Poll: Did you have net access at home in 2000?
 

Trying again

yes, dial up ruled.

Voted yes. I first got cable internet in 1996 when in lived outside of Dallas. Had dialup modem access with netcom (and a few other isps) prior to that, ever since college.

I'm a network engineer though, so having home internet access for me during the duration of my career was a necessity.

Yes, I had high speed (Roadrunner) the first half the year in college, and then when I went to my parents' house, and then my first apartment in NYC, my computer went with me and I managed to dial up somehow. It was a whole song and dance, I remember I held onto those provider CDs they used to spam the universe with just so I could get on the internet in a hurry wherever I was.

Since probably 94 or 95.

I had high speed internet at Rutgers and also at home. So I was covered year round. :D

In case anyone wonders "why 2000" because that's one of the better benchmark years I could find, when home access was approaching 50%.

Prodigy? It's what the PC was invented for.

We were Mac growing up, but were early AOL adopters. Friend of mine had both Prodigy AND Compuserve though.

Yep. Dial up internet here in the Philippines in 1997. Pacific Internet... I remember it was metered dial-up based on how many hours you were connected.

I had high-speed (at the time) ISDN from around '96 to 2001.

I lived in MS and had access, maybe even high speed by that point.

I've had 'net' access since the 80s starting with Compuserve and then in the late 90s switched to high speed cable internet.

I didn't have a high speed internet connection at home until 2002. It sucked. I had dial-up since around 1992-93 or so.

First and foremost: it's good to see a poll with a trout option.

I had AT&T @ Home when it was the only cable internet option in the Bay Area. I remember getting a 3MB connection and thinking I had the fastest internet in the world. I think I got AT&T around 1999, but before that I was using AOL & Dial-up. Those were most definitely not the days.

It ain't an FOFC poll without at least one ;)

I had dialup internet from 1994 onward, got high speed access from 1998 on. Never looked back.

Had Prodigy back in 1991, first forum I ever posted in was a football-related one. They had a cool chess section where they had some analysis of the Fisher-Spassky reunion match in '92 as I recall, but later that section got axed. Nothing like loading graphics in the good old 2400 baud modem days.

Yep. Dialup Compuserve...AOL at various times. I'm not sure when we first got Roadrunner here in the Boston area, but I'd venture to guess that we were early into that in our town, and also my family (as my dad has always worked in software for tech companies).

Dial-up at various locations from 1991 until roughly 2000 when I got my first broadband.

Nothing like cruising on a 300 Baud modem on a Commodore 64.

40 votes and i was the first trout voter? is fofc dead?

Yes.

Definitely, I actually chose a town to move to in '97 because it was one of the few that had cable modem at that point in our area.

I think we're all just too excited about the Internet to be willing to skip a meaningful vote on the poll.

The Prodigy wiki says it didn't really start until 1994, but I am pretty sure I had it before. I remember having it right after my parents divorce which would be '93 sometime, then I had AOL and met my future wife in AOL chat in early '94.

Didn't get DSL until we bought this house, roughly 6-7 years ago now I think.

I think we're well on our way to proving that FOFC is far from a typical demographic. :)

Should we also post a "Do you have a DVR?" thread. (Which, actually, wade was going to post yesterday because of a discussion he and I were having)

Oh, and my dad was using BBS's since at least the mid-80's. I was on them probably starting somewhere around '89-91 and was using IRC and FTP before the web went public ('92? '93?)

I think this place is just an anomaly.

I had dial-up till 2001 when we switched to a cable modem.

That's the whole point of the thread :)

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Left for freshman year of college in the summer of '99, got home the summer of '00 and my parents had gotten DSL.

Prodigy didn't offer access to the Internet until '94, but they were around at least 10 years before that as an online service provider. We were one of the first subscribers back when I was in junior high.

Oh, this thread is net access in general? Yeah, we had dialup well before then. Probably at least around '93 or so.

Yeah, I am a no on this one. And on this board I feel like I am one of a dozen guys who don't have one. Still not sure why we have never gotten one.

I had dialup access to a public linux based network around 94-95 I think, finally getting high speed AOL (I think that's what it was at the time) around 99.

I ran a BBS from 91-95. Good times, perfect for a power hungry 12 year old.

Been 'online' in some capacity since around 83/84 when I used to use the Vic Modem (300 baud) to call up local BBS's.

Since '97, dialup until two years ago.

I think an interesting sister poll to this one for me would be one asking how many people still use dial-up access. With hotels now offering internet connectivity at a high percentage rate, I've been trying to figure out how necessary it is for my company to still have dialup capabilities.

It used to be nearly 90% cell phones or hotel/travelers but even those options have greatly diminished lately.

Dialup in '97, IIRC, and school obviously. Went to high speed in 2003.

I had net access in 1991 (CompuServe) and web access in 1995.

