Its Saturday night, and the news from Washington is worthy of despair (as usual), so its time for something less serious.
I'm curious to know when you were first online, and if anyone remembers the pre-internet days of online culture.
I often forget this myself, but I was first "online" in the earlier 1980s (1983 first as I recall) when I was still in grade school, with a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe, and 300 baud modems. Back then the internet was mostly the province of the DOD, but there was a vast network of mostly personally run and maintained BBSs throughout the country and all over the world that anyone could access provided you didn't mind the long distance phone calls (after the first $100 phone bill got me seriously busted I would learn that paying for long distance calls wasn't entirely necessary...not like I ever made use of this knowledge...of course). There were corporate services as well like Compuserve and later Prodigy, but most of us stayed away from them.
Online culture was at that point already taking shape in some rudimentary form, with software trading, chat, and information about hacking and phreaking widespread, and forums devoted to everything under the sun (although being in grade school at the time I can't imagine I had much of anything to say...though what's changed?). My first alias was the digital phantom (after the Phantom Tollbooth - my favorite book at the time...in retrospect Milo would've been way cooler but sue me I was nine). I would even meet one of my lifelong friends in that world.
For a few years I spent literally hours every day immersed in the BBSs, but sadly much of that culture has probably been lost. I sold my early computers years ago (for a new surfboard) and I assume that little of what was produced during that period has been stored and catalogued. Its a shame (especially since my own memory of this time is so hazy) because it would be an almost invaluable window into the earliest manifestations of digital culture. It wouldn't be until the mid 1990s and I was in college that I would get on the internet (my first use of the net was in 1994 at a forum on the internet and political organizing in San Francisco) and while I'm interested in hearing from everyone I'm particularly interested in hearing comments from people who were a part of the BBS world in the 1980s.