I mean, whoa… you mean I can click on something in the US of A, and be watching a coffee pot in frickin’ Cambridge? In Merry ol’ England, what?
I really felt like I was suddenly standing at the edge of a cliff, and that cliff was labelled “The Future”.
Here’s another page: It’s late 1991, and researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab share a coffee machine… some are two or three flights of stairs away and must travel some distance. It’s first-come, first-served, and distance is a definite disadvantage. In the interests of fair play, some of the residents of the Trojan Room salvage a video camera [in a retort stand], an old 680x0 VME-based computer, and a framegrabber…
I was only 10 or so when we first got “the Net.” By that, I mean we had an e-mail client used to exclusively contact my sister in college (because no one else had e-mail.) Then we got AOL, and I spent all that time on those wonderful AOL “sites.” I swear, it must’ve been a least a year using AOL before I discovered the rest of the web.
I realize now that AOL was basically what TV Shows and Movies showed the internet to be like, before anybody really had it. Where you would just boot it up, and click on a button that said “Shopping” and it would go to the one site on the entire internet that was for shopping.
Pre-net. At work, ca 1981, I had an HP “smart” terminal, something that might be a 300 baud modem, and the number of a gaming BBS. When I made it work I realized that the posters were perfectly vile and flame wars were the norm.
Took me a while to go online again, with friends running the BBSs.
My first look at the internet was somewhere around 1996-1997 or so. A friend of mine bought a fairly decent PC and got set up by phone modem to get the internet.
I remember sitting down next to him and watching as we looked at a few basic sites, but since we had never really seen anything like this, weren’t sure what to do or where to go.
He asked me if I could think of something to search for.
Since I was making a living selling parts for old Ford Mustangs, I asked him to do a search on “Mustang” and see what came up.
On the first page of the search was a few sites dedicated to information on the cars, sites with pictures of old sales brochures, and, at the bottom of the first page, someones personal webpage about Mustangs.
“My Ford Mustang and naked pictures of my wife”
Sure enough, there were pictures of his car and basic information about it, and on the last few pages were scanned photographs of his rather large, middle-aged wife. Not an, uh, attractive woman, IMHO, but he seemed to be proud enough to post nude pictures of her for the world to see.
It was shortly thereafter that I discovered that porn was the driving force that expanded the internet and its growth, and that many new webpage visual features, marketing schemes, and pay-on-line inovations were first used and became commonplace on porn sites.
So I heard.
I wonder if that webpage is still up there somewhere, lost among the millions of pages viewable now.
Depends on what you mean by the web. My first net experience was about 1974, when we at Illinois used the Arpanet to log into Stanford to play with Parry, their paranoid person simulator. I was on usenet heavily starting in around 1987 or '88, back when alt.sex was one low volume newsgroup and before spam. And we had an ISP account where we used Archie and Veronica to mostly browse library card catalogs, probably 1990 or so.
I was a young, unhappily married stay-at-home mother of two very young children when we got the internet in 1992. We both, my husband and I, would hook up to a bulletin board based in Charlotte, NC, where we lived, named Atlantis. We would get together with the other local members on occasion, for nerdy get-togethers, and there was a lot of sleeping around within the group.
Good times. I wonder whatever happened to some of those people.
1997, Comp 123. The course was compulsory, although boring. Got on the 'net at home and got hooked. ParentSoup wasn’t the very first webpage I visited, but was pretty early in the piece.
(Now I think I might have the years a little wrong. More like 1992 for CompuServe, and 1993 for the Buddhist website. I did know people who had email in 1991, though.)
I started my on-line existence as a member of CompuServe in 1992.
Some time within the next two years, I had a job as a lab tech in the college which I had graduated from, and one of the other lab techs installed NCSA Mosaic. I think back then I mostly used the internet to browse CompuServe from the lab when it got slow, or to pick up baseball box scores.
It was 1994 or 95, and I was going on a longish vacation. I asked my admin to “find out what this internet thing was all about and set us up on it” while I was gone. I got back, and had to search for something, so I put in the place I went on vacation. I got all sorts of folks’ web pages who had vacationed there and posted pictures. I was blown away. Who are these people, how do they put this stuff up on the internet, and where is it all stored?
That was at work. I didn’t discover porn until I got an ISP for myself at home a few months later.
In 1995, when I started college as a freshman, they had a computer orientation session where they showed us how to use the Web. That was my first exposure to the Internet. I remember the girl doing the session showed us Yahoo’s page of “Cool Links”, which had about ten things on it, including some teenager’s personal movie review site.
The idea of a news organization, TV channel, or corporation in general having a website was still pretty foreign then. I remember that I used to get my online news from Nando.net because there were hardly any other places to get it at first.
My first linked computer system experience was with PLATO. Back in 1979, in the basement of the med school library where I of course posted in a Tolkien thread or three, and played “bugs and drugs” and “fighter pilot” (got shot down by someone on the West coast.)
I remember discussion threads where Reagan (AKA Raygun) was identified as unelectable, and described in terms similar to what I see used here today regarding our current presidential candidates.
La plus que ça change, la plus que c’est la même chose!
Started on AOL in 1996, and although this wasn’t the first page I ever visited, it was my earliest glimpse of genuine Internet Kooks:
McDonald’s had recently revamped their menu, with the Arch Deluxe as the crown jewel. Somehow I stumbled upon some bulletin board full people raging about how much the Arch Deluxe sucked, how much McDonald’s sucked, and how the new menu had ruined their lives. It was like New Coke all over again.
I think I sat there for two hours reading page after page of the most passionate ranting I had ever seen in my life. I couldn’t look away. It just blew me away to see so many people going off the deep end over a fucking hamburger.
Web, or Internet? I remember being introduced to a MUD on the VAX network at uni, my first year. Usenet, too. So that was the Internet. Web, would be two years later, 1991. Mosaic.