The day the internet was turned on
Discussion
Early 80's I had a ZX81 then a BBC B Micro.
Made decent money selling computer games in school - I even employed a "minder".
I did Computer Science A level, and in my first job as an office boy at the age of 18, ended up doing data analysis on Lotus 123.
By about 1994 I was on Pipex on the internet, and was an early adopter of using the internet for holidays, booking a house in Maine, USA in about 1997.
I don't do computing for a job, but have built my wife's online retail website, which continues to go from strength to strength.
Made decent money selling computer games in school - I even employed a "minder".
I did Computer Science A level, and in my first job as an office boy at the age of 18, ended up doing data analysis on Lotus 123.
By about 1994 I was on Pipex on the internet, and was an early adopter of using the internet for holidays, booking a house in Maine, USA in about 1997.
I don't do computing for a job, but have built my wife's online retail website, which continues to go from strength to strength.
Origin Unknown said:
Jolly Rogers Cookbook
Blimey I remember that mainly using ingredients that cannot be obtained.First computer ZX81. Then started working with Apple 2, Lisa, Sage, Pinnicle, Apricot etc.
Connected with BBSs back in 1980s using modem on Apple 2.
First connected to the Internet with a company that gave a freephone connection from Friday until Monday and worked by advertising and gave an hour at a time and then you redialed. Cannot for the life of me think of the name.
Started with AutoCAD Release 10 in 1989, was employed as an engineer and on the first day, was pushed into the "Computer Room" with 3 other lads and told to learn it.
All dos driven etc
By the early 90's about half the office had PCs and then we got a Modem.
It was located in one room and if you wanted to send a drawing electronically you needed to use one guys PC connected to the Modem.
Then around 1996 we got the Internet
It was like "what's is"
Don't use it for your own use etc etc
And so slow.
All dos driven etc
By the early 90's about half the office had PCs and then we got a Modem.
It was located in one room and if you wanted to send a drawing electronically you needed to use one guys PC connected to the Modem.
Then around 1996 we got the Internet
It was like "what's is"
Don't use it for your own use etc etc
And so slow.
First computer I ever used was a BBC Micro at school in 1982. I used to go to computer club in my lunch break to try and learn programming.
My parents bought me a Commodore 64 and a portable TV in 1983 which would have cost them around £400 at the time. Looking back I have no idea how they afforded it as we were certainly far from rich at the time.
Endless years playing Ocean and US Gold games before saving up enough money to buy a Batman pack Amiga in 1989. I still remember spending hours playing FA/18 interceptor and just flying around exploring San Francisco.
I ended up doing a Computer Science degree and had my first exposure to the internet was in 1992 when everyone in the computer lab seemed to be using a message board. I setup an account and started using the Monochrome BBS which to my amazement is still going today! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_BBS
I spent £1000 on my first PC in 1992 which was a 486SX 25 with 2MB or Ram and 40MB hard drive. Spent many, many hours playing Grand Prix.
I moved in with some friends in 1997 and this is the first time I had internet access at home. I used freeserve which was 1p a minute and my monthly phone bills were around the £100 a month mark.
I used to love going to computer fairs and building my own PCs but nowadays I just want to switch the thing on and for it to work.
My parents bought me a Commodore 64 and a portable TV in 1983 which would have cost them around £400 at the time. Looking back I have no idea how they afforded it as we were certainly far from rich at the time.
Endless years playing Ocean and US Gold games before saving up enough money to buy a Batman pack Amiga in 1989. I still remember spending hours playing FA/18 interceptor and just flying around exploring San Francisco.
I ended up doing a Computer Science degree and had my first exposure to the internet was in 1992 when everyone in the computer lab seemed to be using a message board. I setup an account and started using the Monochrome BBS which to my amazement is still going today! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_BBS
I spent £1000 on my first PC in 1992 which was a 486SX 25 with 2MB or Ram and 40MB hard drive. Spent many, many hours playing Grand Prix.
I moved in with some friends in 1997 and this is the first time I had internet access at home. I used freeserve which was 1p a minute and my monthly phone bills were around the £100 a month mark.
I used to love going to computer fairs and building my own PCs but nowadays I just want to switch the thing on and for it to work.
loafer123 said:
I have firstname@surname.com as a result of owning my surname domain. Impresses/surprises alot of people when I give my email address.
