I just mentioned something to Joe that got me thinking. How long have you been on the Net? Me I go back to the start, even before the WWW. Late 80s getting onto Bulletin Boards from a Commodore 64. Early 90s using an Amiga to get online with AOL which cost a bloody fortune. I went through dozens of ISP's in the early days of the WWW.
I never ventured onto the net until i got a PC and my own house 20 ish so 1995-6 maybe even later actually. (my dad would never get it in, not that i can ever remember discussing it with him, just never came about) I did have the amiga but most of my time was spent on SWOS so never needed the net. I was with BT on dialup and they cost a fortune as well, used Kazzaa light for downloading stuff then bittorrent (even made my own tracker which was dedicated to games), winMX, FTP (my own never got onto scene FTPs) Usenet. Moved down to Teeside and went with Virgin Media, never looked back, yet they get a bad name, but they have been fine with me and getting 112meg down 13-14meg up in June for no extra cost.
The joys of dialup. Programs taking days or even weeks to download. That would take about 2 minutes on Virgin now. I was dreadful with Kazza, too many people allowed it access to their whole computer. (The pictures I found. hahaha) I was an Amiga fanboi, with good reason in those days, it was miles ahead of the PC. Apart from having to make my own null modem cables. I paid nearly £3000 for the 4000 with upgrades in 92. (Obscene price even then.) Didn't get my first PC till Windows 95 came out.
I was the same, my first PC may have even been windows 98, 1st game i bought was total annihilation (or something very similar) but i still prefered the Amiga for gaming. SWOS, Frontier, Cannon Fodder, championship manager they just looked better on the Amiga as well. (and I bought them from Special Reserve, I havnt bought a PC game for years now, not that I play that many mind)
I started life with a a brand new windows 95 386 machine (very slow) and a dial-up connection with an ISP that offered free dial-up access from 6pm-10pm or something along those lines. I was on every night reading the sportinglife! Nearly 20 years ago... To think that fibre optic is now rolling out on a national level along with 16 core processors in your average retail desktop! Times have changed...
Everything I own is owld as ****, including my reconditioned IBM which I paid 200 knicker for. Got my first pc around 98 I think & it was ****e & nee body could ever phone me as the line was always jammed with the owld dial up.
Hahaha I used to be sitting at my pc dialling in at 17:59 in the hope I would be logged on 1 minute early!
Never played games on the original PC apart from Graphic Adventures. The Hobbit etc. It was always used for the internet. I have hundreds of old floppies in the loft off the Amigas. I bought the kids the 1200 when it came out. (And a CD32.) All still in the loft along with Spetrums and Sinclairs. I loved a game called Flashback a stunning for its time platform-er. (Oh and Lemmings! The Angry Birds of its day.) Never liked strategy games like Footy Manager.
Every time a new free ISP came out I joined and just connected to the one that was fastest at the time. I got a full year of free access to all day AOL, as every time I tried to cancel they offered me a free month. They mustn't have had a check on it as each time they gave me the free month and sent a bill for 0p. One of the free ones sent me a box that plugged into the phoneline that gave me free internet access but any calls I made would be charged through them. Silly people, I plugged it in to access the net and unplugged it to make calls. hahaha
I started some time in 1998, using Telewest Cable service (now Virgin) with dial up connection, and HUGE monitor, like an old fashioned TV... PC cost a bomb too (from Bainbridges)
I played the Hobbit on the Spectrum I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game) yeah, the bit with Thorin in the cell had me stumped, then when i got passed it the bit with the barrels and the portcullis, i just could never get passed that so never completed the game. I played Championship manager with my brother, he was Inter I was Barca, I could not play it with the AI (I still cant) it needs another human to compete against for me. Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were great as well, but these days i cant stand any platformers, I hate them.
Just reading Manic Miner had the tune bouncing round my head. I must have played it far too much. [video=youtube;F7khL9Ms4ow]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7khL9Ms4ow[/video]
I've been into fishnets for quite some time tbh but at work, no one has ever guessed................ Oh, I think I misread the title there a bit
Got a brand fire new HP PC after leaving the Army and got dial up for it in 1995, christ on a bike it was slow.
Got my first home PC for mega bucks (about £2000 I think!!) but can't recall the make, maybe Viglen? Got dial up internet access with Compuserve in 1996 or thereabouts. But was using PC at work for developing and email much earlier and my Assembler programming days go back to IBM 360 mainframe and (very) 'dumb' terminals!! LOL! when I talk about those days to my kids they think I lived through the Stone Age.
Although I did have a commodore 64 in the early 1980's, it was only ever used for playing games such as Pac-Man and Hunch-back (Bloody hell, that brings back memories). I believe it will have been the latter end of the 1990's before I used the Internet.
Did you not have football manager on the 64 mate and a game where you were a train driver and you had to blast seven bells out of anything that got in the way?
No, I didn't have them games..Others that I do remember is Paperboy (where you delivered newspapers on a bicycle) and Mutant Camels (which was basically a space-age camel trying to avoid getting shot!).
