17 years ago & the internet

I'm surprised the @ symbol was different. It was just the letter A inside a circle. Not the same symbol we use today.

What do you mean? It has been the way we make it today since forever. I remember it on manual typewriter keyboards in the 1950s. No change other than its use in email addresses which didn't exist until after the military and universities invented the internet in 1979.

I can't imagine how it will be even 5 years from now. skype reminds me of the Jetsons,lol.

I remember those early days of the internet and 386K per minute was considered fast back then (now, I get about 500K per second). I can't believe how it has accelerated in the last few years alone.

I saw a commercial, this man used his CELL phone to accept credit cards to process orders from his company, it will be ONE STOP i.e., cell phone will process payments, make payments, text, used to apply for positions, used to make airline reservations and pay in one step one shop, one comparative view to get lowest pricing on anything in the universe cars, horses, NON face to face communications everyone will be in ROBOTIC MODE . . .4g will be OBSOLETE 50G will be the lowest offered, and talk to activate phones, cars houses thats already been done by the way.

I saw a SEMI TRUCK well that is what it looked like mind you it was a helicopter landing take off after they set it up, unreal. But it has already been done.

wow...

That's weird. I was in college and I remember just typing www.sears or www.target. Some companies had sites and some didn't. It's a very weird thing, but I can't imagine how we'd live without it now.

Www was invented in the mid 1990s; it made a huge difference in access. Was your college running bitnet or vm back then? The www made the distinction irrelevant eventually. My Temple University email address back then was (me)@vm.temple.edu.

I'm not sure.

Wow, it doesn't seem that long ago! Yet look at how many changes have been made in that amount of time.

Thanks, it has come a long way :-)

I didn't realize it had been around that long.

The military and universities first got it around 1979; .mil and .edu were far more common than .com on email addresses back then!

This is really interesting.

Ah, the days when people actually talked to each other and didn't text or Facebook each other to communicate.

I remember working in the very early 90's at a job sorting and shipping computer parts. Most came from IBM. Back then computers were found mostly in offices, and were huge. They looked like TV's. and had orange writing. Through that job I learn what many of the internal parts were, and basically what they did, but never had much chance to actually get on one. When I did, it was only to use one of the F fuctions, to find info on a part. One day I decided to tinker with one while I had a chance, and somehow created a data base. Don't know to this day how I managed that. It wasn't till I took a quantum leap and decided to make payments on a personal computer 6 years ago that I finally became computer literate. I still use that same computer today.

My old Apple 2c had green, but same idea.

Back in those days, you could actually open the top of your box and install added memory and other goodies yourself. Or simply use cotton swabs and alcohol to give it a clean-up if it got sluggish. You could open the mouse, take out the mouse ball, and clean it with alcohol and a cotton ball when it got dirty and inaccurate.

The world wide web hadn't been invented yet. I'd been on the internet since 1989 (those of us working in universities were among the earliest online) and had already been actively participating in professional listservs for TESOL and FSA professionals and using veronica (remember those old search engines?) to find journal articles. As early as 1984 I had been using Compuserve on a computer at work (ALA at Beaver College) to help international students who had just passed our TOEFL prep program to identify suitable colleges to apply to.I believe US high school guidance counselors were also using the program to help American teens identify and choose colleges. Since we had to pay for connections by the minute in those days, we saved time by printing out the student questionnaire and keying in their answers ourselves (since we generally typed faster than the students), the giving them the resulting printout.

My first modem on my first home computer (a Mac SE; the first computer I used at work, years before, was an Apple II) had 12 baud, and just viewing a weather report in another city so as to know how to pack for an academic convention meant going to the online site and selecting the report, then going off to wash the dishes, mop the kitchen floor, fold the laundry, then come back and see if it was readable yet. No? Go grade a stack of student essays and then check again... Things have really gotten better since then!

How many of you remember when playing Dungeons and Dragons was all text, as were the other games and MOO sites that developed from it? No color or graphics in those days! Much less uploaded photos and videos! The MOO sites were awesome place to chat and make friends while doing creative programming and playing with the stuff others programmed. The text-only aspect forced a lot of creativity out of people that has been lost on social sites like Facebook. It's a real loss.

How many of you remember ascii art? I used to sign my plain ascii text emails in those days with a single long-stemmed rose, all done with basic keyboard symbols.

My first contact with computers was at work in 1974, in Spain. The computer itself was about 5 feet high and the size of a refrigerator. The printer was 3 feet high, much like a Xerox machine of those days. The keyboard was kept on a separate desk. It ran with microfiche!

I use to palletize many of those old computers. That work today would kill me! Once or twice we got a mainframe. And that thing WAS literially the size of a refrigerator. How about those floppy disk? Or what we now call a tower was then referred to as a system unit, that the computer sat on. Boy things have sure changed.

HAHA! We would all go to this kids house and he would dial in a number and put the phone on the modem and wallah we were on the internet! None of us had a computer.....

I think this is hilarious, especially since I had been using the internet for a few years by then!

I saw one of the fist computors ever, it filled a basement, here in Burlington, rich guy my mom was dating.

we got internet in 1996 and I was excited as I know it had been around a few years before that at least.

I began using the internet in late 1995. Back then it was difficult to navigate so many people used AOL which made it easier. I did not because my husband thought it was foolish to rely on it and better to learn it on my own. atws

My first exposure to email was in college in the early 90's. I didn't use the internet for the first time until 1995. I tried to view the video but it was removed.

Congratulations! you reached 100 views.

I met my husband ONLINE in 1995. Amazing huh?