Probably 1999 on an iMac RevB. The sound of the modem negotiating the connection is imprinted in my subconscious.
No idea. Got first email account when I went traveling 1998. Still use it today.
Must have gone on line before then but no idea why....
It would have been a year or two after this when I got a 486 - but this period of my life is bit blurry recollection wise!
Similar to many (it's our age group), working for Portsmouth Poly in the early days of connections - green screen email on the DECs is the first thing I remember, no idea what year. Then came bulletin/chat boards, few years before the 486s started appearing on the desks with Win3.1. Oh, why oh why did I think moving into supporting that shit was a good career move?? If I could slap my 20-odd year old self round the head for that decision.
Do know I got my first personal email account in 99 cos it had 99 in the name. 🙂
1997 when I was 6/7 years old. Used to go on forums, skateboarding and snowboarding websites and online games, a lot of chat rooms and messageboards etc then habbo hotel and runescape in the early 2000s 😀 I remember Windows 95, 98 and ME. And other jewels like Ask Jeeves, AOL (that came on a CD as it's own package and was almost like adware), Lycos, Napster, Limewire and Morpheus, and MSN. Wasn't long before I had MSN Messenger and used to be on it almost every night after school.
My parents were both technically inept and still are for the most part, all I got told was "don't look at pictures of naked ladies and don't tell anyone where you live or you'll be grounded" so I was given pretty much free unsupervised reign of whatever I wanted to look at and do on the family PC.
I remember virus's being rife, especially that one called drinks holder that would open your CD drive and not let you close it. Also the BSOD issues all the time, my dad was that sick of paying his mate at work to fix our PC after every virus and BSOD that he sweet talked the bloke into printing out instructions on how to re install Windows OS off the CD drive, my dad worked away so I ended up just formatting and reinstalling windows every time we had an issues and saving everything we needed to keep on floppy disks.
Probably says a lot about why I've now got a career in IT management
First university email address in 1990.
Gopher and Mosaic from September/October 1993 ish
Shared use of my parent's Compuserve account around '94/'95, I'd say.
Proper native user of the Internet with my own email address when I went to uni in '97.
I do miss the multi-page back and forth arguments between Sheldon and Jobst on rec.bicycles.tech still. I think those two would put even TJ's arguing skills to shame 😉
I had a woman with her tits out as my screensaver and I mainly scoured eBay for tat and looked at, um, tits
Err, that's what the internet was for wasnt it, and still is?
I started in 94, possibly 95. AOL for a month, then BT. Freeserve came out a bit later, that was the big boost for the UK. We had a 386 with a 40mb HD, Win 3.11. Newsgroups/Usenet was a lot bigger then, and the Providers promoted them, leading to Eternal September, which is still referred to occasionally on the Usenet groups I still frequent.
Sometime in late '92 when I persuaded work to give me a Compuserve account and a 2400baud modem, because it was the best way to get support for Gupta SQLWindows. Then got Netscape pretty soon after the first release (0.9?).
97/98, I was in year 10 anyway. I remember that because my mate Jamie had Y10 in his email address and I remember thinking at the time that it wasn't going to age very well. Not that I've still got access to lornehead@hotmail.com either tbf. We had an IT suite in the library with a DSL connection.
I remember being distinctly underwhelmed at the time having heard about the internet and thinking it would be amazing, best thing I managed to do was download Timmy the Turtle by nofx and save it to a floppy disc, it was the only song short enough and flash drives hadn't been invented.
I got my own PC about a year or so later ready for my A level 'studies' which mostly consisted of making playlists on winamp then recording them onto minidisc via a line out. I couldn't download songs myself, they were either ripped from CDs or from my mate John who had a HD caddy and some weird satellite internet connection and no job.
about 96/97 at uni, a few lads on my course used to go on a forum and troll. they seem to enjoy it
Dial up Prestel pages on a BBC Micro in the late 80s....
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.
😀 I can remember the moment i passed the 50%/1TB threshold on my 2TB external drive at home.
I now have about 10TB of stuff on three NAS's.
