I didn’t even learn how to use the Internet till 2000!  I’m still pretty behind.

Well in 1995 I had an AOL account with dail-up modem, not only that but it was an internal modem! No box sitting on top of my pc! I was the only person in my office with an e-mail address. Faxes were still the norm and GASP snail mail. OK I was/am the computer guy so I had to be ahead. Yep I was on-line.

Things have progressed quite a bit since then. My home connection is vastly superior to anything we had then, and what I have running at my office was un-heard of speeds back then.

The computers are faster, the internet is faster, there is a world wide web, we rarely get faxes, people have multiple e-mail addresses now. And yet, somehow we are even busier. Go figure.

.mike

This quote is great.  I loved Stoll’s book “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” all about how he discovered (in the late 80’s) that someone was trying to hack into the computer system at his university.  In the book, he uses the term “electronic mail”; it took me a few pages to realize that he meant “email.”  Things get dated so fast in this day and age.  And really, at the time he was right - there was some online shopping, but it was still in its infancy.  Amazon was just starting.  News info online was sparse and not well-written.  And there weren’t any convenient aggregators to pull things together for the casual reader.  How things have changed!

Myself, I still remember the thrill of finally connecting via “electronic mail” in December of 1998.  I didn’t discover blogging until 2007, unfortunately; but I consider it (and Twitter, and Facebook) a boon for SAHM’s, who will never again have to suffer the isolation and boredom that I did with young kids at home in the 90’s.

Well dear Danielle— admitting to a scant few years of difference between us—if I told you that I worked on the military version of the Arpanet—and the Arpanet was the forerunner and seedling for the internet and all of what we use and take for granted these days. I have trouble keeping up and I was IN IT in those days. The thing that I keep thinking is how much we used to have to program in those days to get simple functions done. And now—I can type in words like DANIELLE BEAN and do a search and get back a half million hits. Who would have thought? And it makes one wonder what another 25 years will bring?
As a PS to Stoll’s comments - I remember one ‘respected’ voice predicting that people would never use the internet for shopping and purchases… I wonder if that person still has their ‘consultant’ credentials?

In 1995 I got my first computer.  It was a 386 DX with Windows 3.1.  I had a dial up connection at 1500 baud to a local bulletin board and if I wanted to “go” somewhere other than the local board, I had to ftp (file transfer protocol).  I used my computer at the time for reading the paper online, e-mail and more than anything else, word processing.  I had a CD-ROM encyclopedia and I discovered the game of Mahjong.  Now I have several e-mail addresses, 4 blogs, accounts at Amazon, ebay and several other smaller vendors, am on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-in.  My children use the computer daily to check facts for their school work, connect with friends, listen to music and write papers.  Oh, and the speed of today’s computers!  The first computer I ever used was my brother’s Commodore 64.  He had a cradle modem (Does anyone else remember those?).  I used it for word processing of my now ex-husband’s college papers.  One of his professors recommended word processing instead of typing because he was dyslexic.  It was easier (and is even easier now) to correct on the computer screen (an old black and white TV hooked to the computer).  There was a dot matrix printer with pin feed paper.  Ah yes…those were the days.  I am so glad technology has advanced and is so much less expensive.  My first computer with only the very basics was approximately $1500.00.  You can buy several good computers for that amount now.
The size of computers has changed radically, as well.  we have more technology in smaller spaces than ever before.  You only have to look at a netbook computer to see that, or at the “smart phone” in your pocket that is really a very small computer.
Great article, great topic.

ahh, my age is showing but back in 1995, i was in 6th grade and in awe of my girlfriend’s windows 3.0 and dial up compuserve whrrr whrrr sssssssshhh (remember that sound? :-p)

we only had a tandy that ran ms dos -  you could do word processing (no font choices!) and print on the pin feed printer.

Pin feed printers! I forgot about those!
1995 - I think that’s when I found AOL IM and never leaving my dad’s computer in the late hours of the night so I could use that. And email - which made staying connected when I went away to college much easier.

When I met my now husband in April of 1993, I barely knew what the internet was. America On- what? That all changed by the fall when he went away to graduate school.  I have no hard facts or data, but I suspect we were one of the very first e-mail romances in history.  I would rush home from classes to my on-campus apartment and wait and wait to connect to America On-line.  Then I would hope and pray that no one called to knock my connection off-line before I could download his latest missive.  And what joy to see that little flag go up on the mailbox!  We wrote several times a day and my roommate was not happy when I would block call-waiting to be on-line.  By the time we married in May of 1995, e-mail was an everyday part of my life, but I would have been so “cutting edge” if I had never met my techno-savvy husband.

1995… I had no computer of my own.  That was the year I met my husband, who was studying Computer Programming at University, and he introduced me to the internet.  As students, we got free internet accounts and e-mail with the university, so he got me to go and get my own e-mail.  He had dial-up, and I remember, there were so many people wanting to get on, that we would have to try countless times, to get on before we finally did, especially at night, because the modem was always busy.

I don’t remember what we did much back then, there wasn’t a whole lot to see on the internet.  ICQ instant messaging, I discovered later, in 1997.  That’s about when I discovered Geocities and started a family homepage, to keep friends and family up-dated back home.  (We had just married and moved to the other end of the country.)

I remember the couple of years leading up to 1995, I would hear talk on the radio about the “Information Highway” and this having to do with Bell and phone lines, and I had no idea wha tthey were talking about, nor how they expected to do this.

Back in 1995, I still didn’t get how they could hope to sell stuff through the net.

My husband went on a 6 month trip to South America in summer of 1996, and we communicated through snail-mail.  There just wasn’t the same kind of internet presence or service in the world to do otherwise.

In 1995, I fondly remember sitting in my then-boyfriend (now husband)‘s basement listening to the modem dial up and connect us to Compuserve so we could chat with strangers. By the time we were separated by a couple hundred miles, we each had an account. What fun!

I wish I had a computer with email when I was dating my husband in 1990!  We spent hours on the phone!

My techie boyfriend in college (now my hubby of 20 years) had a computer and modem and used to connect to local bulletin boards back in the late ‘80s. We married in 1989 and started out with an Amiga, then a Commodore, and finally arrived home when we could buy our first Apple computer.  We made friends with other nerds through another local bulletin board after we were married, and signed up with AOL in 1993 or so. Being connected online has been a tremendous help for our homeschooling right from the start, with everything from connecting to other Catholic homeschoolers to finding unit studies, recommended reading lists, etc.

I was petrified of using the internet for fear of getting lost in the world wide web, downloading a virus by accident, and breaking the internet when I first got the chance to use it in 1998 when I started college.  Previously, I’d used databases and chat rooms with a military network which was completely secure.  I remember asking computer savvy classmates exactly what did I need to do to use the internet.  I laugh now at how frightened I was by it.  Now, it’s hard to not use the internet for answering my every question and one day it will be able to answer any of my questions, but it still has a very long way to go.  I wish I didn’t rely on it so heavily.  I read my favorite books from more than 100 years ago and I wonder where they had the time to do all that they did.  Really, I’m looking at it from the perspective that my day is taken up by a large chunk of using the computer.  Of course I can’t get everything done!  Technology sure does zap my time.