When did you first go online?

My first time was probably around '98 with nothing to really search for. Simpler times.

September 94, University pegasus mail account. Virtual Blarney first venture onto online boards.

486 DX2 PC. Mainly for Doom LAN'd up in the halls of residence 😀

Probably in 95/96 when I visited a Univerity and they had computers connected to the internet. I remember when I actually started at Uni there were a suite of Sun workstations and they were the only computers with internet access. Uni email was via a CLI, think it was ctrl-x to send an email.

Bit mad that it's literllay everywhere now. When I think of things that have changed the world in my lifetime the internet and WWW is way out in front.

486 DX 2, wow I was slumming it on a 486 SX 25 which seemed like a rocket ship after my 8086.

Around '98 I think, dial up via Cable & Wireless.

94 at college for elec/mech engineering, 96 at home on fzzz……beep…….beeep……fzzz…..beep painfully slow dial up

For a while I was in the Compuserve and AOL curated spheres (nice try, guys!) but with email connectivity to the WW of the W.

I can remember searching on the web (presumably on Alta Vista?) in 1995 for ‘mountain bike’ and it returned…

…75 results.

alt.binaries. (saynomore)

Can't really remember the year but it was a while ago.

I often have thoughts when buying stuff online now, about how we used to do it. For example, car broke down - look in Haynes manual if not obvious, then ring round local car parts shops and persuade a parent/mate to take me over to buy something.

Actually having to go out to buy things was so different to having the world at your fingertips as is now.

Then came the good old days of Freeserve chat, MSN and Yahoo messenger.

The rest is history, as the saying goes.

Can't recall the year. Couldn't even take a guess. Pre-WWW though. First decent home computer was a BBC Micro (with second processor) and dial-up was either 1200/75 or 300/300.  My job was in IT for a large company, still using mainframes and dumb terminals for everything, so there was a weird mix of being both ahead-of and yet strangely-behind the curve.

We had a compuserve account for email primarily in 1994 or 95 I think. Then went over to Freeserve

We bought a used pc from a friend. 386 sc and only 256 colours. But 8 megabytes of ram and a 210mb hard disc. The hard disc seemed a huge advance having had a twin drive floppy disc machine before

1998.   Split from my fiancé 12 months prior, discovered Doom online as a singleton, then met Mrs K in an American Online aka AOL chat room late in the year and met IRL in January ‘99.  We’ve been together 24 years overall and married 16 years this Thursday.

2002. I was a late adopter.

I had a woman with her tits out as my screensaver and I mainly scoured eBay for tat and looked at, um, tits.

Obviously I’ve grown up now and have settled down with a lovely lady and an expensive iPhone. When I look the internet now it’s simply to scour everywhere for tat and look at tits.

Technically, probably around 1989.

For me it's a tricky question without a simple answer. Breaking out of JANET - or in fact even, breaking into JANET - was a hacker right of passage.

I still use a bulletin board today. https://www.mono.org/

1998, because I thought I should. I was an early adopter in some ways (Fuji digital camera in 2000, Rio Riot MP3 player about the same time) but luddite tendencies in other ways (first mobile phone 2007, and have never signed up to Instafacelinkedtwitterwnker). Big fish in a small pond, blagging free stuff from credulous companies until I slagged it off too much and the freebies dried up! Integrity is a burden.

My first ISP was Force9 - and still is, all these years later - although it is now owned/run by BT.

So probably my first online "experience" was in the early 90s

circa 1993/4 - Sun workstations the in the Medic building Newcastle University.
poking around NASA servers looking for space pictures....found a surprising amount of grot.

Dunno, early 00’s, once I had a work computer that was connected to the WWW. That’s when I discovered the wonders that are STW. Certainly before The Great Hack, a vague recollection says 2003-ish.

I’m pretty sure it was once I was given a Mac, the PC I used before was a 486/66, and doing a screen refresh in CorelDraw allowed me to go out to the machine, get a drink, and sit quietly watching the screen  s  l  o  w  l  y   r  e  d  r  a  w , it would have probably been slower than dialup using the internet.

Around '99 I think. Might have been '98. Mostly vaguely obscure music and mythology chat on ICQ IIRC.

Would have obviously been painfully slow dial-up, and on a self-built 386/something.

When I went to uni, literally the first day after fresher's week, so September 96. All downhill since then.

Pretty sure I was sending some prehistoric emails when at university in the mid ninetees. I know I was using forums in the late 90s.

I don’t remember, I’ll Ask Jeeves.

Jeeves was sleeping so I tried Altavista…sorry, Netscape is a bit slow for me today my 28.8Kbps connection is working hard here!

Fortunately I wrote it in my diary. It was 1996 when I first started emailing people sitting at a desk next to me.

2002. I was a late adopter.

I had a woman with her tits out as my screensaver and I mainly scoured eBay for tat and looked at, um, tits.

Obviously I’ve grown up now and have settled down with a lovely lady and an expensive iPhone. When I look the internet now it’s simply to scour everywhere for tat and look at tits.

Made me laugh as it's pretty much true for me too only around 1997, dial up pron was a lesson in patience and longevity training that's stood me in good stead for R/L relationships

1998 for me, can still hear that modem dial up sound now and the amazing 56k speed

1997 at university.

School had a "suite" (haha!) of the original Apple Macintosh 128k computers, the ones with a 6" screen so you had to zoom into to anything you were working on to actually see it. However they weren't online.

I remember for my final year at uni buying my own desktop computer and it cost £1200 and was delivered in about 7 large boxes (it included printer, scanner, speakers etc). It was still a rarity for students to have their own computers at that time but even then to get online you had to go across to the university library; the house had one landline connection in the hallway and that was it.

