Do you remember your first days on the internet?
Discussion
1994-5 a mate of mine was a geek in a local computer shop.
I was using packet radio (amateur radio still have the modem) with an Amiga and I got talking to him about the internet as a local ISP had started up.
So he built me a computer and we hooked up to the phone line. After a couple of hours I exclaimed....
"Feck me! this could be the end of Amateur radio" I repeated this statement many times until the phone bill arrived
I was using packet radio (amateur radio still have the modem) with an Amiga and I got talking to him about the internet as a local ISP had started up.
So he built me a computer and we hooked up to the phone line. After a couple of hours I exclaimed....
"Feck me! this could be the end of Amateur radio" I repeated this statement many times until the phone bill arrived
I guess I had early exposure, since my mother had started off as a programmer in the 60s.
But...
At home, ZX80 aged about 10, then a Sharp MZ-80k.
At school, I used to hang around the computer room in breaks, then O-level and A-level Computer Studies. RM 380Z, 480Z, then BBC B, Master and the odd Archimedes at school. 10Mb HDD on a 380Z as a "network server", sat on rubber on a shelf in the corner. Not that we were allowed to use it - 5.25" then 3.5" only for us...
Atari ST when I went off to uni in 1988 to do Computer Science.
(obPH - the computer teacher had a Mk1 XR2 - cool... One of the music teachers had a Scim SS1, but I was utterly unmusical)
Email between students, and mail-order catalogues of "demo disks" for ST and Amiga, with the odd mention of bulletin boards, but we didn't have easy access to a phone line.
Win3 coming out when I was doing my placement year, 90-91, supporting WordPerfect, 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics on DOS - with a couple of isolated departmental networks in the office.
First job after was after graduating in 1992, working for Lotus - ccMail, then Notes - and the seeming magic of the optional SMTP gateway.
(obPH -
to then-boss)
1995 or so, working for a corporate consultancy/boxshifter, and we all had Compuserve accounts!
...and the rest is history...
Looks like continuity of at least one email address for 14 years now, and another for nearly 18... Jesus. I feel old.
But...
At home, ZX80 aged about 10, then a Sharp MZ-80k.
At school, I used to hang around the computer room in breaks, then O-level and A-level Computer Studies. RM 380Z, 480Z, then BBC B, Master and the odd Archimedes at school. 10Mb HDD on a 380Z as a "network server", sat on rubber on a shelf in the corner. Not that we were allowed to use it - 5.25" then 3.5" only for us...
Atari ST when I went off to uni in 1988 to do Computer Science.
(obPH - the computer teacher had a Mk1 XR2 - cool... One of the music teachers had a Scim SS1, but I was utterly unmusical)
Email between students, and mail-order catalogues of "demo disks" for ST and Amiga, with the odd mention of bulletin boards, but we didn't have easy access to a phone line.
Win3 coming out when I was doing my placement year, 90-91, supporting WordPerfect, 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics on DOS - with a couple of isolated departmental networks in the office.
First job after was after graduating in 1992, working for Lotus - ccMail, then Notes - and the seeming magic of the optional SMTP gateway.
(obPH -
to then-boss)1995 or so, working for a corporate consultancy/boxshifter, and we all had Compuserve accounts!
...and the rest is history...
Looks like continuity of at least one email address for 14 years now, and another for nearly 18... Jesus. I feel old.
Trying to think now
We had a computer in around year 5 I think, which would have been about 95? It was a packard bell thing; hulking great box with a monitor atop with those silly elephant ear style speakers. I remember they had some funky thing over the top of windows 95 that made your desktop into a house. You went into different rooms to do different thinks. Encarta was in the Library for instance! It was a Pentium 1, 100 MHz. Swift.
I don't remember that one being on the internet mind. It probably was connected but I don't remember using it.
I think around 97, we ended up with a Tiny PC (remember those? and Time...). Some mini-tower, Pentium III 600 and a TNT2 graphics card. Rad. I remember going on the net with that; MSN messenger mainly. Oh and downloading songs on Napster. Though with the speed of dial up I think I managed just one song in 2 hours before it cut off. I remember a friend giving me Unreal Tournament, what a blast that was (and still is!)
Few years later I remember downloading UT2003? It was one of the first PC demo's to weigh in at 100 mb and it took maybe 6 hours to get it. Someone at least had the foresight to make you download it via a download manager so that when you got disconnected at 2 hours on dial up, you could re-dial and continue where you left off.
We got cable not long after, from NTL. I still have and use the email address I got from them. 128 k cable modem. I remember being in awe of my friends 512 k internet, it was like lightning. I think we got a boost at some point to 384 k and then later upgraded to 512 but they forgot to charge us for it. Happy days.
Of course now, I am sat here with a 200 Mbit line and think nothing of it!
