1997, this local office supply had a stand at this annual fair in my town.

It just so happened that my mom was part of the committee organizing the fair, so after closing hours I got to hang out while she was in a meeting. I hung out with the office supply clerk and he showed me how it worked without having to worry about a huge line of curious people.

Not long after I got a 33.6 baud modem around the time this telecom provider was running a promo and that’s when I finally got my own computer online.

@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.

Dial-up, but not to an ISP as such. Local call to another computer which had Internet access by means unknown to me.