I worked at Schwab in the early 90s and we had a sort of inter-office email/IM. It was used for flirting, to spread word that Kurt Cobain had died, and to work out inter-office drug deals. The clever dudes doing the deals were sending messages like "Hey, want to come play 8-ball at my place later?" Shockingly they were found out.

I got the first computer of my own in 95, when I went to grad school, and got online online then.

lisah, you just totally reminded me! I worked at a DC nonprofit in 1993. We used our internal messaging system to set up 4:00 PM Hearts games, which we also played online across three different floors.

We'd also sometimes plan on ganging up on people during said Hearts games via the messaging system.

We didn't even have Internet at work until 1999 or so.

Corgi. In a water park. He's so happy.

Lolo Jones is hot. And Amanda Pearce is like lightning.

I had my own mac starting in college, but no internet in the dorms yet-1993. Had to go to the labs for that, and at the time, it was vax for email and PCs, not yet on the internet. I think the PC got on network later that term. I didn't get my own internet at home until 99 or so, but I definitely was surfing when I started work in 97. NSM in college, just email. My dad had it at the house in 90 or so? For email. I don't remember, exactly, it was dialup to the university and I wasn't exactly using it. I remember being fairly uninterested in using it up at APO with mosaic.

I got the first computer of my own in 95, when I went to grad school, and got online online then.

96-97 for me, although I had a web-designer boyfriend for a couple of years before that.

I feel like this photo [link] wants a clever caption but I'm just not coming up with anything. It's not the best photo of the set (I like this one [link] )but it is probably the most pointed one.

Trying to find out the name of the old Schwab inter office IM sent me down a rabbit hole of old files I had saved in my gmail account. (Like 10 years old...old in internet time!)

I think I just printed out the Schwab messages, though, and have them in a box somewhere.

The corgi must go on goodstuff.

Yeah, you know it's been too long since you've been to the salon when they have to sweep three times while you're in the process of getting a haircut.

I remember connecting to Bulletin Boards at 300 Baud. And then at work we got a 9600 Baud modem. And at the time a lot techs said that was as fast as you would ever get on a regular phone line. And then we got an advanced modem that connected to a Cray at 48,000 Baud. And man we thought we were hot stuff. Blazing 48,000 Baud, and to a Cray yet. Uploading simulation input data to the Cray and downloading reports. And then converting those text reports into comma delimited files to upload into spreadsheets. And even more fancy, writing a little basic program to convert those text files into Autocad scripts so that we could plot precise graphs of the results on our 12 pen plotter. Rube Goldberg data processing. And then we got a PICK machine to do our accounting on ...

Oh, man, I loved those plotters that drew with pens. So much cooler than dot-matrix.