Your First Internet Experience

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Another thread got me thinking...

What was your first internet experience?

Mine was in 1993, at school. The school had just had the internet installed and the whole class was invited into the secretary's office to see it work. We all huddled around a computer, it may have been an acorn (although I'm not convinced, but they all looked the same to me back then) and the secretary explained that it was marvellous, new technology. Instead of having to write letters and fill in forms to place the stationary order from the education department at the council, she could now do it on an amazing computer that looked like a portable TV. She checked the telephone line to ensure that the headmistress wasn't using the line, then connected to the internet. It seemed to take ages and the modem was a box in the wooden storage cupboard, next to the computer.
 
This is not about my first Internet experience but one which made me think it was a marvellous thing.

I'm not sure when it occurred, probably early-mid 1990s. Online we ordered and paid for a CD from a company in California. We were a bit wary - would we even get the CD, would we somehow lose even more money? A few weeks later the CD turned up and we really impressed that you could type things into a PC (as I recall it was a Viglen with a 50MHz cpu) to halfway across the World and get a result.

The rest ......


Dave
 
Mine was probably much much later, definitely in secondary school, maybe Year 11 so around 1998? Think at that point all I did was use Alta Vista as my search engine and look for stuff. About a year later, I switched to Ask Jeeves because it used multiple search engines to produce the results. '98 was when I first had a hotmail address.

The year 2000 was probably the first time I used a chat room in Yahoo. Got asked a/s/l and had no idea what it meant (age, sex, location). She was an Australian blonde teen.

2001 was when we first had the internet at home, and it was 56k with AOL.
 
And yet that was only 30 years ago - look how far we have become as the interweb becomes a household name, along with the TV, hoover, fridge, oven, etc.

I first got onto the internet in 1999 using a 56K dial up with AOL on a 450 mhz Pentium 3 PC, it costed me £14.99 a month and even then, I was still getting charged the usual telephone call rates under BT all the time I was online. Boy,, did get the shock of our lives when mother and I got the telephone bill.
In 2001, AOL then changed it into £9.99 per month for unlimited usage, much better even though I was on 56K dial up but I still kept getting cut off every time mother picked up the phone. That was a pain as AOL had the finest chat rooms there were in the world! Along with Microsoft Chat V2.5, I really did get into all that.
I'm still with AOL to this day (although it is owned by Talk Talk) using the same master screen name for emails and signing on (eg, this fine web forum).

But, if I really have to be pedantic, I did actually send my first ever electronic mail in 1983 using a college's own computer network system. It involved a series of eight BBC Micros all connected to a server with a dot matrix printer also connected to it and each computer were assigned a number. So, for example, if I wanted to send someone else in that room an electronic message, I would type in "BBC1 to BBC7: I don't like you very much and your feet smells" and someone sitting at computer number 7 would see that message appear on their screen and would know it came from me. It was also connected to a TV receiver that could pick up Prestel (a slightly posher version of Ceefax and Oracle).
Very basic stuff when compared to today's technology but I can say that was the first time I've sent a message via electronic means as well as viewing electronic contents.
 
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1984 in a basement. Dial-up, Hayes 300 BAUD modem... logging on to BBS for help and files... great times.
rolleyes.gif


PC was the first IBM... price only £6200 :banana:
 
1993 pretty sure it was a 14.4k modem but not certain and my provider was compuserve, anyone remember them :)

Dial up costs were bad compuserve was a manchester number and when my first bill arrived the wife nearly killed me :)

Steve
 
I still have a Compuserve e-mail address and it's my name with a single digit suffix. Guess that means I was in there quite early-on then! :D
 
BBS != Internet

You can't really call a BBS the internet.. samey but not quite... If we are talking BBS then my first real experience that stands out was a 360 quid phone bill for a quarter..

