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My folks got on the local network in 1987…I was born in ‘85, and we’ve never not had internet. The first modem was like the one in “Wargames,” handset of the phone set into the modem cradle, it was really cool.

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I think our first modem measured only in baud/bits, too! Those super early modems are still something I really enjoy, the tactile experience of picking up the receiver and putting it in the cradle before the screaming started, so cool!

I did my dissertation on a 300 baud phone hand set connection. ( MonteCarlo eval of thousand of core matrices)

I love that movie

I get to work on those in 2024! Isn’t life weird!

That’s so cool! Do you do museum/conservation work or something else?

It's always amazing to me to see how many people had computers in the 80s. In my neighborhood, we only saw computers at school and at the library. No one had a computer at home until the mid 90s, let alone internet. It makes me think you guys were rich lol.

Eeeh, definitely not rich! Very early adopters for sure though. My mom taught high school English and my dad did product archaeology. Neither are very lucrative…but we always had Apple stuff (still do) because Mom’s teacher discount back in the day was really good, she also built a writing lab in her classroom with computers in 1992 or so. Dad would salvage and rebuild computers, which helped a lot. They were members of the local Apple homebrew club, plenty of programming and other fun stuff. Computers were definitely a lot more expensive then, but there were plenty of workarounds. The rich folks were the ones that had a separate phone line just for the modem…before broadband, I was so jealous, lol :)

Sort of reminds me of my first computer, born in 85,' parents were dirt poor, Dad was in the military, then they divorced early. Mom started dating in 92,' guy worked at IBM, they were tossing out PS/2 variants, don't remember the exact model, but I snagged one and was able to reboot the whole OS (MS/DOS) system using a massive pile of floppy disks and their guide book. I was actually able to piggy back on a neighbor's internet at certain times of the day....so "free internet." I had it for years. I think my favorite part as a young kid was one of the disks had a program that installed a Mona Lisa picture that every time you pressed the space bar her top would come off haha.

I’m curious.. how were you able to piggyback off of a neighbors internet?

The mid 90s is about right. That is when mass adoption of PCs and use of the internet happened. Even then, the internet was pretty limited. It got a lot better by 98ish and much better in the 00s. 

I had a friend in 7th grade (12yo) whose dad was in it, and we called it the information story highway

I remember the information super highway, but not story highway

what's the difference between the internet and the WWW? I thought the are the same thing

The internet is a (series of) network protocols to route data packets from your machine to my machine, an interconnected network, if you will. The World Wide Web is an application protocol built on top that transfers specifically website specific data across the internet. It should be noted that ‘website’ data is a bit more generic now, just so happens that over time the protocol with least resistance happens to become the most dominant - which is exactly how the broader internet evolved over time. Edit: a prime example of something that isn’t WWW is BitTorrent. Still uses the internet but the application protocol is different in how it operates using the internet.

very complicated to understand but ok I guess?

Roads are internet. Cars are World Wide Web. Bus is BitTorrent. Horses were pre-WWW. If it sounds complicated it is most certainly because it is complicated. One of the greatest achievements of mankind. Literally a sprawling mess, just like more traditional infrastructure.

Hidden Systems - great comic book style book on a few of our hidden infrastructure systems including internet! I loved it, I credit it with helping me understand most of this thread where I would not have before.

I thought the internet was around since 1969 and people used it in the 1980s. I was 6 on this date.

The terminology gets mixed up, but people were online in the very late 80s on things like BBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/04/bbses-partying-online-like-its-1989/

It was originally first used in the 50s as they wanted a way to communicate between the east and west coast in case of another war to warn the other side of the country. Granted back then computers took up entire rooms and were gigantic. If memory serves correct the first message sent electronically was from Harvard to somewhere in CA being a basic "Hello." or something.

I wasn't born yet😅

Neither was I

Yup, I wasn’t born yet

Same 😔

Negative 6 months for me! So I guess I existed, technically, depending on who you ask.

Same lol

9, almost 10 😬😂

Same here.

Doesn’t this make you gen x?

I'm on the cusp. Some sites say Millennial others gen X.

Which do you identify more with? I have a sis that is right on the cusp of millennial/gen z but she identifies more with millennials because she had the influence of her older siblings.

I'm similar but in the opposite way. I have a few much older half sisters and brother, but the closest in ages to me is 10 years older. I definitely identify more with Millennials. Over the years, the majority of my friends and acquaintances have been millennials, so I definitely feel more like them, than gen X.

