Features - QOTW: What are your first memories of the Internet?

[HEXUS]

With the Internet turning 25 this week, let's take a trip down memory lane.

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[Jonj1611]

Ah never ending Compuserve discs, my trusty 28.8K modem and back when you could send up to a certain amount of emails depending what tariff you were on.

[daddacool]

I started playing with PC's and the internet in my first year at university, 1993. I'd had home computers from the 8 bit days and even did a lot of my A level homework on my Atari ST but no internet whatsoever. At that point to get an email account, you had to fill in a 3 page paper form and then wait a couple of days for some poor sod in the computer department to manually set up your email account. The university network was run an a Unix cluster that someone was always joking had a network enabled toaster plugged in for the busy periods.

And the Internet? Let me tell you where/what the Internet was in late 1993. A lot of people confuse the Internet (round for years and years, home to all sorts of stuff like Gopher, Telnet, FTP, Newsgroups and so on), with the World Wide Web. Well, the World Wide Web was effectively invented in my first year at university (yes I know the web was 1989 but popular adoption was lagging behind IMHO and it really took off in late 93). All those web pages? All that content? Nothing before NCSA Mosaic came along and allowed us to have (more or less) the modern internet that we all know and love.

Immediately the entire membership of the sci-fi society became the fledgling members of this brave new world. At this point in time, if the sci-fi society wanted to watch Star Trek the Next Generation before UK broadcast, they were beholden on an exchange student posting a VHS recorded off the telly from America. Remember, this was 3 years before Google was even founded, and the immediate uses for the world wide web were:
science fiction fan sites;
Geocities and it's garish sites that were always under construction; and
porn

[Andi-C]

snuff movies, let's say it wasn't nice viewing...

[Platinum]

Porn tbh

[rox0r]

I suppose Bulletin Boards didn't really count as the 'Internet' proper but they were my first WAN-exploits, bagging shareware and tat like clip-art. Compuserve was the next big thing for me, I was a chat admin for a few years and made some good friends around there. The WWW-actual was a chargeable 'add-on' at the time but I honestly can't remember the first thing I actually did on the web itself...

Boobs; probably boobs.

[shaithis]

[Brewster0101]

I suppose Bulletin Boards didn't really count as the 'Internet' proper but they were my first WAN-exploits, bagging shareware and tat like clip-art. Compuserve was the next big thing for me, I was a chat admin for a few years and made some good friends around there. The WWW-actual was a chargeable 'add-on' at the time but I honestly can't remember the first thing I actually did on the web itself...

Boobs; probably boobs.

Bulletin boards for Boobs, and games from the likes of Epic

Good old days of wading through text based pages

[Corky34]

First ever experience was with Compuserve, they only wanted me for my money so i soon switched to a real ISP, CIX offered the best connection for playing Doom II and later Quake.
The fond memory's of spending £300+ per month on phone charges.

[Jonatron]

Very first memory was the BBC website, on a laptop with a dialup modem. But proper memories are from when I started being able to get on the net myself. It was all about MSN messenger, chat rooms, probably some awful games, and half the internet seemed to be on geocities. If you wanted to find about about something you'd try infoseek, lycos and dogpile and still not find anything useful. Also what happened to surfing the net? I guess when you have to tell people when you're _not_ able to access the internet saying you're surfing the net sounds a bit silly.

[deejayburnout]

I remember audio galaxy. Took about a day to get a few mp3 tracks.

Digital Copyright infringement in its infancy.

[owlx]

I remember making a joke online and someone responded with "LMAO." I responded with "I'm not a lame-o, jerk." Then the everyone in the chat responded with LMAO. Then I asked my slightly hounger roommate if the word lame-o was making a come back or something. She said no, looked at the chat, and literally began rofl. I've never felt so old and out of touch, and I was 26 at the time.

[simonpreston]

After spending fruitless hours trying to convince my parents to sign up to an ISP my first foray in the web, at home anyway, was when Freeserve came along - changing the game a bit. So I bought myself a 56k modem, hooked it up to my Amiga, installed TCP/IP stack and got online that way.

Before that, I guess it was the machines in my school. Most of us spent our library time in awful chat rooms trying to chat up anything we could. Good times.

[Scainer]

porn, connect direct, yahoo chat

[Funkstar]

Very first use of the internet was at a friends house using Compuserve and a 28.8 modem. We used to gather there most weekends. Most of our time was spent trolling on Compuserve Chat rooms


My first internet access of my own was with a Trust 28.8, with Enterprise.net as the ISP (based in the Isle of Man I think, I wonder what happened to them). Pretty sue it was repalced by a 33.6, then a 56KB modem before I managed to get on the initial roll out of ADSL. That green stingray from BT was a pain in the neck.

[starbuck]

I remember being up in the middle of the night to try and log onto X-Stream which was a dial up service with a free phone number. Because it was free, either early morning (5am ish) or other off peak times were the best times to connect, otherwise you took a while redialling to get a connection. The earlier mention of audio galaxy really takes me back, that and winamp. I almost miss that dial up sound sometimes.....