"Last generation who knew life before the internet"

[Nextphonewontbesamsung]

I heard this phrase on R2 or R4 recently (sorry I can't remember the specifics). It was a discussion programme, possibly about something on at the Edinburgh Fringe, and the general consensus was that it was quite unique to be a person who has lived through as an adult straddling that boundary between no internet/then internet.

I am in this generation and I DO actually feel in a bit of a no-mans land. Anyone else? and how old are you roughly? when did the internet become a thing in your life?

I was at work in 1994/5 when I first heard the word "internet". The Chief Exec was having some extra wiring done into his office but he was the only one in our company of about 50 people. I was over 30 so had lived many adult years without it and it was many more years before it become a thing that I just had access to.

I'm struggling to think of a more life-changing invention. Maybe fire? or the wheel?

Oblomov I was just thinking of 10 goto 20. That was the only thing I learned, then it was waiting 20 minutes for the tape to upload the Blagger game and me wasting what was a lovely piece of kit.

Had a conversation a bit like this today - how did people manage to make lots of visits in an area they didn't know before satnav?

I used to do market research house calls in the early 90s. I needed an A-Z for every town I needed to visit (I'm in the NW); I used to plot my route from home to a destination using a road atlas, wrote out all the junctions in large letters on a sheet of A4 with black permanent marker (that sat on the passenger seat), then used A-Z when I got there to find the streets I needed.

Unbelievable

I can't remember exactly when we got our first home computer - mid 90s I think. It did all the mad dial-up connection noises that took ages. We had Encarta & other clever stuff on disk.

When I first heard about a friend using email to communicate within his office I wondered why he didn't just get up to go & talk to people! I don't remember when that was though.

I've been on MN since 2000 - was on the BBC Archers message board at the same time - arranged a very few, very tentative meet-ups through both. It was weird. Actually giving someone your email address!!!

(I'm a baby boomer btw. Born 1951)

I was at University 2004-2009. DH and I are very happy that most of our youthful idiocy was not caught on camera and immediately uploaded to social media. Even with digital cameras and basic camera phones we had to wait to get home and censor stuff before publishing online. I was at one of the selected universities so got Facebook relatively early for the UK... It was originally to allow University students to do group projects and arrange meet ups etc! And you could only have 60 photos in one album.

I was in my mid 30s when the Internet arrived and the Worldwide Web was born. My DS worked 3 jobs before and after school and at weekends in order to buy himself a pc. It cost him £1400 and had 8MB of RAM!

We got a modem so he could dial up onto the Internet. Accessing the Internet was quite problematic and very expensive. Fees were charged per minute of Internet use, plus BT also charged for the use of the phone line by the minute - then there was a monthly charge from the ISP on top of that! DS was with Compuserve. I can still recall the musical signal that played when the Internet had loaded.

I sometimes feel there is a cut off between me, and people who are only a few years older who struggle to use a phone and with new technology at work.

Satnav is liberation for me. It's not foolproof, but it is bloody wonderful.

I’m very much an inbetweener. I started secondary school in 1996 with the internet on one computer in the school library that only upper school and teachers were allowed to use and they had to make an appointment to do so. I remember a teacher of ours saying he didn’t really “get the fuss about the internet” and he couldn’t see what he would ever use it for and we all agreed it was a bit mysterious.

First email address came when we got dial up at home when I was 14 and by the time I went to uni in 2003 I had my own laptop (it cost a thousand pounds and was a present from my grandparents!) and internet via an Ethernet cable in my halls of residence room- they were brand new and it was all incredibly exciting.

Got my first internet enabled phone in 2004 and then by the time I was 25 Netflix existed and the way we consume entertainment had completely changed. From video cassettes and literal records in my childhood to thousands of films and TV shows at the touch of a button before I was 30. Mad.

When I was at Uni we had apple macs you could take home - the ones with the six inch screens.... but we also had a LAN in the college plus email and an early messaging/chat service. Often wonder if I was one of the first to "online" date as a bf asked me out over that net work lol. When I started work in 1991 we had one computer in the building and it was given to me as no one else had ever used one. I had been using them since I was about 12 as Dad invested a whole months salary in a BBC!!! Still no internet....