Even mobile phones were still in their infancy, I think my first mobile was 1999, an impossibly sized brick with a green screen dot matrix type display.

1996 for me with AOL on a 14.4 modem.  Cyrix 200, 16mb of RAM and a Matrox 4mb graphics card.  I’ve now been a Force9 customer  with the same email address and username since 1997 🙂

Either ‘91 from an 8086 at school or, if memory serves, ‘92 from one of the Sparc IPXs that Uni had in the computer department that were hooked up to JANET. My first real computer was a 486 DX4-100 in ‘95 and I still remember buying the RAM upgrade in what felt then (and now) like a drug deal.

I’m glad I got that extra RAM though, it was rocket ship fast for games afterwards.

93 at uni. Bulletin boards and Web rings.

How times change.

Somewhere a long time ago at school... making punched tape to do simple maths problems. Sent it off to a computer in Hull and teh answer in punched paper tape came back a week later...

Own Compuserve account early 90's perhaps..

Another one who struggled with JANET in the mid to late 80s but then it was around 91/92 when there was an (as in one, singular) Internet connected computer at work. I was one of the few who knew what it was for and how to use Mosaic to navigate usenet, and managed to use it to organise a trip to south Africa. Later on in that project I was allowed to use a laptop and modem to dial in and check on system build status overnight. What progress! But it was still a few years after that before I got my Nokia 2110...

1998 at work. We all got new desktops, and there was an icon on the screen....

2000 as a teenager. MSN messenger was my first taste of being in touch with everyone I know at all times. And that was only when I was allowed to log on so I didn't take up the family phone line.

My school had PCs with internet access in late 1994, not much you could do with it though.

Home PC with internet access was probably 97 or 98.

1990 at uni, postgrads had computing accounts including email and my girlfriend (now wife) had just gone elsewhere for phd, so we used that a fair bit, there was also usenet, possibly some online chat and I remember playing a little on some sort of chess server. Far from the internet as we now know it though, I actually went to a library to look at journals and had to order hard copies of research papers up to about the turn of the century. The horror!

oh it was 1991 she moved, so that was probably when I really started using it.

I think 1998 not long after i got my own house. Freeserve 33.6k modem which came with an offer to upgrade to 56k when they were available. Mainly used it for online gaming, Wireplaay was the place to be for various games.

Mobile internet from about 2004 onwards, no pc at home till about 2007/8. Low wages and divorce meant I couldn't afford it.

1992 - University had new fangled Macintosh and early windows PC's. Netscape Navigator and bulletin boards FTW.
1994 - a house mate introduced us to some more online bits and bobs, I *think* I signed up to a Netscape email address...
1994 - University gave us an email address (ooooooh)
Actual own computer - 1995 I had an Amstrad PCW for my dissertation.
1997 - work had one huuuuuge lead acid battery mobile phone for occasional use between all 12 instructors and the boss.
In 2000 I bought my first PC off a friend.
In 2001 we bought first personal mobile phones when eldest was born.

1997 in Australia whilst backpacking - got a temp job in Sydney manning a call centre for Telstra selling ISP packages to Aussies. $20 a month for a package that gave users 4 hours dialup a week!
Naturally the phone didn’t exactly ring off the hook so there was lots of time to practice using the product so.
I stumbled across a Melbourne yacht club with the same initials as my home club in Edinburgh- emailed them and got an invite to their regatta. Stayed with them for a week. The Internet looked like it had useful purpose after all!!

Define "online".

First time I dialed in to anything would be 1986 while on call at work, a portable* IBM XT with a modem the size of a shoebox.  Portable only in the sense that you could take it home, couldn't actually carry anything else as it was that heavy

Proper internet would 1992, still using a work PC but we'd moved on to Toshiba's (no battery, just mains power).  It gathered pace vastly then, along with mobile phones to what I'd say was a full-on-public use by 1996 with mobiles not far behind, probably 2001/2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100

I’m still impressed that a phone line that could only transmit at 3,000 Hz could send data at 56,000 Hz. I think I know how it was done

Somewhere on the back end of september 1992, when i started at uni.

JANET, chatboards and trying to learn how to formulate searches without the benefit of anything that looked like a proper search engine!

It was around '95/'96. I was on holiday in the US over Christmas, staying at my brother-in-law's place in Washington DC and I was emailing Chipps about a job on one of the cycling titles at Future.

I remember my BiL had an Apple Mac but other than that nothing.

92 - 93 .
Lolz @JANET and Green txt.
Remember thinking it was cool to get 'live'update chat on screen,from the bods in Holland that were running some big wave tests. However,the time delay on screen refresh was so flaky/slow,it was quicker to just phone them 😆 🤣

Odd connections to things early late 80's 90's....mid 90's for dial ups to the internet.

Alt.binaries 🙂 home access.

Demon internet rings a bell.

Mid/late 90's odd works places had it. Everywhere after 2000 onwards.

I did have a Dell pc (97) that came with a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, had no idea what it was for. Like seeing a spreadsheet for the first time, and having no concept of what it does or could do. Miles ahead of its time.

Also, storage. I remember at the same place that gave us all the Internet (insert choir music here) and a massive downturn in everyone's productivity, also installed a 1TB hard drive...For the entire company of maybe a couple of thousand employees. TBF not all of them had access to the 'net, but I remember them saying that we could save "entire contracts, not just the sig page", and we could take as many photos as we wanted as we'd "Never run out of space"

gentler times.