People had already grabbed my surname when I registered a domain, which is surprising as it's quite unusual, so I have mail@initialinitialsurname.co.uk. Unfortunately some on line registrations say 'Please enter a valid email address' - I have to use another address for those, which is a pain. They must be looking for @btinternet or Hotmail, but how they decide what is and isn't valid I don't know.When we bought a Pentium 1 in about 1995 it was 'internet ready' so we set up email and web access, I remember thinking Why do we need email - we only knew about 2 people who had mail so it was a bit useless at the start.
loafer123 said:
Alex said:
I've got firstnamesurname@hotmail.com, initialssurname@gmail.com and firstname on Pistonheads.com. 
I have firstname@surname.com as a result of owning my surname domain. Impresses/surprises alot of people when I give my email address.Vaud said:
1988 for Minitel in France for me (precursor to WWW)
About 1990 for Prestel in teh UK
1995 for full WWW
Similar to the above, except I worked in datacomms throughout the 1980's, so for me 1984-1991 were amazing years where we developed newer modems, routers, multiplexers and both BRI + PRI ISDN. I still remember V21/300bps modems, telex/fax and even acoustic couplers. When V22bis/2400bps arrived it was a revelation...then V29/4800-9600 and good old ISDN at 64kbps or if you were lucky 128kbps. To see how the internet has developed in only 20 years is remarkable.About 1990 for Prestel in teh UK
1995 for full WWW
Morningside said:
First connected to the Internet with a company that gave a freephone connection from Friday until Monday and worked by advertising and gave an hour at a time and then you redialed. Cannot for the life of me think of the name.
XStream I think. It definitely had adverts and allowed an hour a time.Had a BBC Model A upgraded to Model B memory (16k to 32k) as a kid, and used tog et a magazine that had games in you had to type in yourself, don't think I ever got one working.
I did a year out before uni in 1991. We had 4 PC, one in my lab to run the gas analysis suite, and 3 in a computer room that were mainly used for plotting graphs. Within a year there was a PC on every desk.
I did a year out before uni in 1991. We had 4 PC, one in my lab to run the gas analysis suite, and 3 in a computer room that were mainly used for plotting graphs. Within a year there was a PC on every desk.
minimalist said:
I am quite pleased with myself that I was in early enough to get firstnamelastname@gmail.com
Same here.... but when I tried to be all smug about, no-one knew what I was talking about!Biggest thing for me was when went from dialup to half a meg.... I thought it was the fastest thing ever!
My currently connection is 80 times faster still!
I was pretty late to the game I think. I had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid and a BBC micro in school, but I progressed to consoles not long after - I remember that The SEGA Megadrive had a LAN port in the back and on the back of some boxes it showed how you could connect to other players via the telephone which just seemed otherworldly at the time - it didn't work though, I don't think it ever did.
I pretty much gave up on computers then, I saw stuff on the TV about the internet, knew what it was of course and had a PC in work, it was connected to an intranet for this horrible black screen database we had to use, we hot-desked in an office with about 500 booths in it, if you were incredibly lucky you might find one the IT dept. hadn't removed IE on and have a look, it would take about 5 mins to load the BBC homepage.
It wasn't until 2000 I actually paid much attention to it, I went backpacking for a year and everyone had "Hotmail" so I signed up and reported my whereabouts home once a week on it, my brother would print them off for my folks.
Everyone exchanged "hotmails" because it was polite to, you’d get involved in these huge round-robin e-mails with people you might have shared a dorm with 3 months prior. You wouldn't be able to pick them out of a line-up now but ballastandy79@hotmail.com would let us all know he was still in Bali diving. Back then digital cameras were expensive and crap so you'd sometimes get a blurry pic someone took on 35mm film and scanned on a flatbed scanner - it would take about 15 mins to open it in an Internet Café, which cost you $5 an hour to use, so it had better have some cleavage on show.
By this point the BBC news site let you drill down to 'local' news, or in my case news from my hometown thousands of miles away, it made me homesick, until the pics of grey skies, rain and office blocks loaded, I used to take a walk down to Sydney Harbour or sit on the beach in Noosa and smoke a little weed to get over it. When I got back to the UK I didn't have a computer in my flat, my brother had one at my Mum's places which I'd use occasionally to check my Hotmail, Ballast Andy reporting he was diving in Bali.