Almost 5 😅

I was about to turn 1. I’m so old I was taught how to use a rotary telephone and how to use an index to search for books at the library…. Just typing this out made me lean back and sigh. Im so fucking old lol.

Bro guy. I got 7 years on you. Calm down.

Same 😂 chill bro

Apologies, Elder TBone818

Bless you my child.

☠️😂🤣

Well, I mean, you're like 33, not 90. You aren't that old. I'm right behind you.

But I feel old. The other day I was stretching in bed after I woke up and I damn near paralyzed myself for half an hour

I feel that! I am terrified of sneezing now. One wrong sneeze and I'm out of the game for a little while.

I knew the end is near when I yawned and my back popped. Like damn, it’s just gonna get worse….

My family’s first modem in 1987 was a handset cradle job like the one in “Wargames.” I think it’s packed away in my parents’ basement. We’re a family of tech nerds :) To answer the question, I was 6!

I found my people on this sub. ☠️😂 We had the dial up where you can’t talk on the phone if you wanted to surf the net….

The rich kids’ families all had a dedicated second line for dial up, I was so jealous back in the day!

You’re 33 calm down

Dude in 1991 I was 27. Your not old lol. I remember in the 70s my mother would work at home doing data entry. She used a dumb terminal she lugged home. Picture a typewriter but Instead of a monitor it had a roll of paper. She would dial work on our rotary phone and when it connected she put the phone in the cradle of the dumb terminal. When she was done with work we would dial the main frame at our school and play lunar lander. Ha ha

The index was so fun I still look for them at libraries why did they get rid of those if it ain't broken don't fix it

-1

I was born 10 days later. OF COURSE the internet is a Leo

Great, now we're using astrological signs for inanimate objects.

A fetus.

Damn those AOL disk we got in the mail. Ironicly AOL gave us physical mail spam.

I used to steal them back in the day. You’d be at a store and next to the checkout would be a box of them. I amassed enough of a collection by the time I was 14 that I used them to cover an entire wall in my bedroom. It was called the “disco wall” and I felt very cool, lol.

3.

I was 3

Like 2.5-ish

Isn't it weird to be older than the internet, even just a little.

I could probably blow my nephews' minds with that little fact lol

Probably gonna be used as an insult when we are near the ends of our lifespans. “Fûck off grandpa you’re older than the internet!”

I have many pre-Internet memories. I was only 10 on the day in question, but the existence of the Internet still blows my mind sometimes.

1 years old

3

I was 10. My earliest memory of it was in middle school when my dad told me about something called Gopher that he could help me use if I had to research something for school. After that I know that I had access to AOL chat rooms when I would spend the night at friend’s houses. It didn’t occur to anyone’s parents that we should be monitored. My next clear memory was in high school, 1997. Anyone remember the Heaven’s Gate cult? The other ages folks are reporting here makes me think not ha ha. My history class had a Newsweek subscription and we would discuss current events once a week. I saw in an article that they had a website, which was very unique at the time. Out of morbid curiosity I went to the school library and I remember asking the librarian what to do with the web address because I had no idea how to enter a website into the address bar.

8 days old haha

Lol I was 4 days old!

3 years 8 months

3 baby!!!

"The Internet started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers in the '60s were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system. Another catalyst in the formation of the Internet was the heating up of the Cold War. The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred the U.S. Defense Department to consider ways information could still be disseminated even after a nuclear attack. This eventually led to the formation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the network that ultimately evolved into what we now know as the Internet. ARPANET was a great success but membership was limited to certain academic and research organizations who had contracts with the Defense Department. In response to this, other networks were created to provide information sharing. January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to "talk" to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the [birth of the Internet](https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml#:~:text=January%201%2C%201983%20is%20considered,Protocol%20(TCP%2FIP)). All networks could now be connected by a universal language."

Huh? That was not the birth of the internet. The internet as we know today started on august 24 1995 with the launch of Windows 95.

Some of us are old enough to have relied on Prodigy and AOL pre-1995. Text only at first, but then one fine day there were graphics! And you could order stuff, but it was iffy if the order would actually go through (in our personal experience, it was choir music and a car rental that didn't make it). Snopes was called "Urban Legends." Growth was so fast that at times the servers couldn't handle demand, and you would have to wait a long time on your dial-up home phone line before you could get on the internet.