I did computing as part of the degree I was doing and my favourite bit was envisioning what was to come - some of what we talked about scarily came pretty close.

It all stood me in good stead and now work in the Data Centre Industry as a none techy and it helps to be able to grasp the concepts easily.

When I was newly married (mid 90s) I used to get Iceland home delivery sometimes. There was a catalogue with pictures of the foods and you phoned up with your order!

we actually called email electronic mail still too

I started uni in 1993 and got my first hotmail address in 1995 (still have it!)

The internet didn't impact on my studies or 1st few jobs at all tho.

I remember doing door to door work in Australia in 1997 selling encyclopedias and this person was talking about cd-roms full of information. Just imagine - many copies of CDs containing facts......

I'm remember my first pc at work running windows for workgroups 3.11, first one at home was windows 95, remember before the Internet the kids looking up stuff on encarta for their homework.

Think we got Internet in about 97, dial up for years. That horrible noise it made!

I loved my pc and the Internet, nothing has ever fazed me with it. It's been funny at times especially when I was temping in offices how people have thought because I was of the older generation I wouldn't understand the computer and Internet.

I actually met my now DH in a chat room, before OLD was the way. I also went to many chat meets around the country

It's so weird.

I can't believe I went all the way through uni with no internet and didn't actually get it until I bought my first house in 1995/6.

My PhD in the mid 80s was very computation heavy - a lot of it had to be run at the regional computer centre in Manchester ... submit job, then next day walk over to the computer centre to pick up the output on that big lined continuous printout paper plus some files would be sent back electronically, iirc it was done using JANET. (These computations could of course now be done easily and quickly on a laptop)

There were a few 'forums', chat room type things including one dedicated to Mornington Crescent.

Then around 1990 with work there was email - oh yes I remember that modem sound!
When DHs job moved in 1995 I was able to work from home, my company paid for me to have an ASDL line. So I was using the Internet seriously at that point.

I only bothered to get a smartphone last year though.

I got my first mobile in around 1995 I think and shared it with my husband. I still have the same phone number today.... I also caught him cheating on me on it - some things don't change!!!

I first used a very basic intranet in around 1994 at uni, I was amazed I could talk to people via a screen.

I bought a home PC in 2000, it cost £800 for the package. It had dial up, and if you used more than 30 hours a month you got charged a fortune.

When my Dad did his degree in Manchester in the mid 60's he was programing the large computer in a room at Manchester Uni ... I seem to recall him saying they had 6bytes of memory or something

I worked in a radio station from 1999 to 2001, and I remember the old computer system, the cds of adverts coming in the post when they'd been made, the faxing of information over to the studio etc. I also remember my boss at the time saying he didn't think the "Internet will take off" and only installing a dial up line to one PC in the office and sending for new business card prints without email addresses etc.

Does anyone remember on live and kicking they would say ‘why use snail mail when you can use email’?

I’m only 38 but still remember looking stuff up in books at the library, and even early 2000’s it wasn’t like everything was on line, and when it was you couldn’t just look it up on your phone.

I learnt to drive pre sat nav and pre 17, passed my test asap after my birthday as the first of my friends and we used to plan outings with an a-z. Also remember doing so to drive to uni for the first time and loads of us having them if we needed to drive anywhere.

Remembering your friends parents landline numbers, something that seemed to disappear overnight when we all got mobiles.

I’m glad I got some of the pre internet skills. Stuff like being able to find an alternative route with your sense of direction/ bearings is so much better than waiting for the sat nav to notice the bloody great jam, especially if you are driving a familiar route and haven’t got it on.

I also remember when 9/11 happened and we got info from the sky TV in the corner of the newsroom

I was in my late 20s when I first saw the internet. It was mostly SciFi, a bit of porn that took an age to load and, weirdly, a fair amount of fishing stuff.

Before the internet, people remembered phone numbers. I your friends, family, taxi company, take away and various public phone boxes.

For everything else you had the Phone Book and Yellow Pages.

Does anyone remember on live and kicking they would say ‘why use snail mail when you can use email’?

I remember the original phone number, 0818118181 way before email!

My dad once told the kids
‘In my day If I needed to look something up I’d walk to the library and find it out from there’

They all looked at him like he’d grown an extra head