Another stand out was In the early 90s I got a review of a web page in a computer mag.. one of the comments was that I had played around with colours in the background.... yep the web used to be black and white and all text :)

I also have a review of a program I made that had hyper text markup language before http was released.. it was a diskzine shell that allowed clickable text to go from one part to another (not menu but in the articles) .. before BBS we used to communicate sending floppy disks through the post.. I made diskzine shells and message software :)

in 1997 I got an award for best Atari programmer from a computer magazine :)

oh loads of other stuff...

Oh yeagh.. I was the first person to make a domain checker that checked mulitple domaiin TLDS in real time... (about 1998) I did that in perl/cgi while working for an internet company so was on wages.. they released the program/script for free.. had about a million downloads and the core is still in use all over the internet at a lot of companies..

worked as a programmer for a couple of differenr online companies until i burnt myself out...20 yrs from being there day one of the www ...

the stories i could tell :)
 
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Probably mid - late 1990s, with a 56K dial up modem. The PC was probably based on a Pentium 1 something or other, but I can't really remember. We had to be very circumspect about using it because Telkom (telephone utility) rates were sky high and connections were very slow, so the bills mounted rapidly. It didn't become really useful until ADSL arrived in the early 2000s.

Some things don't change though. ADSL is mainstream now but many people still can't get it, or face long delays, because the infrastructure is lacking and it's still very expensive and slow compared with overseas.
 
1996 or 97 at college. It was god awful slow, I imagine it was an isdn servicing a whole IT faculty if not whole site. Was on 3.11 thin clients to Novell servers (10-baseT token ring anyone?) with 256 bit colour :lol:

Friend got busted for downloading porn to a floppy :D

At home I got my first (56k no doubt :geek: ) fax modem in maybe 98? Got hold of an 0800 dial up number and spend all night (parents would get annoyed with the permanent lack of dial tone otherwise :D ) chatting on mIRC.
 
At home on an Olivetti 386sx25 via a 14k modem and Compuserve circa 1989 I think. You had a choice of a slow 14k local number or a super fast 28k national rate number! Did the bbs thing and even tried online gaming, playing an American based flight sim on Compuserve where the lag was so bad you were flying around minutes after you'd been shot down :lol:
A few years later I managed to rack up a £600 phone bill playing Netropolis, thank goodness BT came along with free weekend broadband!
 
1987, whilst logged into "qvc" (a Vax mainframe in the basement) I sent an email over JANET from my bristol.ac.uk address to someone I went to school with who was at Bath university.
 
I recieved a good slap off of the wife for my first internet experience :D
 
hmmm My first modem was early 90s and the fastest I could buy was 9600 and was told 1400 was really for business use and all i need was 9600.. remeber everyhting was text.. including the www .. so nothing heavy to download..

all these people saying 56k cant have been early 90s surely ?
 
Either '94 or '95 at school. I remember it being announced in and IT lesson that we now had the Internet and every boy simultaneously looking up port, followed by a mass rollicking.

Ahhh they were the days.
 
u8myufo said:
I recieved a good slap off of the wife for my first internet experience :D
Click to expand...

:D

She must have been standing behind you for quite while...

Hair....
loading
eyes....
loading
nose...
loading

OMG hurry up! I just wanna see her ...

I remember my first computer ran at 14MgHerz or something, good enough to show off...
 
Forbiddenbiker said:
:D

She must have been standing behind you for quite while...

Hair....
loading
eyes....
loading
nose...
loading

OMG hurry up! I just wanna see her ...

I remember my first computer ran at 14MgHerz or something, good enough to show off...
Click to expand...
Yeh, and you stood no chance of ever watching the video :lol:
 
video? them days.... everyone went crazy over animated gifs .. suprising what you can do with them hahah
 
Actually, I do want to add a bit more story to my earlier post.

