MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
All that talk of a pcmcia above me reminds me of another milestone - when did you first experience wifi?
When I joined uni in 2002 they were just trialling wifi and I was one of the early adopters with a PCMCIA wifi adapter.
Really made Napster come alive.
when did you first experience wifi
Working at a startup in mid-2001, I got handed some wifi kit and was told to set it up - I'd never even heard of it before that day 😀
All that talk of a pcmcia above me reminds me of another milestone – when did you first experience wifi?
Probably with the advent of home routers rather than USB modems? I've never really thought about that before. I remember 802.11g being "new" and supplanting a/b and that would have been, what, early to mid 2000s? That can't be right surely, that feels way too long ago. Yeesh.
What a great question.
1994 for me with Demon Internet on an Amiga 1200, changed to the dark side with a PC in 1995 due to Command&Conquer. Wi-Fi must have been 99/2000 ish as a Radio HAM I just had to create a Pringles Cantenna
On a press tour to Nokia at some point in the early '00s we were all loaned PCMCIA mobile data cards because they (quite rightly) didn't trust journalists with access to their Wifi or wired Ethernet connections.
I was using a Powerbook G3 at the time, and the CD ROM with the drivers didn't include any extensions for MacOS 9.1. I found a spare phone port in the press room, got an outside line, connected via AOL (at the time, the only way to get online if you were travelling to multiple countries was to have an AOL account, which gave you access to lots of toll-free POPs in most countries) and downloaded the files I needed to get the wireless modem working.
It was fairly low stakes stuff compared to one of my lecturers who used to file copy from the wrong side of the Berlin Wall using a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 and a 300 baud modem.
I think our media handler almost had a conniption when he found out. It made up for the six (six!) hours of PowerPoint we had to sit through that day, and he got his revenge with salmiakikoski later that evening.
I remember 802.11g being “new” and supplanting a/b and that would have been, what, early to mid 2000s
There was huge hoo haa when the original iMac was launched (the one that didn't come with a floppy, and in the very early days of USB) because a/b was on the same wavelength as some of the French military stuff, so a whole Apple product line couldn't be sold in France unless the adapters were swapped out. Steve Jobs' ego vs. French bureaucracy was fairly hilarious.
Interesting thread
I'm sure it wasn't my first online experience but my very first memory was looking up or at least trying to look up the news about 9/11, so 2001. Of course it pretty much broke the Internet and nothing seemed to work, but I have no online memories before that. I guess as I didn't own a computer and the only access was a council PC it isn't surprising. In fact I do remember ringing up and ordering kit over the phone around then, which seems incredibly quaint nowadays.
I was in a computer club at sixth form 81-84 where we had modems and acoustic couplers hooked to BBS for the RML380Z, interesting but more or less pointless. Then JANET came along while doing my degree, there was a chat functionality and shared directories where you could pass stuff around, mostly just coordination of lab setups and IEEE demoes, still nowhere close to internet as no FTP, browsers or search engines. Then I was working as an electronic engineer for a while and we had email at the end of that, and could (slowly) send cad files to the board and chip makers. Then after moving house and selling cars for a year I went into IT training around 92 and it all just came together over a few years. Browsers, searches, email, AOL all came within that couple of years and that was it, primitive but more or less where we are now was in place by 96/97. Lots more stuff self hosted, and not enough speed for streaming. Pre google, I used to recommend DMOZ, a directory of the internet, ordered by subject, it worked for a couple of years too. Someone has saved it from the archives too.
I fear your username may be optimistic. 😁
I remember those Research Machines boxes. We had them in high school, half a dozen 480Z machines connected to a 380Z "server" with dual (DUAL!) 5.25" disk drives. It was way beyond slow. By the time everyone had loaded up whatever it was they needed, the bell rang.
They were in part why I swerved Computing as an elective subject during GCSE Options. That and I realised a) I knew the entire syllabus aged 14 so it'd be a waste of time and b) I knew more than the teacher who with the benefit of hindsight I suspect was originally a teacher of something else and had drawn the short straw when the Head had gone "who fancies a crack at teaching this then?"
