Who remembers the first time they used the internet?

[MynameisnotJohn]

Maybe for us oldies. I am 59 and my children don’t really understand. I remember my dad getting a dial up connection around 1995. He worked in computing and was an early adopter. I think he installed via a CD then had to disconnect the house phone and plug in the router into the phone socket then beep boop eeeep. Two minutes later Connect!
He said I could type anything into the search bar and speak to people all over the world. I didn’t know what to search for. I found my way on to a chat site and said hello and someone messaged and asked how old I was. 19 I said. He told me he was rubbing his cock.
We had a family email address. I used eBay when it was just text lines.
I think I’ve lived though a fascinating age of change. Every generation is defined by something and mine must be seeing the entire Information Age being born. I don’t think my children really understand not being connected. If you didn’t know something you had to know someone who would know or buy a book or order it from the library. You had to go outside to see anything new. Had to buy music from the shop. Wait for TV to show something and find out what was on via a magazine.
My kids are smarter though. Wish I’d known about ‘red flags’ before I got married! We were so innocent.

Me. I remember being 16 and taken into the computer suite at school and being shown a website all about classical civilization. My teacher was raving about how much you could find. I’m only 45!

I remember going to uni when I was 18 years old, and not really knowing what to look up on the internet - I remember staring at the Netscape logo to check I was still online 😄.

i remember it well, my first email was in 1992 when I got an address during my masters and I only knew one person to talk to, but it was better than sending him letters! I think I’d have first go on the web proper in 1993 at work though there were only a few people who had access and I remember sitting in some one else’s office carefully typing in the website.

Yes you had to know what to search for. Then type in www. Etc .
I remember finding out about copy and paste. Before that I would see a web address and laboriously type it into the search bar. No clickable links.

I used to spend hours looking at this site https://www.willardlib.org/ghost-cams hoping to see a ghost 😃

I remember my dad getting a cd Rom from hmv to connect and, like you, didn’t know what on earth to search for! I think we tried to look for nirvana but in those days it wasn’t easy to actually find information. I remember my friend’s mum had internet and she would use chat rooms and my friend would too, and thinking it was all a bit creepy and weird that these grown adults were talking to kids online. That was probably 1997 ish.

by 2002/3 remember being pregnant with my daughter and using Ask Jeeves to ask questions about pregnancy, I was 19. So it developed massively in that short time.

I also remember a boy at school having a Nokia that could send texts and having no one to text because no one else had a phone.

The internet is a great example of ‘Build it and they will come’. Nobody could have predicted how life would be impossible without it.

I remember being given the website address to Google 🤣🤣.
"This is a very useful resource" 🤣🤣

I used Ask Jeeves to find a Greenday fan site, I think. And I spoke to a girl from Saskatchewan on a chat site.

Yes, when I went to university. I remember using AltaVista to search for a popular band. There was no reference to them on the internet 😄

I thought it wasn't going to be very useful.

Yes I remember going to the library to use the internet. Sat down. Didn’t really know what to do. Back then companies were starting to advertise that they had websites on their tv adverts so I think I went on the Superdrug website. I don’t even think you could buy stuff from it, just look. I was a bit underwhelmed!

I sent my first email in 1986, on Prestel, that pre-dated the WWW, I then moved to the internet and the www around 1994.

Rather like AI is now, we knew it would be revolutionary but not sure quite how.

We were early adopters of the internet at home, in the early to mid 1990s. I remember sitting down one night and dialling in to try it out for the first time in the dining room. The dial up tone always reminded me of the Clangers.

I decided to test it out to see if it was any good. A group of us had been talking at work a while previously, and a colleague had mentioned an Enid Blyton book he had loved as a child. I searched for it online. I tracked it down to a bookshop in Sydney, and ordered it to be sent to the office in the UK anonymously. I briefed the bookshop they were not to reveal my identity, and when he contacted them, they stayed true to that

He was bemused and delighted. ( I had no ulterior motive, he was just a nice colleague and it was a good test). From that moment on, I knew the internet was awesome.( I did confess several years later when it came up in conversation. I do love uniting things with people who should be their owners).😆

I remember someone showing me an online encyclopaedia on a desktop computer in around 1995/6. “You can ask it anything,” she enthused, pushing the mouse in my direction. I can’t recall what I asked.

