10 years online - my story

The Early days
Those early days were a lot different from now. Using dial-up to access a BBS was something magical. The sound of the modems interacting or, as I called it: the "mating call of the modem", was so recognizable. After a while I was even able to recognize by the pitch of the sound what speed my connection was. I mostly did it to get my hands on PC games and software. I had an Intel 286 12mhz PC with a whopping 20 megabyte hard disk. Back then it cost me about 3000 guilders and another 500 guilders for the matrix printer I bought with it. I used Word Perfect 5.1 (I started out with with version 4.3 or so), and was running DOS 4.0 or something.

I would have loved to use a Mac back then (the Mac Classic model), but I could just not afford them; even back then they were a lot more expensive then regular DOS PC's. Nowadays I use a Mac at my work (Powerbook G4), and several PC's at home. Both speed and storage (hardware) have multiplied enormously while prices have stayed somewhat the same.

Back then multitasking was almost unknown of in the PC world (in the mainframe world it was normal off course) except for some program from Quarterdeck Desqview that ran on top of DOS on a Intel 386 together with QEMM-386 and made it possible to ‘switch’ between tasks (programs). It was the time of OS/2 and big mainframes. The Internet already existed, but it was mostly text based and using a shell account was about it.

Downloading a ZIP file (yeah: that's how old ZIP is!) took forever with my 2400 baud modem. I remember that I wanted to buy a 14k4 modem that was roughly 8 times faster, but they cost a fortune (almost a 1000 guilders), so I upgraded to 9600 baud. Off course dialing into a BBS wasn't cheap either: you had to pay for every minute online thanks to KPN (or PTT Telecom as they were called back then).

My First E-mail
In early 1995 I started to become interested in this new phenomenon called Internet. On January 15, 1994, De Digitale Stad ("The Digital City") opened the result of a joint venture by De Balie, the Amsterdam cultural center, and XS4ALL. DDS was a Free-Net, a free system open to the public. The aim of DDS was to bring politics and citizens together in an online community. It was my first e-mail address ever, but you could not mail worldwide: only within Holland.

Then in April or May 2005, by chance, I met Jan Jacobs, a former journalist and publisher. He had just started a Dutch Internet company called Riverland Networks together with some Dutch and Belgium partners. I started to work there in June '95 (I think) as an online journalist publishing my news on the website RIV.NET. That was pretty special: together with Dutch journalist Francisco van Jole and Erwin van de Zande, I was one of the first people in Holland to publish daily news about the Internet - exclusively - and only on a website.

I remember that when I started, I used Windows 3.11 (aka Windows for Workgroups) and Windows NT 3.51 together with Netscape 1.22 and some weird program called 'trumpet winsock'. Later that year I witnessed the introduction of Windows 95 in Holland. I got it for free with my press kit, together with a copy of Office 95. Both on a bunch of 3.5" floppy disks.

Early adaptors
The World Wide Web back then was also know as the "World Wide Wait" and the phone bill you would get (using dial-up) was killing. Roughly 1 percent of all Dutch were online: mostly young men (IT-students). There were hardly any Internet providers: Planet Internet had just started and worked mostly in and around the big cities. In hindsight it is obvious that I (No comments | 1 Trackback | Top Exits (273)

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