Basic science even brings some good, besides Higgs bosons!
Tullio

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Feels like it was just the other day to Me, though a lot has changed since then, My where does the time fly to...

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

I remember this day back in '91. Before then it was all Bulletin Board Systems and downloading a 5MB game like Doom or a 2.1MB game like One Must Fall:2097 over 14.4k modem was painful, but you couldn't wait for it to finish (assuming no one picked up the other line during the download)!

Let's see... back in '91 I was running PC DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1 and my regular online provider was AOL (yes, AO Hell). I was very excited when I learned AOL was going to start offering Internet Service for free as part of my subscription. Then I learned I needed something called a web browser. Internet Explorer wasn't available in '91 and the most popular one was Netscape which cost almost $100 for the full package. Fortunately, AOL offered their own built-in browser for a few years but the speeds were horrible (yet all I knew).

Sadly I didn't ditch AOL until xDSL was available in my area which was around 1997 or so. I gladly dumped by 56k modem (by then) for those blazing fast 128k speeds!

Anyway, I digress. I still think the best years in technology were those early pioneering days. Always brings a smile to my face. :-)

I remember using Gopher in 1992 on my UNIX host, which was a RISC machine built by MIPS and branded BULL.The Gopher server at Pisa University had a directory named "top models" in which were photos of top models. They had to close it, too many visitors. I stated Netscape on Solaris OS only in 1996, after retiring.
Tullio

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Oh well.
I also started with AOL but i liked it.
I tried T-Online but that was more buggy.
Still keep my email addy. LOL

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Actually, I liked AOL too, though I started getting annoyed that every time I would log on, my screen would just fill up with Instant Messages asking me for personalized tech help. I posted a few dozen answers in their technical Q&A and suddenly people thought I had nothing better to do than to answer their question (of course they had no idea how many I was getting, but it got to the point where I stopped logging in because I felt obligated to help people). I still remember my first email address but I lost access to it after I temporarily switched to another online provider. I still have access to my second AOL email address from '97 onward.

Looks like I had my timelines wrong in my last post. PC DOS 6.1 wasn't released until '93 and Windows 3.1 didn't come out until '92. That means I would have been using MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.0. And Netscape wasn't released until '94, and Mosaic wasn't released until '93. I don't think there was a web browser for Windows 3.0 back in '91.

My mother first got online around 1993-1995 with a 1200 baud modem in an IBM laptop. She started with IgLou(Internet Gateway of Louisville) as her ISP, and then went to Prodigy, and then AOL, which she is still on, today, but with a slightly faster modem and computer, ;~).

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

Together with a friend I started a domain in 1996, which was desysoft.it. We leased a 64k line from Telecomitalia and paid a huge sum for it. The host was a Pentium running Solaris, which also cost a lot of money. Not being Google, we had to shut it down. I went home and started Linux on a PII Deschutes at 400 MHz. That was my first BOINC client, running SETI classic.
Tullio

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Internet, modems, sounds...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Oh Pants. I'm an oldy...

I remember a networked golf ball terminal and 4 bit pink punch tape. Programing in BASIC, ALGOL and COBOL.

This was pre 1979 and whilst not quite WWW it was at least national.

The internet these days is a mess of un-needed protocols and methods but I love my chance to communicate.

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