@SinclairSpeccy it’d have been October 1988, Dad brought his school's modem (he was a school teacher) home over half term along with the BBC Micro and we used it to connect to the NERIS database and TTNS (The Times Network for Schools).

At least we did once we’d figured out which way up the 5-pin DIN plug (in domino configuration) went around in the socket!

In the 90s, I got my own Modem for my ST (£40 from GAME when they sold off Amstrad Sm2400 stock) and used it for BBSing.

@SinclairSpeccy Dick Smith Electronic's BBS from home, on a cutting edge 14.4 kbs modem. Often had to wait for one of the BBS's lines to be free.

@SinclairSpeccy AOL sometime around 1993-1994. My dad signed up for the 4 hour free trial or whatever it was (it was long before it was like 1000 hours) and dialed up on his work PowerBook. I got like 30 minutes to download a few HyperCard stacks.

Didn't got online again until we got real dialup internet for Xmas 1995.

@SinclairSpeccy 1200/75 baud full-size modem card inside an 8086 processor based PC (IBM clone) with 2 floppy drives, MSDos 3.2 and a monochrome Hercules graphics monitor. Used a text based BBS. It was somewhere in the mid 1980s if I recall correctly.

@SinclairSpeccy My dad had a 1200 bauds modem he used to connect to a BBS sitting in the shop where he bought his Mac. The community was called MacUnivers, but I don’t remember what the BBS software was.

@SinclairSpeccy Hard to say. I know we got our first home computer in 2001. I remember getting these AOL discs in the mail, maybe, and getting frustrated when I couldn't get them to work.

But I def had access to computers through school before then. I just have more concrete memories at 11-12, staying up all night to read fanfiction and sneaking back to my bedroom before my mom got up for work. I think we had DSL? Either through Bellsouth or Mediacom.

@SinclairSpeccy For me, it started in the mid 80s with local BBS systems, accessed at 300/1200 baud. Around 1987-ish, I was acquainted with a fellow nerd who ran a Xenix dial-up server on a PC in his apartment. Got my first Unix account on that system, which I primarily used to read netnews. First email address had a UUCP bang path!

@SinclairSpeccy

MAGIC - a local First Class BBS.

Later as Mac Lab Admin at OCADU, managed to wrangle dialup access to UofT for actual (pre web) internet access

@SinclairSpeccy

dialup bbs, from commodore 64, in 1988 :-)

https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/ouser6.html

@SinclairSpeccy German BTX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext

@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.