As someone who’s still a young’un (at 20), I remember when the internet first came on the scene, but since I was a child it just became something else to add to the list of Things I Did Not Yet Fully Understand About The World, but Was Learning Of.
My family was on the notorious cutting edge of technology (my dad being an engineer and all), so you could say I grew up with it - from 1993ish on.
But I’m especially curious to hear stories from those of you who were already adults at the time, and had a more established way of doing things (that I imagine by now must be shattered. It’s hard to even imagine life before the 'net!).
Do you remember the very first time you heard about it?
What about the first time you actually logged on? How did you react? What did you think?
I think the first time I heard of the internet was 1989. I had never known anyone else who owned a computer except my youngest brother. He had been in on it since Commodore 64s were new and was a BBS sysop… but we didn’t really know each other until he was in his 30s.
Then I started using the internet in 1997 when I got a Yahoo! Mail account to write to my girlfriend (now wife). The first thing I checked out was record collectors’ websites, which my wife told me about. I went to the public library to use computers with net access. That was so much more convenient than trying to meet other collectors and go all over the place, physically looking for records. We got a computer in the fall of 1998, and still most everyone we knew didn’t have one. Some of them still don’t!
I don’t remember a specific reaction I had when I first saw the web. Obviously, there was a “wow” factor. I did (and do) think that it’s the best mass communications medium ever developed. I can’t conceive of how they could improve on it, except to make it faster.
I was online with my then-husband, who was (and still is) a big computer geek, in 93. We were involved with a BBS in Charlotte. This was before there were graphics, I think, all I remember is text. I remember being astounded at all the groups on usenet (IIRC), looking at it, probably with my mouth hanging open in shock.
We divorced shortly thereafter, and I didn’t have or even use a computer again until '99. Things had changed drastically.
I’d heard about BBS’s and such around 1987 (when I was in high school), but I didn’t go online until several years later. It was during the summer of my sophmore year in college, which would be in 1992. One of my roommates was hooked on playing Go over the internet and I asked him how he got connected. He introduced me to IRC, which I tried and then ditched within a few days, and to Usenet, which I was instantly hooked on. I spent most of my time at alt.folklore.urban, as well as a few of the alt.binaries boards (nudge, nudge). Anyway, the first time I tried it, I believe my thoughts were: holy crap, this is totally COOL!
I also remember spending a lot of time trying to convince my parents (with a fair amount of success) that the Internet was more than murderers, molestors and freaks, which is what all the news programs were painting it as.
After college I went overseas and was computer-less for about a year and a half. In mid-1996 I bought a new computer and one of my friends introduced me to “The Web”. The first page we went to was Lycos.com, and for my first search term I entered (thinking I’d get no replies) “The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381”. I got back pages of results and was once again completely hooked.
The change in access to information is incredible. All while I was growing up, my parents and I would have at least a dozen “I wonder…” moments during the day: “I wonder if anyone has made a…” “I wonder where you can get a…” “I wonder what other shows he’s been in…” that we couldn’t get answers to without going to the library, and maybe not even then, so they went unanswered. Now, through Google, imdb, HowStuffWorks, Lyrics.com, Word Detecitive, World FactBook, the SDMB, and several dozen other reference sites I have bookmarked, I can usually find an answer to any of those questions in under a minute.
I was 16 years old, in high school band class. A senior ran in, his face completely white, and said “somebody just invented the internet.” My blood ran completely cold. It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. A couple of the girls started crying; a few others joined hands and prayed quietly. The principal came over the intercom about five minutes later and said we were dismissed for the day so that we could go home and be with our families.
Senior year of college, 1993, all students got email addresses and I thought I had hit some kinf of technological jackpot. My friends and I would email each other things like “I Fcked your mom last night" and "Your mom smells like sht today” just because we could, and it was a whole new way to insult your best buddies’ moms. Yeah, we were real mature college freshman.
I remember, too, spending a lot of time at rec.music.beatles.
Is it just me, or did the internet not really “happen” for most people until the late 90s?
