The day the internet was turned on

[Adenauer]

Quattromaster said:

AB said:

My earliest memories of being online are dial up modem followed by 'Welcome to AOL'.

Same for me, about mid 1996 I think.

Same here, windows 95 on a PC at home bought from Tiny Computers in Bristol for about eight million quid.

[colonel c]

Accessing message boards on a Commodore Amiga 1200. It took ages to download a single picture. I recall running up a phone bill of over £100.

[AB]

Message Boards... some of the stuff that you stumbled across on them was horrendous!

[AB]

Adenauer said:

Same here, windows 95 on a PC at home bought from Tiny Computers in Bristol for about eight million quid.

I remember Windows 95 on a Tiny PC!

My first ever memory though is Windows 3.1 on an old IBM.

Those were the days!

A friend of mine introduced me to .onion and Deep Web stuff yesterday - am I even allowed to mention this very strange corner of the internet!?

How times change.

[vanordinaire]

I remember messing about with writing dodgy programs for a ZX 80 belonging to a school friend and loading the tape into the demo model at a local electrical shop.
Then nothing till about 1992 when I used Exel, CAD, and played Battleships at work.
Then nothing again till about 2001 when I changed jobs to a place that used e-mail. I remember my future boss asking me if I used e-mail, I didn't know what it was. She said 'You soon will and you'll wish you never had'. She was right.

[Adenauer]

AB said:

I remember Windows 95 on a Tiny PC!

My first ever memory though is Windows 3.1 on an old IBM.

Those were the days!

A friend of mine introduced me to .onion and Deep Web stuff yesterday - am I even allowed to mention this very strange corner of the internet!?

How times change.

When I was bored during work I'd bung in the CD 'The Oregon Trail'

Jesus that was seriously st

[AB]

Adenauer said:

'The Oregon Trail'

Jesus that was seriously st

But weirdly addictive!!

[AndrewEH1]

sooty61 said:

Chris Type R said:

I remember when it had to be @googlemail.com due to a domain dispute.

SWMBO still uses hers - refuses to switch to gmail for some reason she is not prepared to divulge.

There is no difference between gmail and googlemail now.

I still type googlemail when giving my email just because I feel it looks better...

[Adenauer]

AB said:

Adenauer said:

'The Oregon Trail'

Jesus that was seriously st

But weirdly addictive!!

Until you got dysentery

[eliot]

Went to the National Computer Museum at Bletchley park yesterday - very enjoyable, as well as colossus etc, they had all the computers from the 80's - most of them are working and you can play around with them.
There was a platter from a hard disk, stored a couple of hundred meg - it was about 4 foot across!

[21TonyK]

Started in 1980 with the ZX-80 and by 1984 had a proper IBM PC on permanent loan from my Dads office. Played around with comms and control with BBCs, build a modem, buggies and light pens etc Dabbled with CompuServe and running various dubious BBS after being suspended from college in 1987 for using the college "network" to send messages to other students. Then one day I was introduced to the LEA network and it all went down hill from there!

[andy-xr]

minimalist said:

I am quite pleased with myself that I was in early enough to get [e-mail]

One of our techies at work sent me a beta invite to Gmail, I had no idea what it was at the time but he told me I should have one so I signed up. I got firstname.surname but could have had first name and first initial (ie [e-mail])

I think I first started out online around 98/99'ish with Netscape and gateway PC on dial up. Painful, but loved trolling the st out of handbag.com

[RossP]

Anyone remember freenetname? A dial up ISP where you could get your own domain... for free!

I managed to get mysurname.co.uk, then I had to wait for freenetname's registration on it to expire so I could actually buy it (after they went bust).

[Alex]

I've got [e-mail], [e-mail] and firstname on Pistonheads.com.

[LukeR94]

Alex said:

I've got [e-mail], [e-mail] and firstname on Pistonheads.com.

You dont know how envious of you I am.

As far as I am aware, there is only 2 people on earth with my name Luke R****** (According to Facebook and some basic digging on the internet) its a pretty unique name, ive never met anyone with my surname. The bloody other guy is a manager of a food restruant in Washington DC. He has Luker******@gmail.com LukeR******@yahoo.co.uk and also Youtube/LukeR****** and Facebook/LukeR****** and many others im sure.

Cant wait till he pops it so I can have my birthright email address. Who does he think he is.

[HTP99]

Not sure of the year when I had my first memory of the internet but I know it was at home on the PC that my mum's work lent her; I should imagine it was the early 90's.

Mum and dad were out so I decided to have a look for prawn; as you would do when you are a teenage male with access to this magical device that can get dirty pictures, I remember it took bloody ages to download with dial up.

What I didn't realise was it stored your search history in the search bar; until I noticed, I panicked and just couldn't work out how to clear the history so in the end I had to leave it and hope that mum didn't notice; she did and I got an almighty bking, not for looking at prawn but looking at it on her work PC using work provided and paid for dial up.

[Trif]

Hub said:

Got the internet at home in about 98, built up huge phone bill for daytime use while on exam study leave - oops. We then switched to one of the first subscription based free off peak ones, but you could hardly connect at 6pm! Freeserve or 'worldonline' can't remember which.

I remember being on Freeserve dial up around that time. We had a separate phone line installed for internet and left it on auto dial. I also remember downloading a film at a rate of a couple hundred meg a day.

[krallicious]

I first had the internet in 1994 and was with Compuserve. 100546.554 was my very first email address.

I think that I would be locked up now if I tried to find some of the st that I used to look up when I was a pervy 12 year old!

[Blib]

colonel c said:

Accessing message boards on a Commodore Amiga 1200. It took ages to download a single picture. I recall running up a phone bill of over £100.

The same. I used to play the original Essex uni. MUD online (Compuserve) from my home in North London. That must have been in '81 or '82.

[steviegunn]

70s:
Binatone "pong" game

80s:
Apple II at school
ZX81 Spectrum, VIC20, Amstrad CPC 464, Atari ST through the 80s
VAX/VMS COBOL, Amstrad PC/W Word Processors & BBC Micros for PASCAL & Machine Code at Uni & JANET
First work PC a "portable" Toshiba T3200 in 1989 on works LAN

90s:
Gateway 286 PC with dial up (32kbs) around 1992 (Compuserve, Alta Vista, Webcrawler, Netscape, etc)
Spent early 90s developing Sat Nav positioning and tracking software before moving into ERPs and B2B/B2C online applications and portals
Moved through various PCs, laptops and now tablets

00s:
Mostly 10 years as a Technical Consultant with Oracle, first dedicated ADSL home line then Broadband and Wireless BB

10s:
Given up the tech side and now a Programme Manager in eLearning