In 1996, my colleagues and I got work email addresses that couldn’t send or receive external emails for the first few months. Sent faxes to customers instead!

I remember visiting the website thisislondon daily whilst eating lunch. Also, the Asserta website which I think was the forerunner of RightMove or Zoopla.

My then BF was doing an electrical MSc at Imperial and in 1992 he took me into their Sun Server Suite and showed me the World Wide Web. The next year one of our friends went to work for the London parallel applications centre the first place to run two microprocessors in parallel each processor had it’s own massive room- now everyone’s mobile phone does this.
I got my first email address in 1992 as they suggested I ask my college for one, I only new 5 people with email addresses initially.

It was 1998, my husband bought a computer home from work after they upgraded the ones in the office and soon after he suggested we get a modem so that we could use the internet. I clearly remember asking why we needed the internet, it seemed pointless.

I didn’t know what to search for when it was all set up. After a few weeks I found a message board for Friends (the TV show) and was soon chatting to people all over the world, many of us are still in contact now. When I was pregnant with our second son later in 1999 I joined an MSN group for babies due when my son was due, again many of us are still in contact now (we have a Facebook group).

I was underwhelmed by Amazon and a little bit more impressed by EBay.

The third thing I found was a suicide site with an upload of Kurt Cobain

I remember a website that was just photos of pylons.

I liked looking at all the different versions of Yahoo for the different countries, with the different news and celebrities.

I was 12. My dad took me into my mum's work to use the Internet. We typed "spice girls" into the search bar and were promptly greeted with reams of porn😯It was a lesson to us both!

I first used the internet in the mid 90s when I was a graduate researcher doing my masters at uni. Before that I had used an Amstrad word processor at home but ti was not connected to the internet. When the uni was connected we were all given email addresses and dial up access so we could dial in from home. High speed broadband became available from about 2004.

I can remember teaching students wordprocessing and database in the early 1990s when many of the adult students had never used a computer. I first encountered Ebay when I was working at Uni of Nevada in late 1990s and opened a shop there (on Ebay not in Nevada) when I returnd to the UK. It was a profitable side hustle and i still have my shop over 20 years later.

Happy days!

Using JANET in 1989. From JANET you could hop onto the internet proper and access stuff like Usenet, IRC, FTP and WAIS and gopher (the predecessors to the WWW). Then they let the plebs on in about 1994 and it’s been downhill ever since.

‘How long will you be on the internet? I need to ring my mum/ sister/friend etc’
🤣

DH was a programmer in 1970 which led to being a lifelong early adopter of tech.
He once took me to his work and showed me the computers which filled a room like star trek but were about as powerful as a calculator. He's 76 now and his hobbies are still computer related, he was very into early AI.
We got dial up internet in the early 90s and it was very underwhelming although DH was excited about the potential.
Before that we had home computers and played games on floppy discs.

My Dad set up our home PC with AOL in 1996.
We didn’t know what to search for first. As Friends was really popular at the time, we searched for Courtney Cox. What appeared first was a site called David Courtney and his Cox! We clicked away quickly (I was only 12 ish at the time).

I remember using AIM (messenger) and you could look up anyone with an AOL email address. I had some bloke messenging me asking me to find him pictures of women smoking and send them to him…

I then found Angelfire and taught myself HTML coding to set up fan web pages for some of my favourite things which still exist today in their pixelated 90s glory

Yes, mid-late nineties my mum took me to an internet cafe to see what all the fuss was about. She sat with a coffee at a table and i went over to the computers. However there was no homepage, just the address bar along the top and I had no clue how that worked or that a search engine or website address was what was needed. Faffed about for my 30 minutes feeling bewildered and ripped off and left very underwhelmed with The Internet!