My first foray into the internet started during my Amiga days, around the time that BBS’s we’re on the decline and the internet was becoming cheaper and more accessible to the masses.
I had been running my BBS for a few years, and started to notice a decline in regular callers, and that other BBS’s were sourcing software via another means than the usual BBS sharing.
I honestly cannot recall the year I got introduced to the internet hands on.
I knew of the internet via friends of my father who had it for various reasons, and while their experiences with it and the tech around it interested me, the cost put me off. It was an hourly rate, and anyone offering internet access generally would do a 40hr per month package. For someone like me, 40hrs was nothing.
During a local Amiga Auckland club meeting, I was introduced to another similar aged Amiga user who had just arrived in New Zealand from the UK, Finn (aka Niff). He soon joined my BBS and we got chatting via the BBS and catching up at the regular Amiga meetings. Then one day, he said he had the internet on his Amiga 1200.
Finn invited me around (thankfully had my license by then) to take a look.
He showed me websites, email, and the most fascinating of all to me, IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The ability to chat real time to users from all around the world appealed to me, and then what Finn showed me next in IRC blew my mind.
#amiga_warez
You name a game or application, it was available via this IRC channel, using DCC for file transfers. It was absolute heaven.
I started to look into how to get connected. It was amusing, as a lot of “geeks” claimed I could not do it as I was on a lowly Amiga 500 Plus, which would struggle with the software required. What those particular people did not know, was that while the Amiga 500 Plus aspect was true, I had upgraded it to one of what I know to be, most powerful A500 based units in the country at the time. 6MB of RAM, with a EC030 @40MHz CPU. The GVPA530 unit was a god send for A500/+ users. Going from 7MHz to 40MHz and the upgrade in RAM allowed my system to keep up with the modern software. (Stock A500 was 1MB and ‘000 @7Mhz, an A1200 was 2MB RAM and ‘020 @14MHz but a better graphics chipset)
A short time after that, I shut down the BBS, and signed up to a local IAP (Internet Access Provider – they didn’t provide any other service) SineSurf for $35 per month unlimited dial up internet.
I was soon connected and enjoying the digital globe……
The software I can recall using, was as follows :
TCP Stack / Dialler : Miami
Browser : Aweb / IBrowse
Email : YAM
IRC : AmIRC
And the rest was history as they say…. sadly my A530 unit died in the late 90’s, so I ended up on Windows 98.
But getting the Amiga on the internet was a great learning curve, which helped me learn about networking on Windows.
Still prefer some of the Amiga internet applications…..