@SinclairSpeccy It was AOL, in the mid 90s, right about the time the WWW was entering public consciousness, but AOL was still a walled garden at the time with no access to the web. That came later. Also later, after canceling AOL, I got onto an ISP started by AOL called GNN for an absurdly long free trial. And then after that, I went to a BBS, and later a plain ISP started by the owner of said BBS. So I kinda took a weird, meandering path back in the day, but AOL was the start... and provider of many free floppies. 🤣

@SinclairSpeccy Dial-up access to an email and Usenet provider.

@SinclairSpeccy
At my first job, the company had a UUCP connection to mcvax, and I was exchanging emails with people in the US and Canada.

Note that a UUCP dial up connection is not quite the same as what people understand as "dial up connection to an ISP".
There were no ISPs at the time, and we had "internet", but not "Internet" (tcp/ip).

Later I had my own UUCP connection to mcsun, using Taylor UUCP on Minix.

@SinclairSpeccy Prestel & Micronet on my trusty VTX5000 1200/75 modem.

@SinclairSpeccy dial-up BBS. I was able to borrow the 2600 baud Hayes modem from school computer room during school holidays to dial-up from Archimedes at home.

@SinclairSpeccy In the early 90s I was connecting to CIX in the UK, which was effectively a BBS, but had an odd connectivity to the early internet.

I had been sending emails in the mid-80s, with some access to UseNet via my university account(s).

@SinclairSpeccy wifi when i was like 9

ig i also watched youtube technically when i was like 3 and ig that’s the first time i used the net (don’t worry my parents weren’t that ignorant they only let me watch yt for a few hours a day)

@SinclairSpeccy our first modem at home was a 33.6K Creative Labs Modem Blaster, some time in the late 90s. It wasn't until my ISO standard rich friend upgraded to cable internet that I got his hand-me-down 56K modem, which I still used for several years before we finally got 256K ADSL.

Someone asked this point on my last poll back in 2024 so here it is btw 😅

@SinclairSpeccy IIRC it was in 2002, a paid dial-up session in a "computer club", a department of a post office that happened to have computers, connected to the internet. The access used to be billed per time units, the smallest one being 10 minutes, for about 1/3 USD. Overall personal computers were considered a luxury in ex-USSR up until 2007, that's when cheap and reliable sources of second-hand hardware established. USB thumb drives and CD-RW drives were also considered a luxury at that time, so I had to resort to floppies, and if a file happened to be a tad bit bigger that 1.44 mb, it could take more than one floppy disk to carry valuable stuff like Winamp Skins, or new wallpapers. Windows 98 used to be a go-to operating system for such clubs because of superior gaming capabilities and lower hardware requirements. At the times when Windows XP-capable machines became a commodity, computer clubs already died out.

@SinclairSpeccy I was BBSing like crazy in my teens. Talking to sysops online, then coming to offline gatherings, then running my own board. Then somehow got my Fido node running, with a bunch of points even. Fun times, I actually enjoyed it a lot, even though I would probably be considered rather lame in the technical sense during that time, haha.