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.

We got it at home in the mid 1990s I think, I was around 13/14. I can't remember the search engine I used- or what I looked up. Ask Jeeves? My dad showed me, he also worked in IT. Obviously it was limited because it was dial up (preventing any phone calls getting through), expensive and slow.

I can also remember a boy at school in the mid-late 90s managing to get an image of a naked teenage girl stood in a garden during one of our very few IT lessons. TBF I think even he was a bit shocked. That sticks with me.

On a lighter note I used to buy lots of CDs from play.com which was like a UK version of Amazon in the early 00s. I'm sure they did free postage.

1998 and in the uni library researching my diss. A fellow student showed me how to log onto ‘Navigator’ and I remember discovering loads of clunky looking text relating to my subject. It was quite the revelation.

It would have been around 1996/97. I remember in my focal year of secondary school (1995-96) we got a new computer suite full of Apple Macs. I told jt parents about how amazing they were and all the things you could use them for (no internet either at that point) and they decided to buy a computer for at home. I wanted an Apple Mac like we had at school, but the guy in the shop convinced my parents they’d be better getting a Windows pc. So they did. Not long after, we got internet. Our ISP was “current bun” which I think was a free CD from The Sun (which I realise now is odd as my parents hated that newspaper, they always got the Mirror) - I’m guessing a customer in their pub probably left it behind or gave it to them. The only problem was the phone line upstairs in our home was the same line as the pub. We had a pay phone in the pub that customers could use. So mum and dad didn’t want us using the internet for long periods of time anyway. They ended up getting a second phone line put in for upstairs.

I remember the early days on the Internet of not really knowing what to use it for or how to use it. I think the first online shop I used was BOL - Books Online. It was for my uni text books. I also used Amazon when it first started and they only sold books & DVD’s from memory. I remember having to call them up because the wrong DVD was inside the sealed DVD I received - I spoke to an actual human, located in the UK from the accent, they answered quickly and resolved my query even faster. In fact, I received my replacement DVD before I even posted back the wrong one! It was a Stargate (the series) DVD if anyone is interested lol. I used to spend loads of time in chat rooms, and later playing card games like Hearts online with other people from around the world.

One time I was at the cinema with my (male) best friend who I was also completely besotted with. He commented that he really liked the Pearl & Dean music that you saw before films at Showcase cinemas. The next day I went online and started investigating - I reached out to Pearl & Dean and found out the name of the piece of music & who made it to start with. Then I researched and found the name of an album it appeared on. Finally I found a copy of the album as a CD online and ordered it to send to my friend! I remember him being super impressed and then us laughing together as he told me that the whole piece of music was literally just that, it wasn’t part of a bigger tune or anything.

Another friend a couple of years later had been through a nasty divorce where his wife had cheated on him with multiple people, but somehow ended up taking pretty much everything in the divorce (no kids). She took all of his beloved albums, which he was gutted about. He spoke one time about an album called “Rainbow Rising” by Rainbow and his much he missed it. So I tracked down a copy and gave it to him for Christmas months later. I used to be quite good at finding random stuff online!

I used to hang out in a chat room called “The Bronze” which was for Buffy fans. I’d heard that sometimes writers etc from the show would drop in on there! Sadly never when I was online, probably due to the time difference.

1991 at university in the special computer room (with 3 computers). Took forever to do anything and there was a lot of noise.
First had it at home in 1996. I used to go and have a cup of tea whilst waiting for it to boot up.

Once upon a time I was a big blogger - before all the film stuff - so pics and writing, I had 20K followers in the early 2000. I was a big crafter and was on lots of yahoo.groups we used to organise holidays and even went to the US to have a big meet up with our US counterparts we had a ball.

I too still have a hotmail that is "myfirstname"[email protected] not that I use it still.

The internet in its early days was so naive. I remember a friend getting it first and us being amazed by chat rooms! When I got it I also loved chat rooms and message boards and quickly made lots of online friends - I’m still friends with one today and we’ve met up a few times over the years and went to each other’s weddings.

Neopets, Habbo Hotel, AOL chat rooms etc.

First used in the school library. Directed to chat rooms by other student were it immediately turned sexual and inappropriate. Can’t remember how old I was maybe 12?

Does anyone remember geocities? I remember creating my first html page with them and their ludicrously long URLs somewhere around 1995

I'm 53 & it would have been the late 90's. My first online shopping order was a made to measure leather skirt (that I still love) - I found the company - Sam's Leather in Cyprus on the web. But my measurements were sent by email and I had to send a fax to confirm the order.

I remember spelling Google to people when suggesting it as a better search engine than Yahoo or Ask Jeeves. And explaining the concept of buying books from Amazon - which I took to pretty quickly as I'm a fan of fairly esoteric history books that they never had in Waterstonesm

I remember it starting up and saying well it's OK but it will only be useful if everyone is on it! And here we are! I'm a football fan and my ex FIL was an IT bloke, so I asked him to search for my team. I was in awe! 😂I remember sending my first email as well to [email protected] and got an automated response.

Im 52

i visited the newly opened IT lab at university and spent 2 hours browsing the World Wide Web. It wasn’t good enough to go back.

i then didn’t use it again for another 5 years when I got my first email address at work. dial up internet. Took an hour to do anything

I still have a roll of that paper tape!

beep beep beep beep beep
doing doing
shtshtshts

got my first modem around '97 ish
very first exposure via school library a year or so earlier to look up the isbn for books from the literature list

I did something similar. DH (then boyfriend) was a teaching assistant in a university and had an office with his own desktop and access to the internet. My first experience was searching for a much loved childhood book that was out of print and was so impressed that I could order it online all the way from Canada.
It was such a novelty and now no-one bats an eyelid.

