My internet in the 80's

.. OK, well I didn't really have internet. Obviously the World Wide Web didn't exist, at least in a public form, in the mid 80's. But my Radio Shack 300 baud modem did.

For those of you whose first experience to the internet was surfing on a 28K modem (or, if you started out real early, you may have even had a 14K modem), 300 baud is.. let's see... let me do the math.. 93 times slower than a 28K modem, and 186 times slower than the standard 56K modem. So it was slow. REAL slow.

And there was no browser, no URL's, no graphics. I had a list of BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems), each with it's own phone number. I would dial this phone number, wait for the tone, and plug the phone line into the 300 baud modem. If someone else was already on the BBS... yes, just one person.. you would get a busy signal and redial until that person hung up. Once connected, the text would slowly scroll across my computer monitor, attatched to my glorious IBM PCjr.

Eventually, primitive chat systems arose. Some guy would buy 6 modems, hook them up, and run a chat program on their own PC. The "D-Dial" was born. The six modems (yes, all 300 baud) would be linked to one phone number, you would call this phone number, and be able to chat with 5 other people. I never dialed a chat system that had more than 6; maybe Chicago was behind on technology... but I've heard of some with 8, 12, or even 16 modems.

I remembered late in middle school, and at the beginning of high school, I'd talk about this with my friends. They'd just give me a blank stare. I was talking with 5 other strangers on my computer every night? First of all, they didn't understand how this was possible... and second, they didn't know why. I also remember my parents yelling at me because the phone was busy all the time. I eventually got a second line, funded by my first job at the local video store (No DVDs, mind you.. just VHS and Beta).

I became quite addicted for a while, probably spending 2 to 3 hours every day after school, surfing the internet and chatting with middle-aged men. Very few women.. and almost no kids my age.. were on the D-Dials.

Finally, around the end of my freshmen year in high school, I realized there was more to do after school than call other computers. I became involved in sports, the concert band, met my first girlfriend, and had my first beer. I would go back to it every once in a while, but eventually I stopped using it all together. This was around 1987.

The next time I used a modem was to connect to AOL in 1995.

Now that's old school.