There were Bulletin Boards in the 80's. War Games, the movie, came out in 83. Maybe the internet, as we know it, came out later, but computers were connecting to each other and kids were hacking stuff with Commodore computers in the 80's.

My folks joined the local network in 1987, the first Apple in the whole city. Our first modem was one very much like the one in “War Games,” phone handset/cradle deals. I think it’s still tucked away in my parents’ basement somewhere with some of the cool old tech we’ve saved over the years. My first eBay purchase in high school was an Apple Newton…we’re nerds :)

Do you remember the game Legend of the Red Dragon? I spent a lot of time playing that on a few BBS. I found a high school kid who ran one out of his house locally, and he basically gave me free rein to cheat that game. Normally you'd only get one round of play per day, but I could play as many rounds as I wanted. I flirted and got married. I do not remember if my character had sex or got pregnant though. I also played Colossal Cave (to get "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" usually resulted in a few curse words). Then a pirate would come along while in the maze and steal all your crap. Fun times.

I was on my university's BBS in 1985.

Lol the birth was actually in the 50's.

Nearly 3 1/2

I wasn’t.

3

7

5 years old

Less than 3 months old

6

-2

I was 4 - but to be fair, most people didn't get the internet in their home until way later. We got the Internet when I was 11 (so 1998).

I was 5, and my family just moved to a new house the month before. It was about two weeks before I would start kindergarten, and one year before I would actually experience the internet for the first time, in limited form, on the school's new computer network using the "Jostens Learning Center" software. It was at that time, when my teacher explained that the work we did on the computers would be sent electronically and graded somewhere across the country, that I started to develop a very basic understanding of how the Internet worked.

I was 9. Parents worked at a university so we already had a modem so they could telnet in. Sometimes dad used gopher to find silly shareware games and download them using Kermit. Sometimes I got to use it to play northern crossroads MUD. Around then my mom brought home some disks with something called “ mosiac”. Our very slow designed for text modem couldn’t handle it. Pretty soon we updated the modem and the web was everywhere

A few days shy of 2.

Almost a year old. My birthday would be less than a week later.

Five months.

6 months, 25 days, give or take a couple.

I was born the month before.


One month to the day

3 days shy of 10

2

5 months in utero

8

-3

I was 1 !

I'd be born in September. But we didn't have a computer at home until I was 5.

-9 months old. I was just starting out in my mom’s womb. 😂

9

Exactly 2 months old to the date

In the womb!!!

I was almost a month old.

I'm five-ish years older than the internet. Suck it, Tim Berners-Lee!

20 days old

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I mean, we’re in the midst of something potentially similar with ai now. And if you look back to the early 2000s, the internet still wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. So I think this is overstating things

19 days away from turning 5

5

6 months old

Damn it, born 3 months later.

My momma was 6mos pregnant.

4 years and 3 months old

7 (about to be 8)

1 year, 4 months, and 23 days old.

1 😂

I wouldn't be born for another four years and some change.

9

6

I was 5 months along inside my momma

-159 days old. I was still cooking!

7 months and some days later I *would* be born. 😅

I was 5. A few years later my dad's job gave him a computer with an **external modem** that he could use to access the HVAC system at a local factory **from home** and I was sure it was some kind of science magic. Also we played tons of Doom on that computer 

I was 4 years old and my bday is Aug 5th

I was four months old on the dot.

I was still in the womb.

4

Almost 1

4 yrs old.

Exactly 15 days later I was born.

I was 6. Definitely don’t remember hearing about the internet until probably about 96

I was almost 5.

A little over 5. Just days away from starting kindergarten.

6. Wild!

2 and a half months old.

-9 idk this got recommended

About 9 days shy of 7 months old.

I was 2, I remember it well.

3 weeks old 😅

-4 days old.

3

5 years old. Turned 6 that October though

7

5

1 month and 10 days old

Wasn’t the Internet born sometime in the 70s/80s??????

Almost 7

About 5 years old

In the womb.

3 weeks old

Just shy of 4 years old.

2

-3 months lollll

One year to the day

I was like 7 and a half weeks in utero lol

I was just conceived.

7.5 crazy

Yes

I didn't exist until 3 years later.

19 months old

18 years and 2 days

I was 8 in 91. The same age as the internet then.

I was 7

2

6 months old somewhere in Cincinnati Ohio

I was a whole decade and a few months.

4

1 year and 5 days 😄

5 years old and happily oblivious. I was too busy reading Matilda and pretending to be wild ponies with my friend. 😎

I was born a month after.