We did Computing pre-Options as part of this weird car crash of subjects under the umbrella of "General Studies." Six weeks of [thing] then rotate, Sex Ed was one of the others, some form of Cookery another (after learning how to boil water we about graduated to Chocolate Rice Krispies by the end). By the end of the six weeks the teacher had basically given up and deferred all questions to me, no small wonder my first proper job was Tech Support.
Yup, I swerved GCE computing in 81 as they were still using punch cards, and I was past that with the first wave of home computers.
81 to 84 I took a Saturday job selling Spectrums, Vic 20, C64, Atari, various short lived consoles and Raleigh burners in Uptons in Middlesbrough. Crashes aplenty. (For younger Teesiders, Uptons was the big department store that eventually failed and the building became Psyche, now Flannels.)
Met a girl at Club La Santa circa 2001/ 2002 .
As we went out separate ways before our flights home I asked her for her email address and phone number!
I had no PC or ever sent an email!
She is now my wife and first ever email was sent a few days later after returning home! Thankyou Internet and advice from my flat mate!
It was an embarrassing email one finger typing on bike set up , technique and fitness goals .....omg!
We have no kids but loads of bikes!
My neighbour had Netscape in 1995, we uswd ro crowd around it like the first person to get a TV in the '50s. Not really, I thought it looked shite, who knew the madness that would unfold
probably at some point in 97 during IT at college or whatever the course I did was called, don't remember, more so maybe later the same year paying 1p a minute which I remember having to write down when I'd been online and leave my dad some cash 💰:lol:
During 1999 to look at something for a college course I was doing, but my first pc was bought so I could get online for a very specific purpose in 2000...
...yep, it was (seriously) so I could watch the live stream.from the first series Big Brother house 🙄😂
1994 when the sound of modem dial-up means surf net time.
The download was sloooooowwwwww ...
Then a year later I joined the IT industry to sell "e-commerce" package like "online shopping cart" etc and the people there thought I was insane in my main brain. Only European companies engaged with me while the local businesses just showed me the door out of the office (practically opened the front door and walked me to the rear door out of the office). It was a funny time as I was going from business to business trying to sell the "future proof magic bullet" as a young man. Life was a steep learning experience then being an IT Salesman. I remember my the only expensive items in my possession was a bricky Nokia mobile phone and a 665CC small car (still paying monthly installment).
uk.ac.cardiff more like. 😁uk.ac.lancsp.p1 for me. God I miss the PR1ME systems.
Definitely cardiff.ac.uk when I started there in 97, although cf.ac.uk also worked.
Email addresses were the highly original SurnameInitial format - nothing that could possibly go wrong there when you had 1000 new students every year... 😳
When you logged on, the system would give a little series of bleeps if you had email. It would stay quiet if you had no email.
Therefore everyone else in the computer room would know if you had any friends when you logged on...
1987-1989…..Compunet and then Prestel on my Commodore 64.
Around 1995/6 for me, at uni.
I remember telling my daughter not that long ago about what the internet was like, or lack of internet was like back then. It's amazing to think what it has become.
I didn't get a pc myself until around 2000. Dial up in 2001 ish.
Feel quite privileged to have lived through those formative years of something that's become so integrated into daily living.
Did anyone have one of these? 😀
1992/3 at uni. Followed up by mine own home account in 1995 (I got a modem for Christmas ... ah, the days). AOL and Force9 for the home account.
Late 80's with a green screen VT100 terminal, there wasn't a lot of point. The BBC news website was slow and nowhere near as good as teletext/Ceefax which I thought was obviously the future. With our new email addresses we were told to check our email accounts weekly (pigeonholes were to be checked daily). File Transfer Protocol was handy though, no more posting programs on a C90 cassette in a jiffy bag.................
I'm trying to work it out by game.
Got Doom off a mate, so after 1993, and I did buy half life(mind blowing at that time), which was 1998, so probably somewhere between the 2.
