[sopwith]

28.8 ? I started with much less , late 80’s pclink and compuserve and bbs, think the modem was 300 b.

[Lurker]

My first modem was an acoustical one that moved at a blistering 9600 baud.

[upchuck]

In the early 80s, I "telecommuted" with an accoustic coupler running at a blazing speed of 300 baud.

Everything was character cell, no graphics, the modem ran at 30 characters a second. It took "days" to fill a screen.

[Defiant]

I started with a prodigy device in the late 80s that I think was 300. My first modem was a 2800 baud that I used to connect to BBS's. I ran a BBS for a while. I think that's how this site started. In 1993, I got an internet account, and used to get information via FTP, telnet, and the other protocols. Around 94 or so, the first browser was introduced. There was no search engine; the only way you found things was by going to a site that you already knew about, like a collection of law materials at Columbia, or a news site like newsnet. Email was cool, too, but no one else had email.

Around 1994, Mosaic came around, and boy was it awesome, even on a 2.8 baud modem. Clicking links to get to places, seeing pictures load (after a minute or two), and so on. I think Netscape was the successor to Mosaic. The next few years were like an infancy. Then, Yahoo came along, and it made things a lot easier, with its use of indices. But the next big advance was search, and that made the internet far more useful.

As bandwidth grew (in 1999, I was one of the first to have a cable modem instead of a 56k modem) the internet blossomed.

Hard to imagine that when I first logged on here, it was with either a 33.3 or 56k modem.