Do you remember your first days on the internet?
Discussion
Not sure why I ended up figuring this out, but I worked out I've been on the internet for pretty much bang on 20 years this week, a few weeks after my 15th birthday in March 1997 (my parents bought me a Time PC!)
I quickly discovered Usenet and spent most of my internet time on there for the first 5 years or so. I was a bit of an outcast at school for admitting that I spent an hour or so a day on the internet (now you're an outcast if you're a 15 year old not on the internet!)
I made friends on some alt horror and music groups; ended up trading the banned 'video nasties' on VHS, meeting up with complete strangers on the other side of the country to go to obscure gigs etc. Never really thought much of it at the time, we used to trade videos on Usenet using cheques (would post them off before clearing!) and never once ran into a bad egg. We also used to buy the tickets for gigs near us for whoever said they were coming down, always worked out and never out of pocket. A (slightly) simpler time!
A quick trawl through the Usenet archives and I found the same username I have now back to 2002 on Usenet, sadly can't remember the name I used prior to that.
I quickly discovered Usenet and spent most of my internet time on there for the first 5 years or so. I was a bit of an outcast at school for admitting that I spent an hour or so a day on the internet (now you're an outcast if you're a 15 year old not on the internet!)
I made friends on some alt horror and music groups; ended up trading the banned 'video nasties' on VHS, meeting up with complete strangers on the other side of the country to go to obscure gigs etc. Never really thought much of it at the time, we used to trade videos on Usenet using cheques (would post them off before clearing!) and never once ran into a bad egg. We also used to buy the tickets for gigs near us for whoever said they were coming down, always worked out and never out of pocket. A (slightly) simpler time!
A quick trawl through the Usenet archives and I found the same username I have now back to 2002 on Usenet, sadly can't remember the name I used prior to that.
Around 1997 for me much like yourself. Random early social media sites such as Uboot and some others who's names I forget. Many an hour spent chatting on MSN messenger with friends and feeling like an absolute boss having used Sub7 to get into a mates computer.
A friend who teaches IT to younger years loves asking them what the item in the save symbol is on computers and none of them know. She then produces a floppy disk and explains that it holds a whopping 1.44MB!
Back in the days of the BBC Acorn computers I'd done quite well at basic programming and on some ancient Amstrad or similar I even wrote a computer game, but in the end I gave up as I wanted to join the Army and computers were for geeks
In 2002 I remember being laughed at by all and sundry for having a touchscreen phone and being told that it would never catch on...I still have it somewhere, a right old Motorola brick.
Teaching my 80 year old stepfather how to email this afternoon, not an easy task!
A friend who teaches IT to younger years loves asking them what the item in the save symbol is on computers and none of them know. She then produces a floppy disk and explains that it holds a whopping 1.44MB!
Back in the days of the BBC Acorn computers I'd done quite well at basic programming and on some ancient Amstrad or similar I even wrote a computer game, but in the end I gave up as I wanted to join the Army and computers were for geeks
In 2002 I remember being laughed at by all and sundry for having a touchscreen phone and being told that it would never catch on...I still have it somewhere, a right old Motorola brick.
Teaching my 80 year old stepfather how to email this afternoon, not an easy task!
There used to be loads of forums for pirate software back then and it did not take long to find a copy of Doom then using Gozilla to download it. Some sites did not have resume on FTP.
Buying stuff on Yahoo auctions and then selling them on this obscure site called eBay. There were also loads of surplus companies that would sell on their site rather than ebay and you could pick up loads of bargains.
Networked Quake always good for a laugh.
Cannot remember the name of the free dialup service where over the weekend using an 0800 number you could get loads of free time and it just required adverts while browsing so you ditched their browswer and used someone elses. Then just before they closed the lines you would scramble to dial in again to get that extra 2 hours.
Then always getting moaned at due to hogging the telephone line.
I went on holiday once and browsed the internet using a 9600 dial-up modem and an Ericsson phone!
Buying stuff on Yahoo auctions and then selling them on this obscure site called eBay. There were also loads of surplus companies that would sell on their site rather than ebay and you could pick up loads of bargains.
Networked Quake always good for a laugh.
Cannot remember the name of the free dialup service where over the weekend using an 0800 number you could get loads of free time and it just required adverts while browsing so you ditched their browswer and used someone elses. Then just before they closed the lines you would scramble to dial in again to get that extra 2 hours.
