[TomGuy]

In the mid-late 80s, when desktop computers became popular, BBS [Bulletin Board Systems] sprang up in all major cities. They included chat, downloads, forums. BBS’s connected home computers via a BBS center.

The ‘internet’ was not really available to the general public until about 1994. [My first experience on it was in late 1995. My first internet chat — in Fort Worth — was with a guy in Australia. I was in awe to be ‘chatting’ with someone half-way around the world in almost real time.]

ISPs and connection options blossumed during the next few years.

I recall that SWBell in Ft. Worth didn’t want to upgrade their telephone lines [residential Internet was dial-up, because cable TV providers had not entered the market yet]. SWBell official thought the internet was just a passing fad. In a couple of years (late 90s), the phone line connections were crowded — with landline phone, fax, and dial-up.

[I cannot think of a name]

“The ‘internet’ was not really available to the general public until about 1994”

Actually that is not correct. Four Universities kept it alive and you could dial in (via long distance!) to the system.

(I am painfully aware of this because one of my employees ran up a $93 phone bill in in 1987 doing just that! My wife wanted to fire him but I convinced her to let him pay it back.)

[broadcastdude]

Many years before 1994, amateur (ham) radio operators, myself included, were “chatting” with people all around the world in actual real time without using phone lines or satellites.

[9YearLurker]

That’s right. If ‘the Internet’ is going to be defined as the ability for computers to communicate across networks, you’ve really watered it down to something beyond that which we know today. Businesses were looking for and working on such basic interconnection for decades. For example, TCP/IP just happens to be one standard protocol that one out—largely as a ‘beyond IBM’ solution—in no small part because Ethernet cofounder Bob Metcalfe left PARC and in the late ‘70s founded 3Com, which successfully commercialized it.

It really is the ‘world wide web’ as proposed by Timothy Berners-Lee in the late ‘80s and which he commercialized in the early ‘90s that led to the phenomenon we know today.

There were weak attempts, known as ‘value-added networks’, through the ‘80s to provide a consumer-level network service that provided some of the more basic, popular Internet capabilities that spread like wildfire once TBL got netscape cranking.

[Bobalu]

For a couple of years I ran the only BBS in Cape Girardeau MO.

I wrote the simple software myself in BASIC and 6502 assembler for the old Vic 20. Then I ported it to the Commodore 64 and ran it from a eprom cartridge. It used an old Cat modem and a relay controlled the phone line switching. I had a reed switch taped to the ringer coil in the phone to detect incoming calls.

The BBS had chat with the sysop which was very popular, an online text based game, rudimentary email and a raucous forum. That phone line was always in use. It cost me 4 dollars a month because I got the service that had free incoming calls but cost by the minute for outgoing...there were never any outgoing calls. When I connected two more lines and three people could connect at once and chat live it created a sensation

I also ran the only dial-a-joke service in town...built that equipment from scratch. It was called A1-Automated Time. (that name meant I was the first listing in the phone book- alphabetically) You got a voice with the correct time and then the day's joke.

I still remember the first joke. "What's old and wrinkled and smells like ginger?" ........ Fred Astair's face.

That joke caused a front-page story in the local paper ;-)

The only other dial-up lines were 8 of them that connected students to the old IBM mainframe at SEMO university. I had a small computer room with terminals and printers where fellow students would come to work on the SEMO system.

I used 4 old VHS handie talkies to put a terminal inside my old VW bus that connected back to my home phone line. I ran a mobile computer lab that became a popular hangout in the student parking lot... there was never an empty seat in the computer lab so they would line up to use the terminal in the VW. Power came from a deep-cycle marine battery and an invertor. I made a lot of good friends with that gear :-)

[Leep]

I remember the transition from BBS and the internet being like an exclusive club and the invasion of the bohunk WebTvers.
Would have been mid-to late 90’s.
I remember because I was one...:)

[Leep]

I remember the transition from BBS and the internet being like an exclusive club and the invasion of the bohunk WebTvers.
Would have been mid-to late 90’s.
I remember because I was one...:)

[BuckeyeTexan]

Yup. I remember that. I was torqued that I couldn’t connect at other than 14.4k on my fabulous 28.8k modem. IIRC, we had to dial different phone numbers to connect at different baud rates.

+++
ATH

[bIlluminati]

I had my first modem around 1974 - didn’t have a computer then, of course. Talked a friend to switch from making keyboards to making modems. Sadly they made Hayes-compatible rather than my design ... borrowed from a certain Cap’n. But USRX was a decent success anyway.

Starting in 1979 I did have multiple computers and hooked into one that a little outfit out of McLean, VA was leasing during its off-hours - some of the employees of this internet service were quite spooky. von Meister started that, and after getting squeezed, he started another service called America On Line. Readers Digest bought out The Source, but never understood how to price it for growth.