To me the web began in 1995, but that was because of the advent of Netscape and the graphical interface. I had been using bulletin boards (Compuserve) to some extent prior to that though. Remember the 300, 1200 and 2400 baud modems. Ah, those were the days.
Bob
I was in Tokyo in the 1990s. Back then, I was working in the publishing / translation industry. Our translators would fax us their work, which we would retype, or they would mail us floppies. We moved to modem-to-modem direct links, using a protocal called X modem at 2400 bps. 
If there got to be too many errors, the whole thing would timeout and you had to start over. Since the translators weren’t familiar with using modems, and only had one phone line (and of course, no one had cell phones), we would arrange to try three times, then place a regular phone call to check settings.
Translators could never be exactly sure of any questions and getting reference matterial in English was almost impossible. If you didn’t know the answer to something, it was often extremely difficult to find the answer.
And then the world changed.
In June of 1994 I went to Russia. During the summer I was in Siberia and then in the fall I was in St. Petersburg. At the time I left, I had never heard of the Internet. When I returned in December 2004, it was a household term. From my perspective, at some point during the time I was away a critical threshold of awareness was was reached in the US.
I was in a smoky blue-collar bar. I was studiously eyeballing a down-the-rail shot on the six, corner pocket when the room lurched, just once. I was one of four people asking, “What the Hell* was that?” A young man at the end of the bar jumped to his feet. He wore an expensive tie and an expression like he’d just made a 4-rail shot to pot the eight ball. He said, “That…that was the world changing!” Then he bought a round for the whole bar. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I thanked him for the booze.
*Thurber said Hell is a place, so it’s a proper noun.
Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, has graphs of the internet’s usage showing it to have an exponential level of growth. It is about 1/3 of the way down his article (it is the green graph with the yellow line) and it shows the exponential graph (which is an almost perfect line) vs. the linear graph which is near zero then explodes out of nowhere. So arguably the internet revolution was something that was predictable in the 70s as a service that should popularize in the mid 90s. Supposedly using his exponential graphs he predicts the same thing will happen with nanotechnology in the mid 2020s, so someday people will post threads on that subject and feeling that technology appeared out of nowhere.
1996 - I had just graduated college and started using an AOL account to access the Internet for job searching (and porn). We had some kind of text based messaging, BBS and email in college but no one other than Comps Sci folks used it really. I mean we didn’t even have email at my second job and that was in IT consulting!
Bravo, pravnik!
Man, I love these stories. I’m going to have a blast in the nursing home, I’ll tell you what.
I first heard about the Internet in the late 80s, when I was entering college. I assumed, naturally, that it was useful provided you were either a geeky scientist or one of those kids like in Wargames.
The Internet actually happened to me in the early 90s … in the office. We all got email and could use gopher, I think. For a while, email seemed like a novelty – it was standard to call someone on the phone to tell him that you had sent him an email otherwise he might not know to fire up the ol’ Internet and read it. This boggles my mind now. It really was the kind of thing where if you didn’t pick up the phone, you were completely at fault if a deadline was missed, because what kind of moron would assume a coworker would automatically check his email?
The first thing I got via gopher was instructions for a Star Trek drinking game, which completely confirmed my belief that the Internet was for geeky scientists and those kids like in Wargames.
The very first time I heard about computer networks and “logging on” was in the mid-80’s. I was looking to buy a used Atari 800 for $100 or so and one of the people I went to see was going to show me how the thing could use the modem so you could talk to people. He never got it to work, and that was it. I was in the 11th, 12th grade at the time.
I then became aware of it again via my employer’s open-access (for me, anyway) Prodigy account. I would even come to work late at night so I could use Prodigy. This was in 1990, 91, and unbeknownst to me (or any of us, I’m sure), Berners-Lee was inventing HTML and the WWW. A couple of years later, long after the Prodigy account became an AOL account, Mosaic was released and the world was a different place.
I still remember the exact date and time when I was finally able to access this burgeoning “Internet” thing: October 28th, 1995, around 10:30pm - right after my team, the Braves, won the World Series. I had bought my first Pentium computer that day (a 100 Mhz Packard Bell scream-machine with a 28.8k modem, baby!) and my first ISP was, I think, Geocities, and I used Mosaic. MS didn’t even have an internet option.
Establishing a pattern that (glances at clock) is continuing even as I type this, I didn’t log out until 4:00am or so. If I did at all.
I knew we were in a bubble when CNN Headline News began running “news stories” about the latest web sites: “Tired of standing in line at the DMV? Coming up, a new web site that allows users to renew their licenses at the click of a mouse.”
I wasn’t an adult, but I first heard about the Internet sometime in the early 1990’s and I’m going to tell my story anyway.
My older was into dialup BBS’s. I used them a little bit myself. We went to a couple BBS outings at a theme park and it turned out he was the only kid in the group. I remember first getting the impression around 1992 that the Internet was a system that somehow let you connect to other BBS’s across the country. I think he used it that way at some point. I think that was when we had our first Mac, or it might have been on the Apple //e. My brother worked on a BBS of his own, but by the time he was close to getting it running, the Internet was making BBS’s obsolete. All we ever used it for was games. There were a bunch of multiplayer text-based BBS games. I remember The Pit which was an arena melee fighting game, and Operation Overlord 2, an RPG that had you battling monsters in a radioactive wasteland.