I remember my boyfriend at the time’s dad telling me about a new search engine that was great and could find anything you wanted just by typing it in. He said it’s called Google.

I am 45. The first time I saw the internet was at a friends house when I was a teenager. Her dad was into tech things and had got it. That would be mid/late 90s. We didn't spend much time with it tbh!

I think the very first time would've been around 1995/1996. I was at a wealthy (comparatively) family friends house and played some sort of "around the world" childrens game on a floppy disc. I found it so exciting.

When we got our own PC I remember we had dial up via Freeserve which charged per minute. I used to wait until my parents went out or the shower was on and quickly dial up so I could go on MSN.

Offline I loved The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon.

I also loved Piczo, Bebo and Myspace.

My favourite throwback websites (interested if anyone remembers any of these!) were Matmice, Dollie Crave, Livejournal (especially ONTD), Habbo Hotel...

My first job after graduating (mid 90s) remember the excitement when we got computers that could access the internet and send e-mails. If you wanted to use one you had to book a slot. We didn't have our own individual e-mail addresses (so no internal e-mails etc) but could had a few customer who used e-mail.

A few years later we were each issued with our own laptop and e-mail address. We all used 'ask jeeves' and were amazed to be able to find the answers to silly trivia questions that we would previously have spent ages debating (eg. names of characters from children's TV/song lyrics etc). Then there was a phase of everyone using Friends Reunited. If we wanted to be able to access the internet other than when plugged in to a cable in the office we had to present a written business case and have it approved. At a similar time I remember a few of us getting phones that could send text messages for the first time. The major advantage for us at that time seemed to be that you could send and receive messages with friends in crowded clubs/pubs without having to go outside to be able to hear a call. Every text cost something like 10p though, so it could get expensive if you ended up a bit drunk and having silly text conversations with someone.
When I first got home internet I remember sitting waiting for ages for anything with a photo to gradually appear line by line. For that reason (I suspect) web pages were mainly text. When I was first married I remember BT having a special deal where the first hour of dial up internet each day was £1. DH was doing research for a college assignment and assumed this meant 60mins of dialing in to the internet for £1 per day so thought he was being very clever by somehow saving each page once it had loaded and switching off the dial in whilst he read it, then dialing in again for the next page etc so that he could access lots for his £1. It turned out the deal was actually the first dial up of the day for upto 60 mins for £1 so we were charged £1 for every time he dialed in. We didn't know this until the paper bill for the month came through the post- a very expensive lesson in reading the fine print!

I got an email address at university in about 1995. Didn't really use it till I spent a summer in the US and got US student friends to write to. It was done on a big Sun Microsystems computer with command controls and no real user-interface.
I think I 'Asked Jeeves' something in about 1997 maybe?

I remember the first time I had access was in 1995 when I started university. We where in one of only 2or3 flats that had Internet access in student bedrooms. It took many years after university before we had such a fast Internet connection again as we went straight onto the JANET network.

We also used to isolated our flat into our own LAN so we could play Dune, as it got banned from the university network as it would slow the whole network down to the speed of the slowest machine running it lol.

November 22nd 1993
I can be certain of the date because it was the 30th anniversary of JFK being assassinated. I was visiting my friend in London. I can even remember the website 2600.com - which is still going to this day.

Edit - I first used Internet email in 1989 at University

and I was writing those pop up messages with a friend abroad. what was it again? msm?
and my computer monitor resembled a goldfish bowl

It would have been around 1992/3. I was working at a bank and we already had live feeds for share prices, access to client bank balances and full internet services via Compuserve so when our head of IT tried to show me the World Wide Web I couldn't get very excited about it as at that stage it was just lines of white text on a black background, no graphics - there wasn't much to see and for business purposes it didn't appear to offer much more than we already had.

Not long after that, the graphics appeared I became a very early adopter of the internet at home (dial up). Most websites were American, almost nothing connected to the UK, and because every page took an age to load I spent all my free time exploring what was available. I think my first purchase on the WWW was a flight to the US.

By the mid 1990s I could really see the benefits and even went as far as investing in the fairly short-lived dot.com boom. By the end of the decade, the WWW had become widespread and in common use. It was an amazing time to be involved the evolving technology.

Very early 90s. No world wide Web. We had a dial up router, I connected to download my email. I used to play chess using a ascii representation of a chess board. If you wanted to find something you had to know how to use a crawler ( think that's what is was called) where you typed in your search string using IF, AND and OR parameters and the result took ages and got sent to you hours later as a text file (think old dot matrix printer type). The biggest resource on line was the US's library of congress. I remember Amazon arriving, but the online bookstore i used before that was in Oxford (the bookstore that stocked all the books for students at the uni, dont remember the name).

Ah, those were the days lol

Went to the computer room at lunchtime when I was about 14 to have my first go at surfing the net 😂 Waited almost all of the break for a single picture of Damon Albarn to load on the screen and my mind was absolutely blown. After this spent my breaktimes with my friends chatting to perverts in chat rooms thinking it was hilarious to lead them on and watching the Hamster Dance webpage. Our school made the national press because it was the first school in the country to have a computer with internet access in every classroom!