After a while I stopped checking it, forgot the password and there were a short list of suspects to what the address might have been, so it was lost to the mists of time.
During 2001 I joined RBS, I was now a sensible suit wearing mutha trucker, being in my early 20s I was informed that I would of course know all about computers, I'm not saying RBS was slow to change back then, but the reps on the road only got mobiles the year I joined, prior to that they were provided with change bags full of 10ps to call the office to report movements and such, even in 2007 when we got Blackberries, they were stand-alone Blackberries and a separate mobile phone. Anyway we had PCs, but they weren't connected to anything, not even an Intranet - even in 2003 the Reps (of which I was now one) still had the freedom to write finance agreements on carbon paper contracts and calculate repayments and interest rates with a calculator, or use the excel spreadsheet to do the sums for you. We printed everything out, got them signed and couriered everything to an office in Rotherham for payments to be made and repayments to be taken. Collectively my office wrote about a million pounds a month of business that way - nationally I think it would have been about £50m worth of very complex, asset secured finance agreements. I was told by someone in recoveries once that in his estimation only around 25% of the stuff we did would have been enforceable in court because of all the errors we used to make.
I think it was about 2004 we finally got newer PCs with internet connections and centralised databased and standard form contracts which couldn't be written free-hand. At this point I still didn't have internet installed at home - seems too much like work to me, so I tried to log back into Hotmail to see what had happened for the past 3 years, but either I got the address wrong, or the password, or both - I don't think there was much of a process to reset the password back then - I wonder if Ballast was still in Bali? His e-mails had taken ever darker tones over months and years and I suspected he'd taken too much nitrogen the brain and simply lost track of time because in 2 years he was still in the same hostel. I'd bet he's been the subject of a manhunt more than once since, either because his e-mails had gotten so dark and gibberish filled they'd try to repatriate him or he was wanted for questioning about something terrible.
Fast-forward a decade or so and the web has managed to leach into every part of my life, work is almost entirely online now, most of my work comes via e-mail, everything I do is cloud based and even my work phone is VIOP based, I'm tied to my smartphone like some zombie roaming the world missing everything in my surroundings as I look at it unfold on a 5" screen. Even my few hours a week being 'off-line' when I'm out on my bike riding in the woods is under attack - Strava logs my every move so I can tell everyone how far and how fast I went on Facebook, not that they care - Facebook is like a conversation between drunk girls - everyone is set to [SEND] not [RECEIVE] so I 'like' a dozen or so pics of small children in their new uniforms stood by their front door, not because I've really looked at it, but because it's polite and if they don't do the same for the pics of my kids I'd be annoyed.
I keep telling myself that I should take a few hours a day and put my phone in the drawer or just turn the bloody thing off, it hasn't happened yet - some people think that we'll continue down this road until we never leave our beds or homes, I don't, kids always rebel against whatever their parents did - I think as they get older they ignore the internet (as loudly and unsubtly as possible, they are kids after all) and spend their lives in the real world and we'll be labelled as the generation who let their life pass by while looking at someone else's on a 5" screen.
I pretty much gave up on computers then, I saw stuff on the TV about the internet, knew what it was of course and had a PC in work, it was connected to an intranet for this horrible black screen database we had to use, we hot-desked in an office with about 500 booths in it, if you were incredibly lucky you might find one the IT dept. hadn't removed IE on and have a look, it would take about 5 mins to load the BBC homepage.
It wasn't until 2000 I actually paid much attention to it, I went backpacking for a year and everyone had "Hotmail" so I signed up and reported my whereabouts home once a week on it, my brother would print them off for my folks.
Everyone exchanged "hotmails" because it was polite to, you’d get involved in these huge round-robin e-mails with people you might have shared a dorm with 3 months prior. You wouldn't be able to pick them out of a line-up now but ballastandy79@hotmail.com would let us all know he was still in Bali diving. Back then digital cameras were expensive and crap so you'd sometimes get a blurry pic someone took on 35mm film and scanned on a flatbed scanner - it would take about 15 mins to open it in an Internet Café, which cost you $5 an hour to use, so it had better have some cleavage on show.
