wow, awesome blast from the past. i was modifying my résumé for an online-oriented employer, and out of curiousity i wanted to see how long Prodigy had been around (or *P, for those who remember) to see if i had gotten my dates/years straight in my head. for those keeping track, i was on around 1991.
i ended up switching to AOL (version 1.6!) at around 1993 because they had ftp access without needing a shell account (which meant first web site!), it used the windows 3.1 UI so i didn't have to download a whole new gui every time i wanted to look at something else, and it also had archie/veronica searchable access so i could get guitar tab from sunet.se. or maybe that was a little later? i do remember the stigma of having been an aol.com email holder by internet "elitists" however (then mostly compuserve and university students). i think i had flashed my 2400 baud to 33.6 by then. does that sound right? or maybe it was 1200 to 2400.
so in 1995ish i got my first "real" dial-up service from netcom, who was subsequently purchased by mindspring, who later merged with earthlink. at least my email address didn't change through that time. enter blazing-fast 56k modem.
the rest is uneventful: earthlink DSL in 1998, interquest/ygnition T1 in 2002, and now a cable internet connection.
uh, yeah, that's enough about internet tubes for now.
* i had set up accounts for everyone in my family, but i was the only one who used the service. hence, the lowly "D" account.