My idea of buying a PC and going onto the then fledging internet only came about when I checked out a dating agency back in 1998. That involved a trip to Maidstone where it lead to a half hour introductory course in a room full of like-minded people (funnily enough, all were men) and then at the end of it all, we were told the pricing . . . I actually yelled out saying "Bloody hell. It'll be cheaper if I could get myself a PC and go on the internet and find someone online via a chat room!" . . . and that's exactly what I did as that's how I got involved with a lovely lass called Fab via an AOL chat room (she lived about 60 miles away and we saw each other once or twice a month for a few years until we called it off but on very friendly terms and I still hear from her to this day - but that's me going off on a tangent again).

I was so different back then, what's the heck happened there?
 
Ian D J said:
Actually, I do want to add a bit more story to my earlier post.

My idea of buying a PC and going onto the then fledging internet only came about when I checked out a dating agency back in 1998. That involved a trip to Maidstone where it lead to a half hour introductory course in a room full of like-minded people (funnily enough, all were men) and then at the end of it all, we were told the pricing . . . I actually yelled out saying "Bloody hell. It'll be cheaper if I could get myself a PC and go on the internet and find someone online via a chat room!" . . . and that's exactly what I did as that's how I got involved with a lovely lass called Fab via an AOL chat room (she lived about 60 miles away and we saw each other once or twice a month for a few years until we called it off but on very friendly terms and I still hear from her to this day - but that's me going off on a tangent again).

I was so different back then, what's the heck happened there?
Click to expand...

A similar experience to myself Ian. I was using a chatroom which was with either Freeserve or Wannadoo at the time. Not a dating one though. cut a long story it is how I met my now wife Linda, she lived in Slough but was born in the same town as where I am living, she had more family and knew more people than I did from around here. I had even worked with her Uncle in the same same construction company prior to meeting her, all to spooky if you ask me.
 
Late 95 or early 96, using it for Egyptology studies in a school project. That and downloading funny sound clips for customising windows. That was a Pacakrd Bell 486 50Mhz machine with a whopping 512Mb hard disk!
 
funny-DNA-clip-art_zps27311425.jpg
 
However, the internet can send the information round the world in a moment - you'll never get that range from the above!
 
Nod said:
However, the internet can send the information round the world in a moment - you'll never get that range from the above!
Click to expand...

I know of one ( Best not avoid the sweary filter ) bloke on here that might :D
 
I cant remember when,but i do remember loving it their was hardly anybody using it then,but now its got a thought of love & hate thing with me
 
Can't remember when or where. But I am sure I would remember the last time I used it if for some reason it wasn't there any more.
 
about '95 one of our teachers was sick so we ended up being sent to the IT room for the period, we were told we could use the internet. After 10 mins I woorked out how to search, spent another 10 mins flicking through bbc news and then thought this is never going to catch on, what is there to do on it. hehe. How times change!
 
Internet proper? Probably around '95 for work on a bunch of 25MHz 486s, looking up scientific papers & doing email to the parent site in Minnehopless. At home, '97 using a PC the I helped build on the kitchen table, using a 33k modem with cable & wireless and netscape navigator. 56k modems didn't really become available until late 98.
 
Not the www, or really the internet ( they are different things ) and I guess more of an intranet but Prestel back in about 82 or 83 BBC micro and 1200/75 baud adaptor.

Then what ever came next, been "connected" ever since if I remember right, 30 years of phone bills then :(
 
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I've been using computers since about the age of 6 or 7, but only ever offline (or shoulder surfing my dad's dial up) until about 10 years ago, as we never had a connection at home or my primary school.

The first thing I remember was sitting at a computer and just typing search terms into the address bar. Of course browsers were crap then and unless you typed a properly formed URL it'd just spit the dummy out, so I thought "this is rubbish" and gave up until someone showed me what google was shortly afterwards.

Like most things IT I picked it up quickly though and it's now my profession.
 
Parents were both in IT so had home computers as long they existed pretty much. Even remember using Lynx when I was at primary school! Did the CIX thing but soon got a Demon connection. 8086, then a 286 AT that I inherited and was my route into IT for many years after..

Webcrawler, altavista, all that good stuff!
 
I remember there was a pirate version called astalavista or something similar as a play on altavista
 
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