Longest period of time you went without internet?

I started using it in 1996, when it had become mainstream enough so that dedicated cyber-cafes opened up even in my city. Since the hourly rate at the time was something like 1000 drs/h (about 3 euros in today's prices or $4 by the exchange rate of the day, and that was for using a leased 28.8 kbps line shared between the cyber cafe's 5 or 6 PCs!), I went in maybe 1 or 2 times a week until I finished high school in 1998.

During the first couple of years at uni, I only had regular free access from the uni's labs whenever I had a CS course (Linux labs with semester-only passwords, usually the 1st one) so I was internet-less during the spring-summer semester until I went back home for vacations, that is, 4-6 months at a time. Still, we're talking about using it once or twice a week on cyber cafes. There were no "free dial-up" plans then, you needed a monthly subscription and the such and due to my mobility, it was not worth it.

After that, internet access has been much more regular due to permanent logins for 2nd/3rd-year students and above, and from having a limited-time Linux login "for educational purposes" I eventually got to having my own dial-up (gasp!) at home, and later DSL.

Going to the army wasn't half as bad as I imagined, as during any leave I could go to the nearest cyber cafe (even small villages have those by now), and since my cadet training included a month-long detachment to a C4I Officers' school and daily leaves in Athens...it was not an issue.

To cut the crap, the longest I have stayed without *any* internet since I discovered it was maybe 4-5 months, and during the army it never went past 10 days or so.

1979-1996 (possibly 97)

In the beginning I just used internet at school once in a while. But I think that 6 months is a safe bet.

between summer of 2003 to summer of 2004 I was pretty much never online (maybe a handful of times). By choice. But I had internet.

kristus said:

1979-1996 (possibly 97)

C'mon, we're talking since it was actually mainstream (let's say, post-gopher and with WWW commonplace, unless you were already hacking at it with hardcore UNIX during the 80s).

I edited while you were typing. :p

kristus said:

By choice.

Booooooo


3 months off and on really, like summer 2003.

Probably no more than a few weeks.

I've only had highspeed for about a year now. Before that, I had dial-up which was dreadful. It's really hard to do anything with 3kb/s internet and sharing it with 4 other people. So, 13 years of on and off (mostly off since I wasn't allowed to use it most of the time) internet for me.

Shit. Probably a week for me.

Dreadopp said:

I've only had highspeed for about a year now. Before that, I had dial-up which was dreadful. It's really hard to do anything with 3kb/s internet and sharing it with 4 other people. So, 13 years of on and off (mostly off since I wasn't allowed to use it most of the time) internet for me.

Pretty much this. My family only had one computer hooked up to dialup, which we only used for typing reports, doing research for papers and stuff, and for my mom to check her e-mail. It wasn't until about 2-3 years ago when we got two new computers and DSL that I really started to go on the internet regularly.

Several weeks, if not up to a month.

A week.

Well we started using the internet in like 94-95, then before that we were using Prodigy and I think Telnet, since the late 80s. Before we had IE though, it was probably several months of gaps between using it since it was horribly slow and hogged the landline (we basically just used it to order books at the library and to download shareware games). In the days of IE when we still had dialup, I still used it sparingly, but usually once every week or so. Since then, I think the longest I've been off it was a a few weeks due to crappy dial-up or because I was on vacation (and I'm not one of those people who brings technology with me when I'm vacationing...maybe just my game boy and cell phone).

That's kind of sad though now that I think about it.

A couple of months, probably a half year. I am not sure about that.

well, didn't get internet until around 2000, it was only dial up. I've only had "high speed" internet since last year. I was out about 2 weeks.

Really anytime I visited my grandparents until 2008. Probably 2-3 weeks at most there. They had AOL and it didnt even go nearly 56k and using it for anything at all except e-mail was useless so I never did. My family has had internet of some sort since I was about 4 or 5 years old, first a University connection, then AOL, then Compuserve, then broadband. I imagine I used internet things before most of you, probably about 1993 and 1994. Actually no wait I think there was a good six months or so in 1995 when we left Austin that we had nothing. Then AOL started mailing discs to us and that was remedied.

About a couple weeks at a time.
When AOL had it "Growing Pains", the only time I could get on, and it wasn't a guarantee either, was in the wee hours of the moring. (3am or so). The only regular hours I could get on, was when the Super Bowl was on. :)

A couple of weeks at most, since 1997. I intentionally will not go to a place where there is no internet access. Like people invite me out camping for a week? No way.