By this point the BBC news site let you drill down to 'local' news, or in my case news from my hometown thousands of miles away, it made me homesick, until the pics of grey skies, rain and office blocks loaded, I used to take a walk down to Sydney Harbour or sit on the beach in Noosa and smoke a little weed to get over it. When I got back to the UK I didn't have a computer in my flat, my brother had one at my Mum's places which I'd use occasionally to check my Hotmail, Ballast Andy reporting he was diving in Bali.
After a while I stopped checking it, forgot the password and there were a short list of suspects to what the address might have been, so it was lost to the mists of time.
During 2001 I joined RBS, I was now a sensible suit wearing mutha trucker, being in my early 20s I was informed that I would of course know all about computers, I'm not saying RBS was slow to change back then, but the reps on the road only got mobiles the year I joined, prior to that they were provided with change bags full of 10ps to call the office to report movements and such, even in 2007 when we got Blackberries, they were stand-alone Blackberries and a separate mobile phone. Anyway we had PCs, but they weren't connected to anything, not even an Intranet - even in 2003 the Reps (of which I was now one) still had the freedom to write finance agreements on carbon paper contracts and calculate repayments and interest rates with a calculator, or use the excel spreadsheet to do the sums for you. We printed everything out, got them signed and couriered everything to an office in Rotherham for payments to be made and repayments to be taken. Collectively my office wrote about a million pounds a month of business that way - nationally I think it would have been about £50m worth of very complex, asset secured finance agreements. I was told by someone in recoveries once that in his estimation only around 25% of the stuff we did would have been enforceable in court because of all the errors we used to make.
I think it was about 2004 we finally got newer PCs with internet connections and centralised databased and standard form contracts which couldn't be written free-hand. At this point I still didn't have internet installed at home - seems too much like work to me, so I tried to log back into Hotmail to see what had happened for the past 3 years, but either I got the address wrong, or the password, or both - I don't think there was much of a process to reset the password back then - I wonder if Ballast was still in Bali? His e-mails had taken ever darker tones over months and years and I suspected he'd taken too much nitrogen the brain and simply lost track of time because in 2 years he was still in the same hostel. I'd bet he's been the subject of a manhunt more than once since, either because his e-mails had gotten so dark and gibberish filled they'd try to repatriate him or he was wanted for questioning about something terrible.
Fast-forward a decade or so and the web has managed to leach into every part of my life, work is almost entirely online now, most of my work comes via e-mail, everything I do is cloud based and even my work phone is VIOP based, I'm tied to my smartphone like some zombie roaming the world missing everything in my surroundings as I look at it unfold on a 5" screen. Even my few hours a week being 'off-line' when I'm out on my bike riding in the woods is under attack - Strava logs my every move so I can tell everyone how far and how fast I went on Facebook, not that they care - Facebook is like a conversation between drunk girls - everyone is set to [SEND] not [RECEIVE] so I 'like' a dozen or so pics of small children in their new uniforms stood by their front door, not because I've really looked at it, but because it's polite and if they don't do the same for the pics of my kids I'd be annoyed.
I keep telling myself that I should take a few hours a day and put my phone in the drawer or just turn the bloody thing off, it hasn't happened yet - some people think that we'll continue down this road until we never leave our beds or homes, I don't, kids always rebel against whatever their parents did - I think as they get older they ignore the internet (as loudly and unsubtly as possible, they are kids after all) and spend their lives in the real world and we'll be labelled as the generation who let their life pass by while looking at someone else's on a 5" screen.
I remember the IT lessons at school involving various naff mid 90's internet things.
When I really got into the web was around 2000/2001. My mate used to run Limewire on his PC and downloaded loads of porn and viruses using it. Despite the fact it was regularly wrecking his PC, it was always exciting to open the next cache and see what degenerate filth it contained. Limewire downloaders were always tapping his PC as his sister is called Jordan, so people kept downloading her photo from his computer.
When I really got into the web was around 2000/2001. My mate used to run Limewire on his PC and downloaded loads of porn and viruses using it. Despite the fact it was regularly wrecking his PC, it was always exciting to open the next cache and see what degenerate filth it contained. Limewire downloaders were always tapping his PC as his sister is called Jordan, so people kept downloading her photo from his computer.
RicksAlfas said:
I've just fired this bad boy up. Not sure what to do with it now.
http://www.trs-80.org/galaxy-invasion-plus/
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