It’s interesting to recollect my experiences “getting connected” over the years, and see how technologies have changed since then.
I first got ‘online’ as an undergraduate freshman in NTU in 1992, receiving my first email account then. It was an S71******@ntuvax.edu.sg email account IIRC, and checking email was through a clunky UNIX command line interface. In 1994 I got my first 19.2K smart modem and was able to connect to the larger world from home.
The phone line I used was the home one, so there were frequent disconnections when someone tried dialing in. So I installed a separate phone line into my room. Now that annoyed my mum a little, though she was relieved that the Singtel technician did an amazing job hiding the newly laid wires.
I stayed on these modems for a couple of years, upgrading from 19.2K to 33.6K and finally to 56K modems. Those things were expensive back then, each costing a few hundred, and too susceptible to lightning shocks which fried one or two of them. Then I instaled a little-known ISDN2 setup in 1997 (?) which was loads more stable than the old phone modem connections. Then two years later changed to an ADSL connection in 1999 (I think), then Starhub Maxonline which I’ve been on since 2001, and that year bought equipment to setup a wireless network at my family home in Lentor too.
The other ‘milestone’ is this web site. The first pages of this site went online in 1995 and was hosted on Singnet. HTML code generators were really rudimentary back, so I wrote the web page code entirely using Notepad LOL. I even created a subsidiary web site for my small group Salmon Run in 1996, and got friends in the group to write articles.:)
Continued in the next post!
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