We had a computer in around year 5 I think, which would have been about 95? It was a packard bell thing; hulking great box with a monitor atop with those silly elephant ear style speakers. I remember they had some funky thing over the top of windows 95 that made your desktop into a house. You went into different rooms to do different thinks. Encarta was in the Library for instance! It was a Pentium 1, 100 MHz. Swift.
I don't remember that one being on the internet mind. It probably was connected but I don't remember using it.
I think around 97, we ended up with a Tiny PC (remember those? and Time...). Some mini-tower, Pentium III 600 and a TNT2 graphics card. Rad. I remember going on the net with that; MSN messenger mainly. Oh and downloading songs on Napster. Though with the speed of dial up I think I managed just one song in 2 hours before it cut off. I remember a friend giving me Unreal Tournament, what a blast that was (and still is!)
Few years later I remember downloading UT2003? It was one of the first PC demo's to weigh in at 100 mb and it took maybe 6 hours to get it. Someone at least had the foresight to make you download it via a download manager so that when you got disconnected at 2 hours on dial up, you could re-dial and continue where you left off.
We got cable not long after, from NTL. I still have and use the email address I got from them. 128 k cable modem. I remember being in awe of my friends 512 k internet, it was like lightning. I think we got a boost at some point to 384 k and then later upgraded to 512 but they forgot to charge us for it. Happy days.
Of course now, I am sat here with a 200 Mbit line and think nothing of it!
Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Wednesday 22 March 19:26
I was thinking about this the other day. Started out on JANET in about 92, running Linux, then eventually got a 386 at home with dial up. Oh my, the phone bills ...
Usenet
Netscape
Mozilla/DMOZ
Telnet
Pegasus mail
IRC
ICQ
Those were the days
Turning pictures off when surfing just to make the pages load
Stitching binary files together in a text editor
Getting stuck in a popup loop and having to shut everything down to get out of it ...
Usenet
Netscape
Mozilla/DMOZ
Telnet
Pegasus mail
IRC
ICQ
Those were the days
Turning pictures off when surfing just to make the pages load
Stitching binary files together in a text editor
Getting stuck in a popup loop and having to shut everything down to get out of it ...
Edited by oldbanger on Friday 24th March 11:32
tankplanker said:
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.
St Andrews or somewhere else? I recall arriving in St Andrews in 1990 when the Sun Sparcstations had first been installed replacing an old Vax + terminals. Quite a change.Lots of time spent downloading sourcecode from Usenet and FTP sites and trying to get it to compile on the Sparcstations. Managed a distributed fractal calculation around the whole university network, displaying on one colour Sparcstation (was really quite quick) - until university IT questioned the spike in network traffic and slowdown on all the nodes I was using for computing (most of them!)
An LPMUD was also deployed by some of the computer scientists, leading quite a number of students to exam retakes as they took rather too much advantage of their 24 hour access cards - students of today wouldn't believe text only games could be so immersive.
First got onto the internet in my own right shortly after graduating as a relatively early customer of Demon Internet - dial-up access with a very slow modem - can't remember the exact year, though.
Planet Claire said:
Piersman2 said:
alt.binaries.pictures... 
Not necessarily those, but I remember the various newsgroups from when I went to uni in 1991, and getting my first email address.The web-browser of choice back then was Netscape.
It was all telnet and newsgroups. Started uni in 1990 and discovered the internet then.
tokyo_mb said:
An LPMUD was also deployed by some of the computer scientists, leading quite a number of students to exam retakes as they took rather too much advantage of their 24 hour access cards - students of today wouldn't believe text only games could be so immersive.
Haha. Bugger. I spent too much time on Warwick LPMUD.1996 my brother built one, 2gb HDD , Pentium processor, 32mb ram 14.4 modem.
Bloody hell ICQ. I remember my number 1937856. The ISP if I recall was one charged at a local rate, never bothered with AOL.
I remember those bloody self installing "favourites" when visiting smut sites, plus the daily "thumbnail gallery post" or "TGP" websites that gave pics, movies and hacked passwords to come sites. The Huns yellow pages.
downloading from usenet when the yanks were using T-1 lines and clicking all the headers to "combine and decode". Y-ENC attachments.
IRC chat, Net2phone VOIP, limewire and Napster.
Happy days.
Bloody hell ICQ. I remember my number 1937856. The ISP if I recall was one charged at a local rate, never bothered with AOL.
I remember those bloody self installing "favourites" when visiting smut sites, plus the daily "thumbnail gallery post" or "TGP" websites that gave pics, movies and hacked passwords to come sites. The Huns yellow pages.
downloading from usenet when the yanks were using T-1 lines and clicking all the headers to "combine and decode". Y-ENC attachments.
IRC chat, Net2phone VOIP, limewire and Napster.
Happy days.
First time was in the school computer room on a RM Nimbus PC186, some time around 1993 I would guess. We found out that one of the computers had been specced with a 1200 baud (!) modem, and it intermittently connected to some form of very basic BBS type thing where it was possible to have a stilted conversation with a nerd elsewhere. Magic.