I remember where I was, in my primary school library. The librarian was explaining to us this wonderful thing called the “World Wide Web.” He showed us Netscape, and Gopher, and email on the shiny new library computer. Then he told us we weren’t allowed to use it, ever
Being a computer geek (as you can tell from my name), I was on the “internet” back before it was really the internet in its current form. I started with my trusty new fangled Commodore 64 and logged into Vax 11/780’s (if those names mean anything to you, then you must be an old fart like me). E-mailing stuff was easy to do. Getting files off of another system via FTP wasn’t that hard. The WWW wasn’t really around yet. I remember playing around with this “new” http thing many years later.
Techie specs for engineers ended up on the net before the WWW really took off. Geeks like myself could go to the sites of the semiconductor manufacturers and download specs for all of their parts (well, at least some of them… “all” took a while). Rejoice! No more keeping hundreds of data books lying around! No more waiting a week for the damn specs to show up in the mail! We were happy geeks. FTP sites started to take the place of the old BBS systems. Still, most people didn’t know what the internet was yet. Almost everyone back then was using a unix machine to access the net, and let’s face it, you have to be a geek to do much in unix. There’s an old joke that says “Unix is user friendly, it’s just particular about who its friends are.”
I still remember the day when they annoucned that http transfers (web pages) moved into the number one spot for internet traffic. Prior to then, more people were doing ftp than http. This, in my opinion, is when the “internet” really started to take off for people, because prior to this, you had to know how to do a bunch of cryptic commands to get anywhere on the net. With web pages, all you had to do was point and click. You didn’t have to be a geek any more.
I first heard about it at a Sysop meeting in North Carolina in probably the very early 90s. I was hot and heavy into the BBS scene at that point, and the idea of something even bigger was horribly exciting but I was also rather broke so it was still a couple of years before I actually got to use it. I’m pretty sure my first official foray onto the internet was using Prodigy on a Tandy 1000. Good times.
I was working around 1996 or so. A guy came in to service the office computer and told us about this thing called “the Internet” which was (here in NZ) available only through a server at the University of Waikato in Hamilton. He told us about “logging on” to the server, and then being able to contact other computers out in the rest of the world.
Never thought then I’d be futting around on the 'Net, typing this on a message board, from the comfort of my own home …
Ahhh, yes. And that “someone” was Al Gore.
I’d been hearing about the internet since I was but a pup of ten or eleven, around 1988-89, but didn’t know much about it. My father was ravenous for it, and talked about it all the time. I used to type things into my Commodore 64 (with some kind of chat program, I don’t know what it was called, but without a modem… well), wondering if someone, somewhere could read what I was typing. I would get into long-winded one-sided conversations with myself, hoping that someone would answer back. Heh.
It wasn’t until several years later, around 1995, that we got it (for our PC, not the Commodore!). I was too busy snogging a highschool basketball player in my spare time to care much about it. I cared more when we broke up, however; I remember thinking smugly how sorry he would be that he broke up with me because I had the Internet, and he didn’t! Nya nya nya.
I was addicted almost instantly, and no longer cared for basketball players.
Anyway, that’s just my little story. I was pretty young when it happened.
Anyway, I first heard of online services like Prodigy and Quantum in the mid-80s when I was a kid, but I family couldn’t afford a modem or service for my Commodore 64. I first got online on some local BBS in 8th grade ('89-'90) on an PC-AT. In high school one of the teachers had several computers connected to the proto-Internet, including the early, text-only HTTP network. At that stage it was really only used for academic subjects. For social stuff I logged on to a few local BBSes, one of which was very high tech with 8 9600 baud modems and even had its own live chat system. In '95, my mom got a new computer with Windows 95 installed and I experienced The Web for the first time. Mostly I experienced it when she wasn’t home, because she had the audacity to hog it to herself. BBSes lasted a few more years after that, but they were pretty much dead as a (marginally) mainstream thing by 2000.
