Ah, the days of the "local" freenet based out of Tallahassee. That was circa 1993-1994 for me. I was 14 in 94. We got our first actual computer with a modem, a

Ah, the days of the "local" freenet based out of Tallahassee. That was circa 1993-1994 for me. I was 14 in 94. We got our first actual computer with a modem, a Macintosh Performa 635CD. 2400 baud dialup modem. The first time I connected to an online service was fun. My cousin was over and we had pooled our money($20) to buy the Internet Phone Book. Thick book filled with several thousand websites. It came with a CD that offered dialup access to a company in Portland. Obviously my mom had a problem with long distance fees, so we ditched that before we started. I had no software to actually do a connection, but my computer came with Clarisworks. Clarisworks actually had a COM program built into it. I got the number for the Tallahassee freenet from my local library. After a lot of trial and error we were able to type in the right modem commands (ADTD... etc) and it dialed up. Woot, we were "online"! Pretty quickly we figured out about local BBS's. Spent most of 94 and into 95 on those. By this time had upgraded to an actual telnet client. One of the BBS's also offered dialup PPP access. Finally got that working in late 94 and was on the Internet itself finally. My cd from the Internet Phone Book had a copy of Mosaic 1.0, so I installed that. Then we loaded our first webpage. Forget what it was, but it took forevvvvver to load. Spent a lot of time over the next couple years on BBS's, then MUDs, and a LOT of time on IRC. As I upgraded modems over the next couple years access got a bit faster. GlobalVillage modems FTW! My first exposure to firmware was when my 28.8k GV modem was upgradable to 33.6 via a software update. Talk about me being a newb and having no idea how software could update hardware. =)