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.

Late 90s. Had a friend who ran his own gaming shop and had a PC with internet access.
He would load up stuff from gore sights, and we all would look in horror.... a line of bits at a time.

University open day.
First time on the internet, first thing i ever put in a search engine was my Mum's favourite band. Wet Wet Wet.
It didn't go well.

We got our first home computer in 1983, the famous Apple IIe with the green screen and white text. I got into trouble at school for not handwriting my homework because I started typing it. We had a daisy dot-matrix printer …so noisy but satisfying.

In the mid80s, there was an all text based internet and it was so tiny and you had to know routes. To go from country A to country B, you might have to go through two other countries. I remember memorising IP addresses and using MS-DOS commands. Our secondary school got a computer lab and we all learned BASIC and then started pulling pranks on the teachers by reprogramming the computers.

I got my first email address in 1988 via my secondary school. We had early windows internet by then.

I remember at a University of thousands, I was one of less than 200 1st year students that had asked for a uni email address. My secondary school had scrapped mine because I had graduated and there were no free web based email companies then- hotmail, yahoo they all came after I’d graduated University. I was already addicted to having email. Other students weren’t interested and many of the profs were actively fighting against getting emails because they preferred the office hours, ask questions in person system. The Uni finally did get me a Uni email address the middle of my 2nd year because they literally had to build the servers to handle email traffic and demand kept growing as each new wave of students arrived.

I remember it when I was doing my A levels they showed us at school and I was like what the what?!! That was 1998. cue 2000 when I was googling for my essays at uni like a pro. I miss when google wasn’t AI content

I think I first used it while I was doing my masters, in around 1997. I do remember it taking a few minutes to load!

In the mid80s, there was an all text based internet and it was so tiny and you had to know routes. To go from country A to country B, you might have to go through two other countries. I remember memorising IP addresses and using MS-DOS commands

I think you are mis-remembering, MS-DOS didn't support IP until 1990.

I remember the first mobile phone and the first internet connection. Seems a lifetime ago!

I remember thinking no phone could be better for work than a blackberry 😂

my first mobile phone was as large as a bottle of gin.
and the battery was awful. I basically had to have it on charge to be able to call.

next generation flip phones that could do wap were sooo much better. and I loved that you could just swap batteries with others if needed to.

I do, I’m mid 50s- DH (then boyf) is an IT bod and we had it in our flat in the mid-90s - must’ve been around 95 - I went in to a forum about cats and messaged someone in the US! I thought it was amazing!!
Also remember the lovely dial-up tone which must’ve been going as late as 2000 because we’d moved by then but I still remember dialling in!

not the exact time but I remember having a temp reception job at a hardware sellers who gave me free rein with the computer and said I could do what I liked when I wasn’t answering the phone. That would have been around 1998.

i found some great stuff! The guy who dressed as Peter Pan. Turn yourself into a cabbage. Hats of meat. It was a wilder place. But gentler.

On a related note i remember a workmate around 16 years ago telling me about a free messaging service called WhatsApp- I thought it sounded well dodgy!

I remember dial up and I remember DH coming home with a new Mac laptop but can't remember my first time. I'm 55.

I'm 60 and started off in late 80s with dialling into people's bulletin boards via a very noisy modem. Can't remember when this migrated to the internet but must have been as soon as it became available. I think America Online was the service provider.

🤣

I remember, it was sometimes in 1999, my family didn't have a computer before that.
But being French, we had a Minitel, that I was using from the late 80s, I was still a kid and chatting to men online (who thought I was a 25 yo top model)

It’s not, but I’m sure there were plenty like me and your Mum 🤣

I remember the first e-mail I sent. It was to my son who was doing a gap year in Africa. I can still recall the sense of pride I felt at having used this innovative new tool.

I first used it in 1996 when I was in the sixth form. My school didn’t have it or if they did I never heard about it, but I was doing one of my A-levels at evening classes at an FE college. They had some computers where I was able to use the web for the first time and thought it was amazing. I didn’t use email until I went to university the year after. Dial up was very slow in those days!

It must have been the early 90s. My mum worked for a big multinational corporation in finance, so she must have been on the early wave of tech access and remote working. She was able to put in dial up internet at home in the early 90s and have them fund a home computer for her to wfh evenings and weekends. I remember it was like the old black screen with the green writing and blinking cursor. They had internal email. I’m not sure they could email outside of the company, but they could message other employees on this internal system.

My riding instructor, who was a man and definitely gay (though not something anyone openly discussed in the early 90s), also worked for the same company. My mum used to let my friend and I send him emails, like, “Hey Harry, can’t wait to see you on Saturday. Can we go hacking and jump those logs again? That was wild, until Helda fell off last time. Hehehe, oops! xxx”

In retrospect, god, not a sensible use of company tech and oh god, how embarrassing! Harry was a very tolerant man. 😂

Yes at university. I had a Hotmail email address and it was so exciting knowing I could reach some instantly.

I also spent a lot of time in yahoo chat rooms on different topics.

When someone told me about the Internet in 1995 I didn't believe them. In 1997 I set up my Hotmail that I still have to say hello to my friend, while sitting together in a university computer lab. That was about it for incoming mail for the next few years. I remember trying dial up at a friend's house around 1998. I don't remember the first website I went on, I did a IT module as a post grad in 1997 and we were shown a few sites. If you missed a dot or comma it didn't work, like dialling a wrong number. I remember thinking we should have a thing that knows all the websites and you put in a key word and everything that matches comes up and you pick the right one. I guess I'd be a billionaire now if I'd done it myself.

I’ve seen it grow from the beginning (50) but my real memory of it is from around the year 2003. We used dial up in our flat, my children were not much more than preschoolers. I found a book forum for an author I liked. I met friends on there I am still friends with now, 23 years later. We all lived in different parts of the world and have visited each other in real life a few times now. Amazing that we would literally never have met without that baby internet.

Ive also seen Netflix evolve from sending out DVDs in the post to having its own streaming service and Amazon was an online book shop when I first started using it.

I can’t remember exactly it but it was probably mid to late 1980s and janet rather than the www.

I recently found a print of an email I received in 1990.