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.

1996 when I was a teenager, my work were enhancing our basic public access computers and we had to have Internet training 😀.

I was used to using computers but had never been online before. I can remember just sitting with no idea what to search for on Yahoo! (Long before Google was a thing).

Netscape Navigator 🥹

I first went onto the internet in 1996. My late husband showed me it as he used it as part of his work at the university.

According to Google the first internet cafe in the world was Cyberia in London, which opened in 1994. I went there not long after it opened with a friend who was visiting from Belfast, we had no idea what we were doing and I remember pages being very slow to load, but we were amazed anyway as a very good looking member of staff helped us find some quiz thing and showed us how to use ICQ (A/S/L anyone? 😁). I got a job at a uni not long after and got my own email address and online access. I remember when the Macdonald's page was just a few gifs. I frequented Paddynet and Mamatron, then Handbag and Bowienet. My first home PC was around 1997, a behemoth from Tandy that cost me 1400 quid and came with about fifty disks. Very happy memories of it all, and feel lucky to have lived through that period.

Probably mid '90s. Had to dial up (compuserve, AOL) and pay them AND pay your phone bill, was really quite expensive to do. Not much there, chatrooms, all sort of green screen / blue screeny. Knew it was the future. OH completely unconvinced.

It was 1992. I worked in a computer store the summer before university. I pulled the pricing updates every morning.

then I was in the first batch of students issued email addresses at university that fall. I had hardly anyone to send messages, but it was still fun.

I was given an email address when I enrolled in uni in 1996. I would go down to my residential college’s computer room and look at Amazon and search for US colleges and send random emails to students from the college directories. Most replied. A trusting time. In 1997 I had to upload at assignment at the university computer room. It was hard to get a computer as it was clogged with young men gaming, night and day.

I am 59 too. I remember getting a second hand PC and using dial up, I got bored after a while and switched off. I used it mostly for emailing friends.

I did use email for the first time in 1984, so extremely early. I was at an event in Los Angeles and everyone was given an email address and we went nuts emailing each other daft jokes and silly messages over a 3 week period, I guess it was intranet rather than internet. We had no idea what that was all going to lead to.

I first used the internet in the 1990s on various relatives' computers and in the local public library.

The library computers were often booked out and I think you only got a 15-30 minute slot most of the time. Given how glacially slow the internet was in those days, that didn't give you much of a peep at what was there.

And now browsing the internet will likely become thing of the past as easier to just ask intone of the AIs as no adverts… although the advertising will be along shortly but for now AI is a magic era where you can literally find out anything and crunch so much data in minutes. My research for work is Soo easy now. Well my whole work is really. My company are alive to it though and positive about it.

First use of internet was late 80s. We had a ZX81. You could go on this thing called Prestel which I think was for travel agents. It also had Daisy Wheel chat rooms though.

it was next step up from chatting to hairy arsed truckers in the CB radio.

Interestiing thread!
I worked in IT on the early 90s and clremember the afternoon when someone said her /you can look up anything. I looked up the Turin Shroud. Was going to Bergen for the weekend with stbh and was thrilled to find out about a train/boat combo to the fjords.
Some time after that sometime b in the office wrote an email system that we used internally. My clients were banks and my boss confidently said that banks would never use email because of the security risk.
In 1996 I started wfh some days and my company provided a dial up link for email. And I used it in 1997 when we trying to conceive and joined a chat group called ONNA -mostly Americans and was fascinating to ‘talk’ with women in Alabama etc.

I worked for a national‘quality’ broadsheet at the time and emailed my best friend who lived in the states to say ‘ooh I’ve got email now - we can stop sending letters’ if sent it during my lunch break and had set up a hotmail account (I have my first name and surname as an email address at hotmail dot com as does she it was that long ago)
my senior manager upon hearing this decided to drag me in a disciplinary and screamed the phrase ‘emailing America’ at me as though I’d bought 50k of weapons on a comp credit card. Oh how we laughed

I remember sending a message to a BF using a university computer back in 1987. I don't think the internet per se existed back then - the messaging capability was just a means for inter-university communication.

I remember hearing interference though my computer speakers before the phone actually rang 😅

I wish I’d set up loads of domain names and sold them! The internet was so empty. I also have a first name surname email address on Hotmail. My mate still has her Thesmiths@blueyonder one that they set up decades ago.
And yes. Porn. No security. No spam filters. I got sent an email from someone I didn’t know with an attachment which of course I downloaded and it was a photo of some bloke wanking. DH saw it and was angry and suspicious about why the man had written to me!
All games came on discs which had to be uploaded. We had a rack of them.

Yes I remember. It was a PITA and dull as you had to be so patient and it seemed not to serve much purpose at all initially other than be a slightly whizzier way of contacting people and getting hold of journals in my subject

I do, it was 1996 and my dad had just bought me a PC from PC world. It was £1500 for a combo deal and it got it on 0% finance! My next door neighbour was in IT and gave us his old model. I remember the dial up sound now. Then I discovered The X-Files forums 🤣

Me. 1995 or 96 at uni. I had to get written permission from my head of course to be allowed a 30 min slot on an internet computer. Went and it was a black screen and i didn’t know what to do and left. A few months later tried again this time at home as my parents had bought a computer. There was a search engine this time, think Ask Jeeves. Amazon is a website i remember looking at early on. I used to use Yahoo chat rooms.

Me! Very fond memory. Our school got an ICT room- it was an unused side room off the main assembly hall, I can still picture it vividly. I must have been about 6 so this would have been around 1999. We were told to use Ask Jeeves to ask any question we wanted at all. We were amazed! No doubt all asked really silly questions…

I didn’t get the internet at home till 2005. I had dial up at my Gran’s but she used the landline constantly so I couldn’t often use it. Mum couldn’t afford the internet so my dad (they were separated) bought me a PC and paid the internet bill. He bought me a webcam which was nuts because I was on dodgy chat rooms…

Late 70s / early 80s at Poly, using JANET. I know they downloaded a copy of the C Programming Language before you could buy the book in the UK, using nroff to print out copies.

1996. I was 24. BIL had installed it and we were on holiday at their house. DH came home and had it put in. We had a mobile phone with Orange at the time. That was £30 for 12 minutes per month. I can't remrmber what the internet cost, but can still hear the screeching every time it connected and the the frustration of it cutting off every time someone made a landline call.

I remember my very generous parents buying my then 15 year old son a packard Bell computer it was 1995. We had the wire trailing all the way down the stairs to the phone socket and I can still hear the dial up tone now.
I remember thinking I’ll never be able to understand all this, but I couldn’t resist having a sneaky go when he was out. I can’t remember what I looked at but I loved it.
Not as much as my son who is now 46 and an IT consultant, it’s his passion. Goodness knows what he would have done otherwise. Thank you mum and dad.

I remember being shown something called a ‘website’ at work in about 1994. Fascinating and frightening how rapidly the world has changed.

I remember it being first introduced (I'm in my early 60s). Only certain people at work were given access to it. I've no idea the first web address I accessed but I remember the tiresome and noisy dial up process. Then we got dial up at home. I think when we dialled in we lost access to the phone because you could only have one active on the line at each time, so we were never dialled in too long.

I also remember when iPads first came out. We'd heard rumours and then the customer service team at work were given one for a trial. OMG how I wanted one! Now we barely give them a thought.

1993

Just starting my masters, so on the university network. I was also working in librarianship so was already working with online catalogues (in those days a big step from having to have the CD to being able to actually search online ... we had a computer in the corner of the library for people to use!)