I was reminiscing my early internet connections this morning on the drive to work for some reason.
My first service was Prodigy Online. I probably had the 286 at 2400 baud. Then I believe CompuServe. They were weird. Then my parents paid for two phone lines but eventually couldn't afford internet so as a 12 year old I had to find other means. They kept the second phone line of course, because I was addicted to BBS's as well.
I think first was using the local dial-up for The Citadel's GOPHER system. It's a military university in Charleston. Hidden deep in the menu system was a telnet command to anywhere. I'd telnet to BBS's too! But my buddy gave me a shell (probably a hacked one) on which I ran SLiRP. SLiRP is like using PPP and NAT, but you don't need root. It actually emulates SLIP. It's almost PPP but can only encapsulate one protocol (TCP/IP of course).
So there was also some UU.NET dial-up and NetCom in there somewhere. NetCom offered dial-up shell access, but I think it came with PPP anyway, so while I did dial-in directly to the shell sometimes, I'd just start PPP.
Before I got my own 486/33 (or was it 66?), we only had my dad's 486/100. For a brief time he moved out of the house and took it with. We subscribed to the local ISP, awod.com, which offered dialup shell free with your PPP account. I somehow found a place which sold NEW Commodore 64 parts. I scraped up enough cash to buy a 1200 baud modem (Obsolete even for this time, as it was 1994ish). So I used my dial-up shell to get on ircII. I probably had to compile it myself. It was a BSD system I remember. My buddy's that knew I was using a 1200 baud terminal would mess with me and flood the channel to DoS my slow terminal for a moment. It was quite annoying! hah.
I guess my dad moved back and we built my 486. We had to borrow some RAM from his to do the installation of Windows 95, since I only had 2MB, and I believe it needed 4MB. It ran mIRC OK and quickly became burnt into my small 9" B&W VGA monitor. When friends posted URLs, I'd say, "This better be worth it!" before waiting the 5minutes it took for Netscape to load.
I'm not sure what ISP I was using once we moved out from the house again, but I believe it was that same 486 which I my first experience with Linux. Slackware 1996! Back when you'd order CDs for $2-3. I also recall trying to download QNX iso either before FTP did resume or just the server or my client didn't support it. Man, that took awhile, and failures at 50% suck. heh!
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