JANET? Early 80s. Late 80s? SEAdog mailer? It was prob '88/'89 when late at work one evening my computer started typing back at me. Spooky af. I typed "who are you", answer being the name of some senior IT fixated guy based in a different city to me. But no, probably usenet, early 90s. First thing I remember posting being on one of the rec.bike (or cycling, forget) groups about mittens for some reason. So a while, if a bit half heartedly, predates the web anyway.
1995 at uni. I remember being shown Netscape Navigator in the computer room down in the bowels of the library at Brunel.
And thinking "well this is shit....and slow".
By the time I got to my final year in '99 I ended up in a networked hall of residence & my parents bought me a Tiny PC with a 17Gb HDD & 256Mb of RAM.
There was a lot more stuff online by then and I had (what I thought was) a half decent collection of downloaded MP3s.
I remember a computer geek on my floor in halls being amazed that when we used to play networked TOCA touring cars, I could run the graphics at max everything & also have Winamp running in the background. I had no clue, but apparently this was seriously impressive.
JANET!
Probably early/mid 90s. 1992/1993 for bulletin boards first. Then 1994 gathered the various bits of IP software together from bulletin board binaries and Demon’s floppy discs for my Amiga. ‘ftp.wustl.edu’ and all that. Then in due course Mosaic browser. Then Netscape and so on.
Anyone remember the ‘finger’ application?
Learning to use Wordstar 6 and Quattro and then using Minitab on the Vax.
I had a 286 1mb 40mb 16khz running MS-DOS 5.0 and then 6.0
Upgraded to WordPerfect 5.1 💪
1994, May 6th. Remember the day like it was yesterday. There was a new Model Village (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/990033.stm&ved=2ahUKEwjToc6Mvu2AAxWGIMAKHSb_CXoQFnoECAwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3wuj0CYBtRGm8Rxoq2Jfi z">Crickhowell Televillage) being built in my hometown to cater for the new breed of WFH people that the Internet would usher in and they did a big demonstration at my high school. It was the week directly after Senna had been killed at Imola and news was scarce on what was happening so pretty much everyone searched for news on that. The company behind the new Village had paid for a specially dedicated line into the computer suite form the exchange just over the road from the school entrance, a big cable that just crossed the main road and came down the school driveway! Had yellow ramps on it to protect it, madness when you consider it wasn't that much faster than dialup. Considering we were in the middle of Wales, a technology black spot back then with no Internet for private homes or even the school, it's strange to think now that it's exactly what everyone is moving towards. Connected houses with a small office tucked away for remote working.
I cant remember what year it was but we didnt have search engines, we did have webrings though.
Dial up to Sheffield Uni Timeshare with an acoustic coupler and a teletype back in my 'Computer Club' days of early 80s! Man I feel old!
Best memory of on-line is working for Gillette Dec 31, 1999 waiting for the Millennium Bug to wipe out their internal network. They had a single internet connection for the whole company (US, Europe, AsiaPac) . And I had it all to myself to browse RSN for snowcam pics so I could decide where to go skiing.
30,000 ish employers. 2 megabits/second internet pipe 🙂
I couldn’t download songs myself, they were either ripped from CDs or from my mate John who had a HD caddy
Early 90s for downloading music were nuts. Around the time of the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, I think that was one of my first downloads. I had an FTP client and a super-fast* connection from my desk at the Uni. For a few years work time mostly consisted of finding FTP sites and downloading as much music as possible to transfer onto my USB drive (probably 2-3 albums 😀 ) and burn onto CDs . I don't think it was in the job description though.
*seemed that way at the time. Like, 2 albums a day!
I was "introduced" to the net by a mate of mine who worked for Telewest Communications in 1994.
Its fair to say the introduction involved "Frankie Vaughn"
C. 1998, I purchased a PCMCIA (?) card modem for my work laptop and got a Virgin internet account.
A couple of years later I had a Sony mobile with Bluetooth and a Bluetooth card for the same laptop, so them I had MOBILE internet! Not that you could do much with it it was so slow. Ping off an e-mail with no attachment was about it's limit, but it was useful.
PCMCIA: People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.