There was a nice gap in my connectivity when our free research-institution ISP dried up in 1998. I think we got a free ISP either in the fall of 1998 or winter of 1999. I forget the timeline. There were a few months without the net. After that the longest period was about two weeks without ADSL in 2005 because first our phone company screwed up and then dad's condo was without power for a week while he was on a business trip. Played a lot of Arx Fatalis those two weeks.

When I'm away from home I hardly ever go online. Unless there's something I need. like pay bills, I stay the hell away from the internets.

There was a period around 2002 when my parents couldn't afford to keep paying for our internet access. We didn't get it back until a couple years later, I believe. Although I know there were multiple instances where I had access to the internet from school etc, but it was mostly for school-related functions only.

I remember AOL..they sent us a disk around the time we had Windows 95. My dad installed it and was like "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT!? WORLD WIDE WAIT!" and promptly got rid of it when our time was up (and back then it was like 24 hours instead of the 600 or whatever they were giving out in the end). Yeah, you could get better internet service from tiny one-server local providers back then. Hell, some of them even gave it away for free. Seriously, I don't think our family paid for internet until we got cable.

kristus said:

When I'm away from home I hardly ever go online. Unless there's something I need. like pay bills, I stay the hell away from the internets.

Yeah, when I vacation, I do it to get away from the daily grind, which involves my daily crawl across the internets. Last time I was on vacation, I only went on the internet long enough to check my work schedule to make sure I didn't have to work as soon as I got back.

Super Jamie said:

A couple of weeks at most, since 1997. I intentionally will not go to a place where there is no internet access. Like people invite me out camping for a week? No way.

Heh, even when I went field camping for a drill with the army, I had my GPRS-enabled cell phone with me, so technically I was not without Internet even then, and in fact I used it a couple of times during that period.

I've had pre-paid dialup since 1998 (the accounts still active) and ADSL since 2004. In that time I think the longest I've been without internet access was about a week - when some moron decided to use a chainsaw to rewire the local exchange.

GreyGhost said:

some moron decided to use a chainsaw to rewire the local exchange.

The Ultimate local exchange rewiring...of DOOM!

Maes said:

Heh, even when I went field camping for a drill with the army, I had my GPRS-enabled cell phone with me, so technically I was not without Internet even then, and in fact I used it a couple of times during that period.

I've had internet-capable phones with 2G/3G for a few years now, though they were Nokia phones with Symbian so they were fairly slow, and I didn't have a data plan anyway. I mostly used them for emergency IMAP when I really really needed email.

I recently got a HTC Magic (aka G2) with Android and a 1Gb/month data plan. This has been absolutely no help to curbing my internet addiction, quite the opposite. It rules so much.

I first got on the net in 1997. Early January 2008 all through August 08, I didn't have the net at home.

I first got an internet connection in 2000, but it was a really bad dial-up service with a 5 hour a month (!) limit. Then in about 2003 we finally got a cable connection. I was 13 and very naive.

First got a dial up internet connection provided by Freeserve in 1998 when i was still in primary school, got broadband with Freeserve (which soon became Wanadoo) in roughly 2003 which seemed lightning fast after the hideous speed of dial up. Then in 2005 I moved house, so we had to change our telephone number and move our internet connection to the new number. Wanadoo was for want of a better word an enormous pile of shit run by some cunt chimps who couldn't for the life of them perform the simple service of providing us internet at our new house. We were without internet for 7 months before we gave up trying to reclaim our money from Wanadoo (now Orange broadband) and moved to BT who have been practically flawless.

That was a long 7 months with no internet access what so ever.

Krispavera said:

really bad dial-up service with a 5 hour a month (!) limit

Wow. Just wow. And I thought that the 3 hour limit per dial-up session was bad. Sounds like they fucked up settings on the ISPs end, no kind of congestion and resource contention level can justify a cumulative monthly 5-hour limit per user, at least for any seriously equipped ISP.

That would only kinda make sense if that "ISP" (if it could be called that) had exactly as many users as would fit in a month with 5-hour slots (that is slightly less than 5 users per day) and only one connection line but seriously, who would even start an "ISP" business with such limited resources? Sounds more like the infrastructure for a BBS, rather than an ISP.

What is more probable, you were paying for a montly plan that only included 5 "free" hours, and any time beyond that would be charged extra on the ISP, although I have no idea how bad that could go.

I think the service was being provided through VFW magazine. That could mean something, but you're probably right about the 5 free hours with time beyond that adding extra charge. I was 9 in 2000, so anything my parents told me was right at that time.