Gosh you have been on forums for a long time, Mags! Emails fascinated me (having only previously used letters) and the fact that someone across the world could receive one and respond within the day! 
I have been online since the mid-90s. Started using it for email exchange and posting to newsgroups on the Usenet with a modem. Got my first PC in 1990 using MS-DOS. It was more fun in 1993 when I bought a Windows 3.1 PC. The breakthrough for me was in 1995 with a multi-media Windows 95 PC and an internet hook-up. My first email provider was GMX and still is. I still remember the hassle of using either Word, Lotus, Wordstar, or Wordperfect and the incompatibility of more complex files produced with each of them.
You wonder (well, I wonder) how these programs were invented in the first place…I mean the formula’s needed for calculations. Even coding itself interests me - kids get taught it at school these days, but it just looks gobbledegook to me! :shock:
That’s lovely Tiff, and good for the clever folk who started their own forums…must have been a big deal back then I think. 
Oh I had a CB when I was younger and living out in the country…all I ever spoke to were people from school, when what I really wanted was a huge aerial in the garden so I could chat to people from all over the world! It was fun 
Did you take to it well, Bratti?
That sounds so cool, Bruce! Yes I remember the storage space being so vast in the early days! Kb, gosh its a blip nowadays! When I transferred music to a music player the first time, it could hold about 100 songs and I was amazed! (Having previously hauled around a CD player with accompanying array of CD’s). Then I read a scifi short story where the character had this weird contraption on which she could read a screen like a book, and flick the screen as if she was turning the pages. I was horrified at such an idea and hoped it would never be invented…ah well…!
Dachs, it seems that Lotus has been around forever too! GMX as an email provider? Never heard of them, but its brilliant that they are still going after all this time.
It was in 1983 that I got started. Before Excel and Lotus 123 there was VisiCalc and Multiplan.
1983, Mr Magoo?? :shock: Good grief I don’t think I had even used an electric typewriter by that time! I would love to know what computers were like back then…were they easy to use?
We had one of those aerials on the roof, it wasn’t strong enough to get abroad but I got to chat to fairly local people.
Some time in the early 90’s I bought my first green-screen IBM computer complete with floppy disc drive and ribbon printer to help with my studying at the time & I think it was dial-up internet along the lines of Freeserve (or maybe AOL) on a 14.4k modem that was as slow and as noisy as heck.
By necessity they would have seen my first use of email too though to be honest I can’t remember now what that would have been, but almost certainly it would have been education-related.
Primarily my first computer purchase was to help with my assignments & there might have been a touch of laziness involved because printing my work out was obviously so much easier than writing it by hand.
(I’m still no typist so a typewriter was a no-no for me.)
I remember upgrading to Windows 95 which came in a boxfull of floppy discs back then & cost a small fortune and in those days I used Corel Wordperfect which was, from memory, considered better in those days than the competition.
The coming of CD’s for programmes was a revelation and when publications like Computer Shopper started with what could be genuinely useful freebies on a CD … well, thems were the days. 
Those early experiences started me off building my own computers, something I’ve carried on with up until the last few years.
Technology has advanced significantly since those early days although in real terms the changes have been almost scarily rapid.
In about the same time period we’ve gone from vinyl (which strangely remains popular even now) and cassette tapes to cd’s to Spotify & similar and from VHS tapes to DVD’s then bluray and on to Netflix etc.
From phones with a wire almost exclusively supplied by BT that you had to use in your home to brick-sized cordless monsters with long aerials to todays smatphones that have computing power far in excess of my first computer
:shock:
As for forums like this, well back in the day there was AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and Yahoo Messenger by the turn of the century and I used to chat to people from all over the world on those in a variety of different chat rooms so in some ways some things haven’t changed very much.
First one I bought was the cheaper BBC one £200, I then got the Sinclair tablet one.
Our first computer was the Acorn Electron, bought in the early 80s, promoted as the ‘little brother’ of the BBC Computer. All the advertising hype was that it would run all the same educational software as the BBC one, so we bought it with that in mind for our kids. It didn’t, however, and the available software designed for it was very minimal, so I resorted to typing yards and yards of code to create programs for it. God was that tedious, and nine times out of ten a complete waste of time when it resulted in such a simplistic pointless program that no-one wanted to use :roll:
Fast forward to the early 90s when I bought a PC running Windows 3.1, and around a year later connected to the internet with dial-up AOL. Cue moans from the family when they wanted to use the phone. And by God wasn’t it expensive if you ran over! I think we had something like 15 minutes use before the meter started ticking…
All such a far cry from today’s technology, and even after nearly 30 years, I continue to be impressed that I can sit here and type this out and post on a forum for people to read, immediately, anywhere in the world. Our grandchildren, of course, know no different and I often wonder how they would adapt to a world without technology - having to go to the library to look things up, having to take rolls of film to the chemist to have them developed, having to wait for mum or dad to get off the only phone in the house so they could ring a friend, having to listen to the radio for news of school closures in bad weather, having to physically go to their friends’ houses and knock on the door to speak to them. The list goes on…
If you look at the “History Of The Internet” at this site:-
I can claim to have been involved in most of the stages (including the Morse keys shown at the beginning - although I was only using that from 1955).
By the mid to late 1950s, IBM had (starting with their Retain System) computer communications (messages, etc)going on between company offices.
Must be getting old!
:surprised:
Technology certainly has changed so quickly…I remember the floppy discs, and the freebies that came with magazines - they were really good! Its funny you mention the brick sized mobile phones…I was watching early fools & horses and Del boy had the most enormous phone that he proudly took out and hoisted the antenna waaaaay up! I was daft enough to buy a minidisc player (because it was Japanese and cute) but they didn’t really take off over here. Such a shame.
Were they the first tablets then, Galty?
Oooh I admire you being able to write code, Sheba - do you do it now, and if so…has it changed? Simplified? Its something I would love to do, but the seeming complexity of it puts me off a bit.
I often wonder how the younger folk today would cope without technology…I have seen blogs advising to switch off everything for a week or so and see how you cope , or doing exactly that and coming back online to relate the experience(!) How ironic! Its weird how you just adapt to the changes because eventually you “have” to. I remember we went a while with no TV and people thought we were bonkers…“what do you do with yourselves?” they asked, heh
I bought my daughters a BBC Electron as a Christmas present in about 1985 so they could learn about “programming” as it was called back then. After my ex and I split, I bought a 2nd hand BBC B from an American colleague and added 2 EPROMS to it so I could run spreadsheets and a word processor. I also bought a dot matrix printer. I “upgraded” to a used IBM machine from work that had 2 floppy drives.
When we returned to the UK, I bought a Windows model from an advert I saw in the papers. This came with a 56k modem so, this was my 1st foray into the WWW. That was in December 1997.
Ok, now this has surprised me! I had no idea that computers were on the go as far back as the 1950’s! How do you feel being part of that, Ted, and seeing just how far we have come along since your early input?
Oooh Percy, that sounds so great for your daughters! Did they learn well, or did it gather dust after a while? Also…I’m curious what you used Eproms for (having looked it up and feeling all technological now) Its erasable and read only, so does that mean you can’t input into it?