Personal Computer Media Connection Interface Adaptor? (I didn't google it so that's a guess). It reminded me of the one we had issued to us as field engineers and EVERYONE broke the tab off where the RJ11 cable clipped in 🙂
Before that ubiquitous Texas Instruments V22/V22bis modems. Used to dial up to 'netwire' to download some random driver for Novell Netware on 2400 baud connection. Occasionally leaving connected overnight!
I remember using it in 1992 when I was at university. Its all a bit vague though as to what I used it for and you certainly didnt have a search engine !
I do remember that beer was 99p a pint though
TBH, my first job had less access than my uni did.
92-96 i had unfettered access to anything i wanted. Especially once i'd got myself into the inner circle with the IT admin for the uni engineering network.
96-01 i was essentially internet free at my employers, we had one connected computer in the library (14000 people on site at the time), that was completely isolated from any other machine in the company. Also had all it's ports switched off AND physically blocked or removed. In late 2000 they started to allow a few select sites to be accessible via (i think) a windows emulator on our SG machines. But you had to apply to get sites added to the list of sites you were allowed to access... So i never even bothered. You needed to apply to get external email added to the address book, if they weren't on the list, you couldn't receive or send. Biggest issue with this is that a lot of the guys we actually needed to email had their email addys handwritten on the back of their business cards, and that wasn't good enough for our IT security officers.
So we just didn't bother with email or the internet.
I guess they're still hammering the fax.
dial up pron was a lesson in patience
Kids of today. I remember ASCII Art pron.
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.
My first personal mobile was in 1999, it was a tiny Siemens S25.
93 at uni. Bulletin boards and Web rings.
How times change.
I'm logged into a bulletin board right now.
Personal Computer Media Connection Interface Adaptor?
Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. (I didn't google it either). Later renamed as "PC Card," probably due to GHill's mnemonic.
Sep or Oct '94. On a uni induction course. I'd been away from the UK for a few years and arrived back straight into (slightly) mature uni life and to be honest I'd never even heard of the internet so it was slightly baffling.
3 or maybe 4 minutes later I was introduced to internet porn. Surprisingly by an 18 yr old girl in the group heavily into trying to be shocking (and sex it later transpired).
Pretty sure after that first experience I didn't go back online for a few more years. Didn't have it in the academic dept I was in or student accom. Probably next online experience was when I got a landline in my rental house in about '98 and bought my trusty dx2 66 a sound card and a modem card.
My first personal mobile was in 1999, it was a tiny Siemens S25
It was around that time that my boss came back from the pub at lunchtime laughing because "there was a bunch of guys bragging about who had the smallest"
Probably '99 or 2000.
Windows ME was the flavour of the day, and a huuuge 30gb hard drive.
Internet speed went up to broadband 512 after about a year of 56k, when you couldn't use the landline and internet at the same time. Life changing🤣
Autumn 1998. We'd pestered my parents for a PC for years and eventually got them to buy a Pentium 2 333mhz, 64 Meg RAM, 6gb hard drive, Voodoo 2 12mb graphics card, and 56k modem.
Got given one of those "Freeserve" discs from PC World when we bought it and used that to get online. Later used BT Wireplay for online gaming but from memory that cost more per minute to use and I used to get into a lot of bother from the parents when the phone bill came. Good job I had a paper round to pay for it.
Yahoo Messenger, then later MSN Messenger became the way to communicate and arrange meetups among mates at school. This was may before the days when schoolkids had mobile phones.
@cardiff.ac.uk in 1993, I think. Pegasus and Gopher as a result of having to use the computer labs to write copy for the student newspaper, which only had half a dozen Amstrad 286s for the writers. Used to bump around on the early MTB mailing lists with that there Mike Davis fella. I think one of the earliest things I turned up on Gopher was an article about Alex Pong and the Cannondale V4000.
Very early 90s. My mate at school's dad had a work computer and modem at home. We dialed up and connected to a handfull of telnet addresses, couldn't find anything to do on there then gave up.
Then again in 94 at uni, and I'm not sure I've been offline ever since!
486 DX100, 14400 bps modem that dad bought home from (nicked?) from work. Some Microsoft closed network that wasn’t the wwww. So when was that? Early 90s I guess.
Doom II on 4 floppy disks.
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.
