Reply #20: Oooh, a timex sinclair with a modem!

[hunter]

You were probably connected to a local BBS or something like GEnie. GEnie was a good one for computers and terminals that couldn't display eighty columns. You could set GEnie to twenty columns if you wanted too. (The timex sinclair displayed 32 columns.)

I had accounts with GEnie, Delphi, and AOL back when AOL was still based on Geoworks. I'm pretty sure Delphi was the first national service to connect to the internet. For a few years after I graduated from college and lost my student accounts I prowled the internet by the good graces of well-connected friends. (And sometimes I stretched their patience very, very thin. I always have this nagging fear that someone will out me with some link to my early witings... I was sometimes a bad dog.)



Published in The New Yorker July 5, 1993

I first logged onto "the internet" in 1979, the same year USENET was invented. Your poll doesn't go back that far, so maybe I actually helped invent the internet in some small way. I do remember I was pretty much in the way when BSD Unix was released into the wild.