Got Doom off a mate, so after 1993
Doom was 93 then? I remember Castle Wolfenstein, was that after Doom?
Just found an old invoice - 1994. I got internet in a box from Demon.
Did anyone have one of these?
Yep! mid 80s..
circa 1993/4 – Sun workstations the in the Medic building Newcastle University. poking around NASA servers looking for space pictures…
Remarkably similar - except Leeds and Chemistry and 1992 (but including the NASA pictures). We also had vax systems for querying the citation database at BIDS (bids.ac.uk) and a cluster of Mac Classics.
about 95 or 96? i'd had a 486 dx50 for a couple of years mainly for the playing of doom and writing up college work, then a mate hooked me up with a connection and... napster. 🙂
1996 whilst planning a road trip to the west of the USA, especially Yosemite, from the Public Library in Staines. It was so exciting watching this basic website for Yosemite loading slowly and seeing the images of the place. The trip was just as good as we hoped.
I don't think I had my own internet at home until sometime around '99, but had been able to at work for a couple of years by then, and lost suitable amounts of productive time searching for random stuff. Possibly on Ask Jeeves!
Another Prestel person here. Dad showed it to us on his work laptop around 89ish? It all seemed impossibly futuristic to this 10 year old. Before that, I just thought laptops were only for playing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure.
Then his job at BT and his laptop got Thatchered, so the next time was CompuServe chatrooms at my friend's house around 1994.
Then we got dialup around 96, and I seem to recall using it mainly for alt.music.prodigy and The Wildhearts mailing list/discussion group thing...
1995 working for Lindt. Unless you were looking for a pizza place in L.A. it wasn't very useful, but I could see the potential so I bought a modem, built my company a website which amounted to a presentation page and contact page. And - zilch, because, well, non of my potential customers had computer+modem+knowledge and even if they did they didn't have a browser that would find my site. So I lost interest till Google made sense of it all.
Dial up bulletin boards 1990ish
Demon Internet 1994ish
Since then, the internet has cost me a fortune in bikes and parts.
1996/7 ish, AOL was the ISP of windows choice at the time, think I moved onto Netscape or similar...just became a blur.
Number 1 website at the time was Sheldon Brown.
Don't remember but I've been now forever.
Number 1 website at the time was Sheldon Brown
Oh yes, he was on one of the cycling usenet groups too, very nice chap. Wore sandals (Spd) and socks all year round. A true beardy type! A masive knowledge of frames, wheels and components, iirc, his writings are still online, but so out of date now, only useful if you want to build a wheel, or restore a pre-10 speed bike. His wheel build tutorials are excellent.
Pretty sure it was about 1995/6/7 when Mr Kip was at Uni in Edinburgh and I was his bidey in! I seem to recall a very slow dial up in our tiny one bed flat.
Mr Kip still has the same mobile number we had back then, although now I think about it, I'm sure we had a mobile because we didn't have a landline...
Early 90's I think as was before secondary school.
Mostly as my dad had been working with it since starting his apprenticeship in the mid 70's, although quite a bit of that seemed to involve time trialing a Marina van between various satellite aerials from listening to the stories if his and his colleagues.
Trying to work if out by games like @dyna-ti, a, similar period I think. Carmageddon was 97 so I think it was around 97\98.
Our IT savvy Uncle bought the family a Pentium 133 desktop, I remember it had a really top end Iyama 17" monitor. Totally claimed by me, no, one else interested or understood it. Had a modem and used to use the free 60min access CDs that came on the front of PC Gamer magazine.
1983 when I almost started a global thermonuclear war on a system called called WOPR
Oh wait, that was a movie not real life.
1993 on the Huddersfield Pr1me systems...
I might have known Couger in an earlier life :scared face:
Mid to late 90s. Mrs Scape was a teacher and there was a funding initiative for staff to get half price PCs.
Dial up modems were painful….. used to leave it running overnight to download music files!!
I still have an AOL email address