This conjures up an image of some grizzled tech vet with a Cringer-like beard sitting in a windowless room muttering "You can take my Shiva LANRover when you pry it from my cold, dead hands"

i'm BBS old-school. 2400 baud, baby. Then Prodigy, etc.

very early adopter.

I was one of the prodigy people also. Starting in 1995 or 1996 we got it. then Broadband in 2002? I think

My history with pure wholesome badass internet speeds!

**BBS Era**
1992 - Misawa, Japan - Dial-Up w/14.4Kbps (14400 baud modem)
**Prodigy/America On-line Era**
1993 - Los Angeles, CA - Dial-Up w/56Kbps (best ever was 40Kbps)
**FUCK OFF, AOL Era**
1997 - Los Angeles, CA - DSL w/768Kbps
**Turkish DSL Era**
2001 - Ankara, Turkey - DSL w/384Kbps
**BellSouth DSL Era**
2003 - Bossier City, Louisiana - DSL w/1Mbps
**German DSL vs Cable Era**
2006 - Kaiserslautern, Germany - DSL w/1Mbps
2009 - Kaiserslautern, Germany - Cable Modem w/6Mbps
**Verizon FIOS Era**
2010 - Tampa, FL - FIOS w/25Mbps (with an option for 35Mbps)

:)

I had bluelight.com for awhile. Internets fo free.

Did the C64 300 baud some back in mid 80's (bbs in Ottumwa, Iowa). When we moved didn't know anyone running a bbs (small town) that was a local number so that stopped that.

1998 we got dial up. Then early 2002 moved to high speed cable.

I honestly can't remember exactly when I first got dial-up internet, but it was probably either 96 or 97. Before that I was logging in to various BBS when I was in my early-teens to play games like LORD & PLANETS, and chat. What a wasted youth. :D

Wow, I guess I was a late bloomer (dialup in summer of '01 and high speed in '03). I had access at work and school before that of course.

I had internet in 93 or 94 while in law school. I distinctly remember finding out that Cobain died online - the first major news I ever learned online.

Yes. I know we had cable modem access when we moved into the new house in 2001. In the old house, it was dialup but think we changed to cable modem there also at the end.

I still have my prodigy username ingrained in my head. JBBJ82C

I still remember switching from a 300 to a 14.4k modem. LIGHTNING FAST!!!

We did 1200->2400->56k if I remember correctly.

And we had a NINE HUNDRED MEGABYTE drive on our BBS!!

I think I had a 300 baud back for compuserve in the 80s, but I honestly don't remember for sure. That was parents though so doesn't count. :) I personally owned in college a 2400 -> 9600 -> 14.4k -> 56k

Then from the 56k, I ended up getting two modem lines and 3com had a pretty cool device called an officeconnect modem that would bond two phone lines into one connection as long as your ISP supported it. You didn't actually get 56k connectivity back then though and usually were lucky to get much over 33.6k. Usually it topped out at about 43kbps for anyone using a 56k modem. But with this office connect modem and dual bonded phone lines, I got almost 75kbps speed!

I g ot net access when mosaic was the browser of choice. Actually, I've been on the net since the WWW exploded. Around 16 years i would guess.

I remember how much of a pain it was to get local dialup to work with my Amiga

My dad was a programmer for Tandy (Radio Shack) for over 20 years. Back in the late 70s, he was one of the first telecommuters. We had a TRS-80 Model 3 with one of those acoustic coupler modems that he used to connect back to the office.

You're in a desert and you see a gas station...

:D :D :D

How did this slip through the cracks?

Good god man, how did you survive all the way until 2008 on a dial-up modem?

He was distracted by the dancing baby.

thread win

heh...I'm *still* using my Prodigy username. :)

You just blew my mind

300 baud? Luxury. In my day we connected to a BBS in my basement with a long string and a 3 baud modem. It took 23 hours to connect and then you were dropped out after 5 minutes. And we were happy to have those five minutes.

Of course I did, how the hell else was I gonna download 20,000 Aimee Sweet pictures?

Even with the target audience in mind, I'm blown away by the results of this poll. I seem to remember that I had at least as many friends who DIDN'T have net access as who did back in 2000.

See, I don't remember any who didn't have it.

Was first "on line" back in the early to mid eighties. Had these rubber cups you put over a telephone handset. It was just the cost of a telephone call and connected to user groups for the BBC Micro home computer. Had Compuserve in the early 90s - I recall them suddenly opening up their system to something called "the web".

I started in the BBS scene back in 1984, and my first type of connection with the internet was sometime around 1990. I'm one of the grumpy old men of the internet.

We did have dial up internet at home.

I thought it was so random how you knew my friend corey. I guess there really weren't many users back then. He told me how they had cable internet back in like 94. I think we didn't have a local number for dial up til about 98ish.