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HarryT posted earlier that ARPANET began in 1962. And he's right, mostly. That's when the project began. The ARPANET expanded to two sites in the late 1960s (1968, IIRC, but I may not RC), then to four sites the following year. Those first four were USC (the University of Southern California), MIT (you know who...), BB&N (Bolt Beranik and Newman, who were the prime contractor for the ARPANET IMP processors, which ran the actual networking code), and the University of Utah. I forget the order in which those four institutions connected up, except that BB&N was one of the first two and UofU was fourth.
I first "got on the Internet" about two months after UofU was connected. I was 6 or 7 at the time. My father was a professor of Computer Science at UofU; his brother was a researcher at BBN. My uncle wrote a little math tutor program that ran on one of the computers at BBN. I would pick up the telephone that sat on the teletype in my Dad's home office, dial the magic phone number to connect to the computer at the University, and then painstakingly type the magic sequence of gibberish that got me connected up to the math tutor program (conveniently taped to the teletype, just above the keyboard). Then I'd happily sit there for hours doing arithmetic.
A little math problem would appear on the teletype. I'd think a bit, and then answer it. If I got it right, the bell on the teletype would go "DING DING DING DING DING!" If I got it wrong, the paper tape punch on the teletype would write out about 2 feet of all-ones -- making a sound like a very loud raspberry: "Thppppppppt!" As I answered correctly, the problems got more difficult. If I started making mistakes, they got easier.
I've been "on the net" more or less continuously since then.
So that little math tutor program, which never had more than three users -- me, plus two of my cousins (my older sister was already doing more advanced math) -- is my entry in the "Old Internet" sweepstakes. Thanks for triggering this trip down memory lane!
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