Then always getting moaned at due to hogging the telephone line.
I went on holiday once and browsed the internet using a 9600 dial-up modem and an Ericsson phone!
alt.binaries.pictures... 
Compuserve.
That's how long I've been using t'internet. Since late 80's or so.
Mosaic was the first html browser I used where you could access pages. But, my word, they were slow.
oh, and the first storage I used was the 7" properly floppy discs that held 360K! The first hard disc I saw was the size of a brick and held an impressive 10mb, that would have been about 1988.
Windows 3.1 came along in about 1990 when someone at work wanted to install a copy on his desktop.
IT's all been down hill since then!
Compuserve.
That's how long I've been using t'internet. Since late 80's or so.
Mosaic was the first html browser I used where you could access pages. But, my word, they were slow.
oh, and the first storage I used was the 7" properly floppy discs that held 360K! The first hard disc I saw was the size of a brick and held an impressive 10mb, that would have been about 1988.
Windows 3.1 came along in about 1990 when someone at work wanted to install a copy on his desktop.
IT's all been down hill since then!
In a very rudimentary form for me it would've been 1992. I spent a sandwich placement actually at the Uni itself working with the Health & Safety and IT departments helping to implement new ergonomics requirements for staff at the Uni, so was frequently given access to all the new, cutting edge stuff. Amazing to think how something that looks so crap now was so ground-breaking back then!
After graduating, I went to work in the IT industry (albeit in sales), so at the age of 46, I must be amongst the oldest people in the country never to have known work without the internet, although I do still remember going to the British Library to look for potential overseas resellers in their printed copies of Kompass because the web version was so expensive that my boss ruled it out immediately.
After graduating, I went to work in the IT industry (albeit in sales), so at the age of 46, I must be amongst the oldest people in the country never to have known work without the internet, although I do still remember going to the British Library to look for potential overseas resellers in their printed copies of Kompass because the web version was so expensive that my boss ruled it out immediately.
chopper602 said:
I don't really miss the phone tones as it connected to the ISP on the other end of the modem.
I don't really miss the line by line drawing of jpegs on the 14.4 modem !
After a few years my folks let me have a separate line installed in my bedroom, happy days, no getting off the internet when Mum was expecting a call from an Aunt or something!I don't really miss the line by line drawing of jpegs on the 14.4 modem !
chopper602 said:
I don't really miss the phone tones as it connected to the ISP on the other end of the modem.
I don't really miss the line by line drawing of jpegs on the 14.4 modem !
That's the thing I remember most, waiting for a 30kb JPEG to download and render...I don't really miss the line by line drawing of jpegs on the 14.4 modem !
There was a lot of waiting around in those days of the 14.4 modem. I think my first forays on the internet were in 1994/95 when I signed up with Compuserve.
I used to buy CDs from a company called CDWOW in the USA because they were only about £7 each. Shipping was about the same, so I used to buy in batches of 5 or 6 at a time to make it worthwhile. CDWOW later got swallowed up by some upstart book seller called Amazon.
t.
Dead true story this. In 1997 we got net in our office in Reading. It was turned on and we all looked at each other as to what to search for.
A lovely lady on our team, was joined by her hubby who worked in a different department to see the machines turned on. They had two young kids, and she looked about saying "what shall I search for" Her Hubby, says "look up something for the kids, how about "Hairy Jeremy?" (that was apparently some kids TV show they liked....)
///type type type///
"Oh my lord.....!" she shouts
........big mistake but much "lolling"!
A lovely lady on our team, was joined by her hubby who worked in a different department to see the machines turned on. They had two young kids, and she looked about saying "what shall I search for" Her Hubby, says "look up something for the kids, how about "Hairy Jeremy?" (that was apparently some kids TV show they liked....)
///type type type///
"Oh my lord.....!" she shouts
........big mistake but much "lolling"!
I was at Uni had first had access via the Sun Sparcstations so was really spoilt as they were (for the time) very quick and the Uni was directly connected to the Internet over a high speed link. This would have been in 1993, it certainly pre dated the Mosaic port for Solaris as I remember switching from Lynx to Mosaic. My first few weeks on the Internet I spent using Gopher and FTP rather than what we'd think of today as web browsing.
I didn't bother getting Internet at home until I left Uni, dial up was massively slow in comparison.
I didn't bother getting Internet at home until I left Uni, dial up was massively slow in comparison.
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