The first time I used the Internet at school was in 5th grade, in 1996-97, but I think I used it at home before that. I got an AOL account around that time and e-mailed my friends stupid shit about Pokemon.
The summer after seventh grade (1999), we got a cable modem at home. That’s when I started posting on message boards (and being an awful n00b about it).
In 1993 I noticed hearing the term “information superhighway”, which later came to be known as the Internet as we know it today. I was excited to learn what this whole “information superhighway” was all about. Could I have access to it at home? How much would it cost? I wanted to check this thing out! Prior to this I had been going to local BBS systems on a nightly basis. My first exposure to the Internet came about in August of 1994 when I decided to check out AOL, popping in one of the many floppy disks they mailed out at the time (version 1.0 for Windows, I think there had been DOS-based versions of AOL before this). It was very primitive by today’s standards, connecting at 2400 baud and being limited to 8.3 filenames. AOL didn’t even have WWW access at the time, mostly newsgroups (Usenet) and FTP. In December of that year I got on with a local ISP and had full access to the Internet. I had upgraded to a 14.4K modem and was impressed by its speed over the 2400 baud modem I had been using for the previous two years on BBS’s. By then my Internet use completely supplanted my BBS visits.
Since Windows 3.1 was not Internet-ready, one had to run a “winsock” applet to serve as the connection to the Internet. My first web browser was an early version of Netscape which rendered all text in black using only the standard Times New Roman font with a gray background, with all links in blue and visited links in purple. Graphics were viewable but in limited use on most web pages at the time. Java, flash animation, video and other media were a ways off still. On the other hand, the horrors of pop-ups and spyware were yet to become a concern, and the aggravation of spam was scarcely heard of at the time. Viruses were around then but were less prevalent and distributed mostly via BBS systems and via passing “infected” floppy disks around from one computer to another.
Those days of surfing at 14.4K dialup on a 486/33 are long behind me, but they do hold fond memories and give me a moment to take a look at how far the technology has come since those early days. These days I take for granted how easy it is to get instant information. Just about all of the answer to my “I wonder” questions that come up on a day-to-day basis are just a few keystrokes away now.
My second computer: Acer, pentium I, 133 MHz, 16 Mb. My first computer with a modem. My sister wanted to start a travel agency, so she paid for me to get Compuserve so she could book flights and hotels online. A lot of it was text-only. Pictures took forever to load. To download a 30-sec video took all night. But I’m an information junkie, so I was immediately hooked.
Oh, yea, I forgot to mention that the thing that really got me hooked on the 'net was finding “The Avenger’s Handbook”. Anybody remember that? It was my first major “find” when beginning to surf.
My first exposure to the internet was in middle school, 1988. My 10th grade computer science class took a trip to an AT&T lab. Part of the trip involved a demonstration of e-mail, and we all got to “send” and “receive” an e-mail message.
In High School I was a regular user of the computer labs at the Case Western Reserve University library. It was there I discovered Archie/Gopher/BBSes. CWRU was also home to the first freenet, and I had a bit of exposure to that.
I got my first account as a freshman at Illinois Tech in 1993 on the university’s VAX/VMS machine. That was also my first time on USENET and IRC. We got Unix accounts in 1994, followed shortly by web access using Mosaic (which later became Netscape).
I had heard of BBSs and modems and so forth for years and years, but the first time I heard the word “internet” was in 1995. I made sure to commit that to memory since I’m anal, and I’m always annoyed that I don’t know for how long I’ve been doing something or how long I’ve owned something or how long ago something happened. I understood that the internet would be a big deal, so I wanted to know when I first heard of it.
I first used it in 1997 on my first PC. I remember that every company got itself a website, but basically none of them used it for anything. You had to have one, though, otherwise you were out of the loop and hopelessly outdated.
THe first time I went online was in college around 94. I had friends who were in to BBSs and various online type games, but other than email it wasn’t my thing. I remember that the university gave us a program called Mosaic which we could use to access a few web pages. By 96, we were using Netscape, and a few of my classes had websites which we could use for notes and resources.
