you signed on to play Air Warrior or something, you could listen to the dialup connection and tell if you got the full 56k. BONG BONG

Air Warrior was the only reason I kept AOL as long as I did. Man I miss that game so freaking much.

Relatively Obscure: That doesn't look like a BBS to me at all. Hell, I don't see one mention of Trade Wars or LoRD.

So hard to find people who still remember Legend of the Red Dragon these days...

We used to go over to Seth Able's house and play multiplayer DOOM.