TOD
First online experience would have been a couple of local BBS's dialed up at 300-, then 1200-baud (I was first on my block with the 1200), followed soon thereafter by joining QuantumLink -- which was for Commodore users only. Later, out of Q-Link grew "America Online" for multiple platforms. But it began as Commodore, and boy did I get addicted to the chat rooms there. Being able to talk with several people at once was space-age, man. Intoxicating. I was living in Schaumburg IL, then, and moving back to L.A. and having the computer equipment packed up and in storage for a while was what saved me from becoming TRULY addicted.
Life, and another cross-country move, kept me from spending loads of time on the pre-internet internet for a while. I got my first IBM-clone (a Costco Hewlett-Packard with a whopping 40Mb hard drive and low-res VGA monitor, in 1993. Jumped back into the online world via Prodigy and AOL, becoming an online "host" in the "PC Applications" department of AOL for a while and meeting some great people. This was mostly in their pre-Windows world -- I forget what that first platform was called.
I think I'd heard about Usenet by then, but I never really got into it and explored it until a couple of years later when I got my first "real" internet connection that wasn't AOL, at the breathtakingly high speed of 14000-baud. I was fairly confused at trying to figure out how to really follow threads, and I never did participate, or make it a regular thing.
During this period I heard about ECHO, an online Unix-based BBS in New York, and joined that. ECHO was modeled on "The WELL" in the Bay Area, but never grew to any size like that. And now it's but a tiny fraction of its former self. But I'm still there, still enjoying the company of several good friends who I've now known for twenty years (!).
