FreeRepublic.com was launched on September 23, 1996. Led the impeachment of BJ Clinton a couple years later. Would love to impeach FUBO.
And it wasn’t a porn site???
Bttt
Just a post to see my join date... Did us 2000 joiners finally get to be included in the FR old timers club?
I remember getting on the internet in 1992 and going to the local Barnes and Noble where you could buy a book with URLs of the web sites in existence. It was about an inch thick.
When I tried using it, most of the websites had been shut down already.
I first went online in late 1992. There wasn’t much out there then. I worked for GTE at the time, and they let employees dial into the company servers from outside. I just needed a password from IT. Remember 15.5 modems? Those were a step up from my first one!
The first useful website I found was the Stash Tea online catalog, and Amazon books shortly afterwards.
Been right here for 17 years of it. I’m thinking of getting a new nick for my 20th. Something like Hillary’s_Parole_Officer. That ought to last me another 20.
If you can’t remember having to choose between this WWW thingy and Gopher sites, you haven’t been on the internet long enough. CERN and Webcrawler.
Yeah, man!
You were a little late in the online game.
In 1975 while working on the Honeywell 6060 Main Frame we went online within the Mare Island Shipyard to approx. 40 users in the Production Department.
The Database was used for work performed on Nuclear Submarines.
PS: I was a lurker for a couple of years before that...
I remember many printed and verbal battles back then but initially it did not make much difference in my business since so few regular people used it but over the years the Internet (and the development thereof) expanded and ended up being the wisest decision I ever made.
What galls me to this day is that our universities use our tax money and think everything they either invent or develop is theirs exclusively while in fact it belongs to the taxpayers.
Anyone remember the days of bulletin boards and terminal access?
I lurked through the FReeper protest of the Hanging Chads in Florida.
AL GORE GET OUT OF OUR HOUSE !!!
I still recall a few of my earliest online experiences during the late 1980s.
I could dial up my buddy’s computer and we’d chat back and forth online. It was slower than picking up the telephone to talk, but it was exciting to think we were on the threshold of something new.
I used to dial into the Houston public library to peruse the card catalog system. Their website was also a portal to other libraries around the country. I was so cool! [or so I thought]
I used to do some construction projects and went to Home Depot, Lowes, etc. to walk the aisles and shop prices for different cuts of lumber. Tiring of that, I spoke to the manager of a Home Depot in 1990 and tried convince him that setting up a BBS containing a catalog of their current lumber prices would be a tremendous service to estimators. I argued that it would give Home Depot a competitive advantage. He gave some lame excuse why it could not be done; I was not convinced by his excuses.