Hey Pandas, How Long Have You Been Online?

At some point before second grade. Subsequently, I learned my first swear words from A certain infected eye that was in Free Guy.

Closing in on 8 years of being online, 2 of which I have spent on BP

I grew up under a pile of rocks. I don't understand most pop culture references. I've had a bp account for a few months but was lurking for a while before that. Bored panda is my main and probably only media source other than streaming services. So if it's not on bp, please assume that I don't know it.

so far, 8 minutes.

One year. I decided to join BP today, though I have hung around BP for ~9 months

Since I was 9 and started researching torture online for fun 😂 🫣

I was introduced to You Tube by someone showing me the original South Park animation, I think before the first episode aired, but it might have been when I was home for break during that first season. (Oh my god, it's Brian Boitano!)

Let's see...carry the one...divide by the square root of turquoise...about 25 ish years? I'll put it this way, I used to go to the Oracle of Kevin Bacon. You could put in a TV or movie star to get the " degrees of separation" between any two celebrities, not just the one who started it all, Kevin Bacon. From that site grew IMDB.

I've been online since my PC was a screaming Windows 3.1 with a lightning fast 14.4k modem. I had a whopping 250MB HDD and I was a BAD A*S, Yo!

....

And I didn't have AOL; I had Errols, which meant my 14.4kbps modem was in actuality probably like, I dunno, 6.2kbps? LOL

I've been online since 1994, but that was with a Pentium 1 computer.

Before that, it was my Mom's Commodore 64 and a baud modem! She also still had a big dot matrix home printer (with perforated, holed edges and the box with the paper was reamed which means you could tear it along more perforations but it would feed seamlessly into the printer) not to mention the use of floppy disks. I don't mean those hard plastic small ones, I mean the 5 - 7 inch jobbies that really WERE "floppy".

I learned BASIC, COBOL, etc. from my Mom. Learning DOS was another huge one. She was a computer programmer/systems analyst, and saved up a BUNCH of money back in the day to get the Commodore 64. I used it for all kinds of things with her help. Making team banners, compiling data for reports. There also games you could play, using a joystick!

I forget the name of the game now, but it was something along the lines of like, Indian Jones. You were an explorer, and had to navigate up through levels (not different screens, LITERAL levels), etc. It was fun!

Accessing the internet pre-1994 was doable, took ages, but honestly there wasn't a whole heck of a lot there. Even when I got my Pentium in 1994, the internet was still really shallow for information in general. For example, searching for information on the black panther animal didn't really yield anymore results or new information that the books at the library did.

It was definitely a step above the encyclopedias at the time, but it was still nothing to really write home about.

Macs were starting to circulate too, around the mid-90's and these are what my school decided to go with, which threw another learning curve. In middle school, it was PC's and then high school it was Macs, which I had no real experience with, even though the Commodore was Apple. The technology just changed SOOOO fast, and it's still like that today.

Website based chatrooms used to be the norm, and there was TONS of them. Hacking used to be so much easier, too. Before there was Skype, there was a program called POWWOW which let you connect up to 6 people into a video/chat/phone call. It ran slow as s**t, people couldn't talk over one another, but it worked great for us at the time. We loved it.

Usenet, Gopher, Angelfire, Geocities, IRC... I remember seeing Java, Javascript, CSS, etc. all come into being and learning about them and playing around with them. It was just a fun time for learning.

My folks, and the folks of my friends who had computers, never really cared overly much what we were doing online. We had free rein and we definitely took full advantage of it.

I miss those days...

My parents are really strict but I got a lot of social medias this summer and I started watching YouTube in sixth grade. Before that I wasn’t allowed to even watch tv

I got Instagram when I was eight which was a horrible idea on my parents part, so that's six years if my math is mathing correctly (I no longer have Instagram, I'm making significantly better decisions). I was probably using Google before that, but I can't really pin down any exact date

Let's see: 1989 was 35 years ago....goodness, I'm old. Using my roommate's Tandy 1000 (w/ an amazing 8088 processor running at a whopping 20 MHz) and a 2400 baud modem got me on to local BBS's in Atlanta as wells as Prodigy - one of the precursors to the internet...

By my best guess, 6 or 7 years. Started using my device for school, and then for home to write with, and then I found some websites that I liked. I got on here two years ago, but only made an account last year.

Too long, probably