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.

Yep. I remember the “computer” room at school, about 6 computers/word processors in a tiny room. In a school of about 1500.

”computing” in our school was for the lower achievers, it was seen as a thing for girls who were doing typing to try for the secretarial jobs when when they left school.

the internet first time was at uni. Emails, Netscape. Again a tiny little “suite” with some very early macs. Could only email and message each other I think. Our department had a huge grant for modelling so we had massive macs everywhere.

i remember friends reunited which i think was one of the first popular sites for social stuff. Never got into MySpace.

I was an earlier adopter as well. I think I got myself hooked up in late 94. I loved it. I used to go on usenet and look up all sorts of bollocks, I was a regular at bianca’s smut shack (just for the chat rooms I swear to God) and Paddynet. We’d just to hang out all night chatting with people from round the world. I made a Star Wars website then took it down. I tried to set up a review site called Surfing the Crimson Wave to review sanitary products but when I tried to get companies to send me samples of their products, they said that the internet would never catch on and they didn’t think it was worth it. It was a great time. When I got my first piece of junk mail, I didn’t understand why this person was emailing me!

I’m 59, and we didn’t have computers at school until after I left. I was in the middle of my 2nd degree. I got a Motorola 28.8 modem for Christmas, and I hooked it up to my Mac LC475.

No google either! That was a game changer.

switching off pictures cos they took ages to download over dialup

I also remember Amazon when it first started as an online bookstore. Text based. Blue logo. I can still visualise the home page.

We had Tiscali dial up, possibly arounx 1995.

I can remember my daughter complaining that she'd tried 76 times to get connected.

We had a young teacher who liked to use the Internet with her class, thus knocking out phone lines for the school.

I remember the first time I ever booked a holiday online. I was convinced it would all go wrong.

My work were involved in one of the early internet cafes in London so we all got to go along and explore www! Probably around 1989/90

I remember using the intranet at university before it was known as that wld be 86 - just called an internal network originally. We had a messaging system we used - which was a forerunner or similar to email. We were programming Oracle at the time as well on dumb terminals and prior to that when I was at college (84) we were taught to use punch cards to programme and "parse", Wed afternoons was "games time" but we had the option to do typing, old fashioned bash em out typewriter but it was one of the best things I ever did taking that class. We had apple macs (the ones with the tiny screen and 3.5inch floppy disc) at Uni and cld take them home to work on and being able to type was a huge advantage over everyone else. No one even thinks about it now. I do remember being at home and having to use dial up connections so wld have been a very early adopter. Dad was a super early adopter but he had done computer programming at uni, one of the men from Bletchley headed up his first year at uni then retired. So he was programming 65/66/67. We had a BBC early doors as well I remember it costing 300 odd quid which was a fortune then and a real investment. Internet is interesting I can't really think back to it and first time using it. I worked for AT&T from 95 onwards and again I recall an intranet that was accessible world wide, but not specifically the switch to www.

I was using a UK dial-up conferencing system called CIX from about 1989. That had a gateway to the internet for email, Usenet, FTP etc as this was before the web was invented. Usenet was great.

I also remember when we got always-on broadband at home in the early 2000s which was an absolute game-changer. Rather than having to hog the phone line and get 50-odd Kbps you could have 512Kbps whenever you wanted! Stick a pcmcia WiFi card in your inch-thick laptop and you could even browse the web from anywhere in the house!

Internet for me was when i started my masters in IT back in 1996. We had access to netscape, and email although we didn't really use email a lot. It was pretty basic. I designed an atrocious website by typing HTML out manually.

It was one of the first times but I typed girls kissing into the search engine, I would’ve only been 6 or so.

It’s safe to say I didn’t turn out straight.

I don't remember my first use of the internet, wish I did! I remember getting a computer for home, it was such a big deal to set up, took a whole day. At the same time I had an email address for the 1st time, this was about/around 1996, originally it was a shared email with my then partner, but then I got my own and still have the same address. I did have a fb account for a few years at some point around then, I recall looking for old friends online but otherwise didn't use the internet much. I also went to uni then but only used the computers to write reports, all my study was via actual printed word. Sane for my doctorate in early 2000s. I got my first smart phone about 2005. I think I started using the internet more around then. I love the internet, but I only use it for shopping and asking questions, like when I can't sleep and I'm wondering what the population is of some place or when they did this or that thing.