I don’t remember when I first used a graphical web-browser. It must have been sometime in the mid 90’s, maybe 1995. I remember our grandpa had a faster modem than ours, so the first thing I did over at his place was go to the MTV website which was too big for us at home.
Porn changed. In the days of BBS’s what you had to do was read a list of nudie-pic descriptions, pick one and then wait and watch it load line by line over the course of several minutes. I think I saw some really rough animated gifs, and that was the first actual pornography I saw. Once we had a 56K modem and Internet access, it was a whole different world. It happened at just about the right time for me.
By 1999 or so it was all pretty routine. I got my first email address when I was in high school, then. Yeah, that’s when it got real big and there were websites for every company and whatnot. In the mid 90’s a lot of the appeal for me was the weird stuff, like getting in flame wars with the crazies on Usenet and reading the Anarchist’s Cookbook and whatnot.
For the life of me I can’t actually remember when I was introduced to the Web itself. Maybe it’ll come back to me.
You got me beat. I became a PLATO person in 1979. E-mail was called P-notes, and bulletin boards were notesfiles. I was a regular on a notesfile called =events, which was pretty much indistinguishable from Great Debates. It’s truly amazing how much of today’s internet (that even knowledgeable people trace back only 15 years or so) was a common part of the PLATO community 25 or 30 years ago. As you said, multi-user games, involving real-time interaction with people a thousand miles away, were common.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO
The PLATO experience circa 1980 was recreated by a dedicated group of volunteers in 2004, and can be seen via www.cyber1.org. (free registration required.)
Empire (a space battle game) lessons available upon request! (It was scary how my fingers remembered key sequences last used 20 years before.)
Qadgop, are you sure that part of what you remember at Johns Hopkins wasn’t PLATO? I seem to remember that there was a small site there, and bnd (Bugs ‘n’ Drugs) was available on PLATO. (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten all my bnd-gained antibiotic knowledge, though. I knew that stuff cold once.)
Could be. Frankly I wasn’t that clear on the concept, other than it was big computers talking to other computers. I forgot my antibiotic knowledge from the games too. Which is just as well, as it’s all out of date now.
I was in Scotland in 1989 and the owner of the bed and breakfast where we stayed had just discovered she had breast cancer and was crying all the time. The worst thing was that she knew nothing about treatments, etc. so to comfort her I told her that I had heard that there was some way you could go on the computer and get medical information and keep up to date on treatments. I had heard this in California but had no idea who, what,when, where, anything. I never did research it when I got back to the U.S.
Fast forward, when I left the FDIC in 1994, I knew there was something called the “internet” but had never actually used it or seen it. I remember reading a memo that FIDC was going to go on the internet, but when I mentioned this to other examiners they had absolutely no idea what the internet was.
By 1998 people were buying computers at a record pace so I bought one with WIN98. I sat at it for hours amazed, absolute amazed that you could contact people all over the world. I remember that when you wanted to hook up to a server people always referred to them as AOL. AOL almost became Kleenex.
At the think tank where I worked, we were introduced to the Web in 1994. I initially had difficulty understanding the non-linearity of it all. Who controls it? Where do you start? How do you know where to go? Who pays for this?
I think I would have understood it better if someone explained to me that the Internet is a network of networks (and explained to me what a network was!). Then made an analogy to the world’s telephone systems. Individual telephone systems (networks) exist throughout the world, but they are connected so that we can call around the world.
I was emailing on some BBS’s and Prodigy in the late 80’s while I was a high school student. Then I went to Cal-Berkeley from 1989 and discovered USENET. I was pretty active on the newsgroups particularly the movies, trivia and sports-related ones. In fact, I believe I had the first regular MLB scores service available through mailing list from 1992. Cite
Another BBS’er checking in…I actually bought the software to start my own little BBS, but by the time I was just about figuring out how to set it up, that damned internet got bigger and better…I was a day late and a dollar short, as usual.
Of course, this was back in the day of dial up connections and you used to hear the ring, the connect and then alien music until you finally logged onto your BBS. And of course the screens were all green. No color. Think really bad sci-fi film from the 80’s.
Gee…wonder what kids in the year 2020 will think about the archaic sytem we use today.
The first notesfile was called pad. They later cloned it into topic specific files. I remember when we discovered quoting - there was a long thread, which consisted of
Don’t you get a feeling of deja vu while reading pad
quoted and requoted over and over.
Cool, I’m going to have to check that out.
I played empire when it was first called michelin, from space reclaimed from some lesson or others. (Disk space on PLATO was at a premium when I used it.) It used up a majority of Cyber CPU cycles in the graveyard shift. The rest of the cycles were Andrew Appel stealing time to run cases for his father’s proof of the 4-color theorem.