When I started using the Internet

I'm just a little too young to have been there at the "beginning." I never used Usenet or subscribed to any BBS's. I was there on Q-link, though. It was the only online service for the Commodore64. I remember dialing in with a 300 baud modem and how happy we were to UPGRADE to 1200 baud (that's 1.2K of your 54K modem that's so slow today). In those days, I remember how exciting it was to play online games with people all over the world. It really was amazing. My dad and I liked to play Rabbit Jack's Casino on Q-link. I remember dad going and waking up mom late at night to tell her he'd won 20,000 Q-chips. She was not impressed.



Q-link faded away as the Commodore did and we moved on to Prodigy and Compuserve with our new 80-Mhz 386 PC Then one day we got a letter in the mail saying that the $99 _lifetime_ membership that my dad had bought from Q-link would be honored as a 5 hour/month credit towards their new company--America Online. We actually had 5 free hours a month for a number of years with AOL after that.