Internet, sending emails from around 1987-88. Web from about 1992-93 - probably early 1993 from what I remember.

We got online around 1999 and used the AOL cds. It was all so slow. Dial up took ages and kept crashing and then slow loading pages and had to type in the whole address with no mistakes. I remember tv shows reading out really long web addresses and telling the kids to run for a pen. The chatrooms were fun back then and a different experience to speak with people far away.

My first amazon order was in December 2000. A madonna CD. I remember how fun it was to vid on ebay for the first time

I thought people were making a big fuss about something that wasn’t much practical use 🤣 Shows how much I knew! 🤭

It would have been when an external company delivered a training session about "surfing the web" at my workplace, and it must have been at the end of the 1990s because my oldest daughter was diagnosed as having what was then called Asperger syndrome in 1999 and that's what I searched for. I couldn't imagine ever wanting a computer in my house. By the time I left that job in 2003 we all had Internet compatible terminals on our desks and I was using email and chat groups and in 2004 I locked away the computer we had at home because my daughter had developed a disruptive chatroom addiction so things must have progressed very quickly.
(Edit for typo.)

It would have been mid-90s, before home dial-up, and we had a course - a course! - at work on that there new-fangled internet and what it could do.

I remember thinking, that’ll be all porn and gambling in a few years. Genuinely.

They said “go on, look up where you’re going on holiday” and I’m like, nah. I was going to Lesbos that year.

I can remember it being 1p a minute or something like that on dial up and you couldn't use the phone at the same time and being a bit underwhelmed by it. I had a Tesco.net email address, I can't remember doing anything useful like shopping on dial up.

Mum, is that you?!

I’m 45 now & it would’ve been sometime in the late 90s- either at university or when my older brother got a home computer. Can’t remember which came first 😂

Around about when I graduated in 1995. One of my first memories is my then boyfriend's dad searching my name, which was quite uncommon and showing me what he had discovered about me. So, I learned very quickly about keeping a low profile.

I wrote my first computer program in about 1968, entering it into the processor on paper tape. I think I still have the little roll of tape somewhere.
So I can't even remember when I first used the Internet, it would have been whenever it started - I've been through so many computer developments.
Mind you, one of my bosses was at Manchester University as a physics student in the 1940s and remembered this computer being developed...

"the Baby became the first computer in the world to run a program electronically stored in its memory, rather than on paper tape or hardwired in.

The event has been described as the “the birth of modern computing”, though such claims are a matter of opinion. But we do know for certain this was the first implementation of the stored program concept that underpins all modern computing today."

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/how-a-70-year-old-baby-changed-the-face-of-modern-computing/

I do! It was about 1997. I was at a friend’s house and she was showing it to me. She searched for “horses” and found a very basic page about them. How far it’s come 😂

I remember a similar experience, at school making notes then powering up the school PC with my partner in IT. And being confused about how it was possible and mixing up "www." with WWF, World Wildlife Fund.

I know that Yahoo was the first search engine I used. I think that was around 1996.
I remember downloading a freeware version of Excel onto my home computer in 2004. I had dial up and it took about 15 hours to download.
A building I worked in sometimes had WiFi way before it was in general use and it really seemed like magic. That was in the early 2000s.

My friend has The Internet at his home and I thought it was so cool. He’d just chat on the chat rooms to people and I was amazed. This was probably 1997-98. I just used a load of chat rooms back then talking rubbish and then I remember using internet cafes to get my chat room fix. I can’t remember who I spoke to, what about and why it was so important I had to go to an internet cafe for it! I’m 47 now

I remember hearing about it and saying email sounded quite useful (already had an internal email suet of thing at work) but I couldn't see any use for the internet.

I remember dial up and using chat rooms, one called ICQ. Came across all sorts of sex pests!