1996. AOL disk. I was 11.
Tiny (PC brand) machine with a Pentium 133MHz cpu 16mb RAM (later upgraded to 72mb RAM even though the VX chipset only really liked 64mb max!) and a 2gb HDD. 33.6Kbit modem.
Used to spend my time winding up people in religious chat rooms.
Rapidly realised AOL were a crap ISP so moved to MSN, also crap. Then finally moved to Globalnet, a brief foray to Tesco, then years with BT until I could finally get ADSL in 2005 (long phone line caused lots of problems).
If I remember right the free 0800 ISP was XStream? Played Quakeworld online over that in 98-99ish.
Going from JANET at uni (in 2003) to 56Kbit when at home was a bit of a downer!
Misspent youth perhaps but it pays the bills pretty well these days (I'm a software developer).
My ICQ number was 91232533
Tiny (PC brand) machine with a Pentium 133MHz cpu 16mb RAM (later upgraded to 72mb RAM even though the VX chipset only really liked 64mb max!) and a 2gb HDD. 33.6Kbit modem.
Used to spend my time winding up people in religious chat rooms.
Rapidly realised AOL were a crap ISP so moved to MSN, also crap. Then finally moved to Globalnet, a brief foray to Tesco, then years with BT until I could finally get ADSL in 2005 (long phone line caused lots of problems).
If I remember right the free 0800 ISP was XStream? Played Quakeworld online over that in 98-99ish.
Going from JANET at uni (in 2003) to 56Kbit when at home was a bit of a downer!
Misspent youth perhaps but it pays the bills pretty well these days (I'm a software developer).
My ICQ number was 91232533
Edited by Ynox on Wednesday 22 March 21:06
I got internet access at work in 1998 I think. I don't remember the exact date, it wasn't seen as a 'big thing'. Didn't get it in the house til about 2 years later.
Working nightshift, out of boredom I would browse newspaper and magazine websites. It was just another way to read the news, right?
My colleagues on the other hand, jumped right in at the deep end. Downloading porn, cracked games and software and mp3's.
The huns yellow pages, warez sites and Napster got hammered 24/7. Apparently the IT manager invested a lot of time and money to find out where all the bandwidth was going. It was all traced to my colleagues PC who got his hdd wiped and told not to do it again.
The first car forum I visited was the original EVO magazine forum, anybody remember that?
Working nightshift, out of boredom I would browse newspaper and magazine websites. It was just another way to read the news, right?
My colleagues on the other hand, jumped right in at the deep end. Downloading porn, cracked games and software and mp3's.
The huns yellow pages, warez sites and Napster got hammered 24/7. Apparently the IT manager invested a lot of time and money to find out where all the bandwidth was going. It was all traced to my colleagues PC who got his hdd wiped and told not to do it again.
The first car forum I visited was the original EVO magazine forum, anybody remember that?
Early 90s.
My Dad worked in IT, and was an early adopter. (Aged two I managed to unplug his companies mainframe when my Mum picked him up from work)
2.2k modem and using a webcrawler as search engines didn't exist! Used to have a few running at a time and flick between them to see if anything interesting had turned up.
Downloading pictures, something 50k was big and you would watch it build up a line at a time, in black and white.
I remember when my Dad got a 14.4k modem and we were stunned by how quick it was.
My Dad worked in IT, and was an early adopter. (Aged two I managed to unplug his companies mainframe when my Mum picked him up from work)
2.2k modem and using a webcrawler as search engines didn't exist! Used to have a few running at a time and flick between them to see if anything interesting had turned up.
Downloading pictures, something 50k was big and you would watch it build up a line at a time, in black and white.
I remember when my Dad got a 14.4k modem and we were stunned by how quick it was.
0000 said:
I have no idea how many hours I lost of my life on the Yahoo games site, mainly playing pool or poker and nearly always with another chat room open plus ICQ etc. I had a little app (called a program back in those days!) which gave my countdown until my connection timed out, every 60 minutes, then I had to press re-connect if the auto re-connect didn't work. That was normally time to go get food/alcohol.
Sixth form, 1990. Mate of mine got a 1200 baud modem and a Compuserve account. He was allowed to use it for an hour in the evening when the phone call was only 1p/minute. An hour that we, generally speaking, spent playing MUDs and trying to have cybersex with all the laydeez that were, in retrospect, almost certainly other spotty teenage boys doing much the same as we were.
Then after that I spent a year working for IBM who had much a better connection, although you had to specifically request access and I remember my manager giving me 'the talk' about behaving myself online - so the cybersex was, probably fortunately, curtailed. Instead I discovered the world of newsgroups and dodgy FTP sites and haven't really looked back since.
Then after that I spent a year working for IBM who had much a better connection, although you had to specifically request access and I remember my manager giving me 'the talk' about behaving myself online - so the cybersex was, probably fortunately, curtailed. Instead I discovered the world of newsgroups and dodgy FTP sites and haven't really looked back since.
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