Probably about '95 for myself; up until then I didn't have a job that paid well enough to afford dial up.
All the Demon talk reminds me that I ended up looking after the back end of them in my THUS days; having the ability to troubleshoot your own home internet connection from the LNS onwards was a bonus. BTW- it was usually DNS that went down for Demon, it was the core of many faults, and when Google created their public DNS servers it helped. Richard Clayton was an incredible programmer, thinker, and all-round good guy- they all were.
I can't work out all the timings exactly but.... working for Big Blue
early 90's liased and worked with CERN regarding browsers and hosting
Implemented early IBM web content for the EMEA Software Business including first on-line selling in conjunction with the IBM Software Distribution Centre in Denmark. Taking on-line secure payments was the main challenge in those days.
Worked with Netscape with their Navigator browser. They came over to the UK and worked with us. Some of the main players in Netscape came from NCSA Mosaic. Son of Netscape Navigator is Mozilla Firefox.
A couple of fun things...created, ran, hosted and updated daily the first website that the Giro d'Italia had.
Also did the website fo the big Lyngby Rock Festival in Denmark.... these were sort of PR activities.
Also did the website fo the big Lyngby Rock Festival in Denmark…. these were sort of PR activities.
I meant.... the Roskilde Festival
First heard of it in 1983 at University, but it was only for Computing Science students. Got on myself in 1995. Memories of Usenet back then was of behaviour similar to today's trolls but it was seriously condemned. AOL addresses could get you seriously flamed as well. Ahhh the days when it was a nerdzone.
At home with Demon, maybe 86/87. We also had a modem at work to send files to the states, but not the internet, until I used my Demon account at work, before we had an IT department that knew about PC's, instead of mainframes!
Just used it for email (not sure who else I knew had email at the time) and newsgroups, obviously all text based in MS-DOS.
SQL Windows support on CompuServe using a 2400baud modem. Then Mosaic, Netscape 1.0... and now here we are
My involvement with the interwebs was accelerated when I was recruited by a huge ISP to bolster their news operation in 2001.
We still had to use HTML to publish pages at that stage, but it still felt like I'd missed the boat in terms of getting in on thr ground floor.
It was over that next decade that it really boomed, and I suppose I did ride the wave a bit career-wise and in terms of doing fun new stuff editorially.
Things started to change in the mid-to-late noughties as the big social networks gained ground and began to dominate the online experience, taking revenue and traffic away from standalone sites.
I'm glad to be out of commercial online editorial now TBH.
My dad has been mucking about with it since his apprenticeship in the late 70's.
When he finished a few years ago, his office which was the size of a small bungalow, was what housed one of the computers when he started.
I am thoroughly incompetent with it and still ring him for all issues with it.
Anyone remember "The Microsoft Network" from the mid-90s?
Basically Microsoft's classic proprietary strategy in which they ignore perfectly good standards and try to convince people to join their locked-in abomination.
This time not even an advert featuring 90's star Ross and Rachel from Friends could persuade the masses to abandon the Internet.
More details at the link below.
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/
The depressing thing is that, 25 years later, Microsoft are still trying the same trick (MS Teams clients unable to join meetings hosted on other services, proprietary audio/video codecs etc.)
Was online before there was an internet to go online to, earliest was Prestel pages via dial up modem in the mid 80s...
I love how popular IRC Slack is.
It's amazing how much investment and buy-in you can get for a decades old protocol. Just by adding a nice GUI and marketing it as a new product.
I still use 'proper' mailing lists and IRC for most work-related issues. Not used newsgroups much for a while.
I've always been a stickler for plain text email and used to make a point of bottom-posting. I've given up now, things have moved on and people think me an arse if I reply in plain text and/or bottom-post.
So it seems that Slack no longer has an IRC gateway. But my last post still stands historically.
