The day the internet was turned on

The day the internet was turned on

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227bhp

Original Poster:

10,203 posts

127 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
and a few other related things, your early memories.
What was it like? I was there and old enough, but had no knowledge of computers at all (I was brought up with the BBC Micro at high school and never had a computer at home). I had no idea where all the keyboard letters were and remember it taking me about 15mins to type a sentence!
I remember (at school in the computer lesson) someone showing me how to write a program which made some text cover the screen and flash on and off. Cool I thought, what can I type? I hated the teacher so typed in 'Smithy is a fat bd' he came over to see what I was laughing at, I quickly hit the 'Break' key which cleared it. Sadly for me he knew which keys brought it back and I sunk low in my seat whilst he stood looking at the screen eek
I was sent to stand outside the class, the classroom was right outside the head and deputy's offices so I knew it wouldn't have been long before one of them passed and enquired as to why I was standing there....

I'm guessing you didn't sit and look at the screen 'til someone switched the internet on one day?! Like an official unveiling...
I remember some of the early pron came from a thing called 'imesh' which used to mess up your computer.

There was (many moons ago, but a way on from the dawn of the 'net) a website which had Bollywood clips on it, you could type in your own words to personalise it, but I can't remember what it was called. I wonder if that is still going....

Cool story bro' and sorry if it's a bit of a dull topic for many, but it's something I have no knowledge of whatsoever, despite using it every day.

Eric Mc

121,773 posts

264 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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1995 for me - although I'd been messing about with computers at work since around 1984 and had bought a Sinclair ZX81 for myself in 1983 (when it was already out of date)..

AB

16,969 posts

194 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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My earliest memories of being online are dial up modem followed by 'Welcome to AOL'.


slybynight

391 posts

120 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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1992 in the uni library
Something called Pete's tinyMUD. Like an online adventure game, but chatting (typing) live to people miles away - until some overlord wizard turned you into a frog or something, then you had to initiate the whole thing again - which was about half an hour of complex CLI connection commands.

Immediately grasped the immensity of the online thing, and how much it would change the world. Looking back, if only my young mind had understood how unimportant it was to learn to code. And how much much more important prediciting what it would evolve into would be...... I would now be living my dreams as mentioned here! http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

minimalist

1,488 posts

204 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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I have vague memories of the beginnings during my mid-teens. A friend brought me to an internet cafe and put me in front of an internet connected computer. This was the first time I ever used one for any purpose other than gaming. I didn't even know how to use the mouse or click on a link. I thought the internet was rubbish and couldn't have imagined what it would become.

I was in my early twenties before I sent my first email and didn't learn about MS Word or Excel until my mid twenties. Over the years I became more adept and am now a data analyst working with fairly complex software. I am quite pleased with myself that I was in early enough to get firstnamelastname@gmail.com

The sound of dial-up will be forever burned into my memory.

Piersman2

6,596 posts

198 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
For me it would have been about 1988 or so. I was working at a company as the "IT man", To start it was only 3 IBM computers. A year later I had 100+ desktops on my list.

At this time I managed to purchase an IBM desktop that I kept at home to play games on mainly. I think the screen could do 4 colours!

Then, one day a workmate of my brother bought round a modem and connected us up to his bulletin board account and we spent several hours downloading some text based lady pictures. laugh

Suddenly, this virtually pointless standalone games console could be hooked up to access things across the world. I bought a modem (2400 baud IIRC) and signed up to Compuserve which gave me an email address and access to the 'net'.

The really big leap was when I first heard of Mosaic and downloaded a copy. Now I could use html to navigate , leaping from one linked address to another and seeing pictures/colours and static pages of content.

As someone said above, it was immediately obvious that this was going to be huge and I considered learning HTML and setting up as a web page developer. But HTML was a proper language back then without all the tools available nowdays to create webpagesa And I was earning good money so didn't bother.

Otispunkmeyer

12,555 posts

154 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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So from the sounds of things, smut was pretty much available on the net from the word go? Well played humanity.

jodypress

1,927 posts

273 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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minimalist said:
I am quite pleased with myself that I was in early enough to get firstnamelastname@gmail.com

The sound of dial-up will be forever burned into my memory.
I've got me one of those Gmail addresses. ...lol. Didn't realise it was the early adopters.

Being a kid of the 80's I grew up with the ZX81, a Tandy and a Commodore 64. Great memories.
I think my earliest memories of the Internet was a Mini forum in the mid 90's. That then progressed onto PH.

