@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
uucp was it on uni and work machines (while still a student). later dial up modem via work and isp, isdn modem, cable (for many years), now 10G fiber. just missed acoustic coupler for myself, but used it to dial up some bbs at a friend.

@SinclairSpeccy For me it was PRESTEL accessed by dial-up using the BBC Micro at school. Only members of the after-school computer club were allowed to use the modem, and it didn't take too long before our adventuring around PRESTEL brought us to its gateway to the Shades MUD.

From then on, I never wanted computer club to end. There were monsters to slay and loot to be grabbed!

#PRESTEL #RetroComputing #ShadesMUD

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.