ApOrbital

9,939 posts

117 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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80s for me commodore 64 and zx both were my brothers.

Piersman2

6,596 posts

198 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
Otispunkmeyer said:
So from the sounds of things, smut was pretty much available on the net from the word go? Well played humanity.
It wasn't smut in the modern sense, but back then, finding a text file formatted to make a picture of a naked lady was quite an achievement. Especially when it took half an hour to download. Finding a text file with a moving naked lady was a real treasure. I had a 720K floppy disc with a collection of such things on it. smile

I'm fairly confident the internet would not have progressed at a tenth of what we've seen without smut being one of it's greatest drivers. laugh

Quattromaster

2,904 posts

203 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
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.

Paddymcc

929 posts

190 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
Otispunkmeyer said:
So from the sounds of things, smut was pretty much available on the net from the word go? Well played humanity.
Isn't this why VHS trumped all other media at the time and became the player of choice?

andrewrob

2,912 posts

189 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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I remember my dad signing up with compuserve for internet access. I also remember Freeserve, they did a crazy deal which was unlimited minutes online for £5 a month or something silly.
I also remember leaving my laptop on downloading overnight for a week to get a dodgy copy of midtown madness, think it was about 200mb

slybynight

391 posts

120 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
Second year uni I transferred to dept with better PC's - 386's!! so that meant VGA and IIRC 4MB RAM. They were mind-blowing and sat on the screen of all of them was my first experience of the internet proper - AltaVista!
Google happened when I was in work about 4 years later. Funny thing is, I don't remember any marketing push whatsoever, you just heard about it from someone, or saw them using it. Then you tried it. Then that was what you used from then on - it was THAT much better. No big switch over, no fanfare, just 100% conversion on first try. It was obvious that search engines needed improving. Anyone could have done it. It was also obvious that some method of secure payment would be needed, but that had greater barriers to entry. Looking back, I could have done either of those things, but FB - I would have laughed my ass off at the idea, same for twitter and the whole mobile apps market. Today I laugh my ass off at the apple watch - I'll probably be proved wrong on that one too!

Edited by slybynight on Friday 28th August 10:40

Phil Dicky

7,162 posts

262 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
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.
Covers it for me too smile

Otispunkmeyer

12,555 posts

154 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
To be honest I cannot remember when the internet appeared in our house. My dad is quite up on his technology so he realised the importance of getting his young sons into using computers as soon as he could afford to. This was perhaps year 4 or 5 of primary school (so 1995/96)

I think our first machine was a Packard Bell. It was a huge slab on which you stood the monitor. 100 MHz Pentium CPU (so admittedly we're a way into the existence of the net here). Had a 56k dial up and I think we went through AOL or it might have been compuserve. Can't remember. Can't remember much actually from that computer, all I do remember is it was Windows 95, but it had some weird skin or start up program that sat on the desktop and your wallpaper looked like a house! and you had to navigate to different rooms to access different things i.e. go into the library to access internet and things like Encyclopedia Britannica.

Our next machine a Tiny (remember them? and Time PC as well?) something or other with a smokin 650MHZ PIII and a 32 mb TNT 2 graphics card. That was the bomb! and I remember spending 2 hours downloading an Eminem song from Napster.

Studio117

4,250 posts

190 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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Thehun.com

nsfw obviously hehe

slybynight

391 posts

120 months

Friday 28th August 2015
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Studio117 said:
Thehun.com

nsfw obviously hehe
I literally have no idea how anyone makes any money out of pron now. Surely, there is more available free online than anyone could watch 24/7 for 10 lifetimes, covering every area of interest imaginable.

kambites

67,460 posts

220 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all
I suppose my first contact with the whole "online" thing was in the early 90s (maybe 1991?) when you used to dial directly into a bulletin board on another computer rather than connecting to the internet and navigating via the world wide web. I was a bit young myself but my brother used to do quite a lot of stuff that way.

I probably first used "the internet" in about 1995. My first real memory of it was running coax cable all round my parents' house and then how much of an arse it was to get IP connection sharing with windows 95.

Edited by kambites on Friday 28th August 11:00

Vaud

50,287 posts

154 months

Friday 28th August 2015
quotequote all

1988 for Minitel in France for me (precursor to WWW)
About 1990 for Prestel in teh UK
1995 for full WWW