Your earliest memories of email/internet

[Thepigeonsarecoming]

I was at university, the internet was nothing but text and boring. But we could send an email. Although since I had to use a log in on a uni computer I’d call home to see if if was received. Anyone else?

1970s.
My father was an early IT scientist. I remember him talking about debugging the computers when it really did mean cleaning dead flies out of the vacuum tubes. He took me to work one day to see an early “super computer” that inhabited an entire building and I remember a vast room with banks and and banks of wardrobe sized boxes all with massive spools of magnetic tape. This was before we had microchips, the data was stored on magnetic tape.

I had an email address which was simply JHW1

Actually it was [email protected] but we all just used the first part because it wasn't until almost the end of the first year that I encountered someone with an email at a different university...

Late 90's, I remember doing an IQ test online and it charged my parents phone bill £60
Also remember going on really dodgy chat rooms with my friends and talking to strangers for a laugh

I remember going to a science fair at Reading Uni where you could go on the internet 😱 I looked up my name in Russian and my mind was blown.

At one of my first jobs we had one dial up internet computer that we had to take turns on.

Great thread. Born late 80s so remember LOTS of time spent on Neopets when I was growing up. Windows Pinball too!

We got a second phone line just for internet. It was mid to late 90s, I was in sixth form, the computer was in my bedroom with unsupervised access and my friend and I would chat to others who used the same provider in the chat room. She went to meet up with some of them.

Sounds horrifying now but no one knew what the Internet would be like then.

1996 I was at high school, my uncle who lived in Australia had a work email address. My school had just installed a computer which could send email so my teacher allowed me to trial sending an email to my uncle whilst showing the class what happened, it was such a novelty but also boring as nobody else had one and we all thought what's the point of this!

When I went to uni in 1999 the uni computers had internet and email but could only really look up journals. I got a laptop and dial up internet in 2000 for home use but it was very slow and not all my friends had access.

Our phones could text but it was 35p a text so really expensive so my friends and I still wrote letters to each other, which I still have now

Ah dial up modem. AOL chat. Let my dad loose in thete once and he pulled someone up on the text speak saying it was rude. This was about 1996 😂

I met my now sister in law in a yahoo chat room. It was mostly the same regulars day in day out. I was 13. Been married to her brother now for 10 years and I've known her for 22 years 😲

I remember dial up. I used to unwind a BT type cable on an extension reel across our landing from our bedroom telephone point to where the computer was and connect it. Couldn't leave it connected all day as it was a hazard!!!

1996 when I went to university. Queuing up to use the computers in designated computer rooms. Some of which were open all night, so my mates and I would stumble into the computer rooms after the bars closed and 'chat' with people god knows where. ASL - age, sex, location

Being really frustrated with AskJeeves as when it took you to the search results it wouldn't take you directly to the particular page, but they had an AskJeeves preface with a ridiculously long URL (I know that was standard in those days). Made it impossible to find some websites again, unless you could remember the exact search term you'd put in.

Exchanging email addresses and not phone numbers with my boyfriend (now DH) when we met .

Starting work in 1999 and being flummoxed when my manager instructed me to send written memos to internal staff using those memo envelopes where you'd cross out the previous recipient's name. I remember being really puzzled as to why I wouldn't just send an email as it would be much quicker than sending a written memo via the post room... Luckily email/internet use quickly caught up.

ICQ. MIRC. And using the months free trial from each dial up provider as they dropped the CDs through the door in turn. And having to go offline to check the answerphone as couldn’t phone and internet at the same time.

Earlier, installing programmes with about 27 floppy discs, having to get them all in the right order and not switch the computer off in between discs, and then having to keep inserting extra floppies whilst running the program in order to access various extras.

And writing programs in BASIC.

How many remember Joanna Lumley telling us "You've got mail", ahh those were they days!!

First memory is reading an article in The Guardian about the Information Superhighway and thinking how amazing it sounded, in the early 90s. Then when I went to uni in 1994 there was a computer room so I decided to check it out for myself. Took a page torn out of a magazine with some band web site addresses, fired up the browser, typed in the address of Blur’s web site in the address bar, and got an exciting screen with a logo on it. Then had no idea how to progress as didn’t know about clicking on hyperlinks, so went away again. Later I used it to read news from other universities and The Guardian which had an online magazine called Shift Control, and to email my friends at other universities because nobody else had an email address. A tutor introduced me to the wonders of search engines via AltaVista, so I didn’t have to know the right web address every time!

And writing programs in BASIC.

The good old days when you could write a game sat in your bedroom and getting it published (not written in basic though ).

My first memory is of my husband coming home with a computer in 1998 and me asking what the hell we were going to use the internet for.
Within weeks I’d found message boards and ICQ. I’m still in contact with people from all over the world who I met on a message board in 1998 and have been able to meet up with some of them while travelling.

Earliest computer memory - DB getting a Sinclair Spectrum, loading games from tape using DM's old cassette player

Earliest personal computer - an Amstrad word processor, weirdly it took 3inch disks. I was late teens, how many things did I have to wordprocess at home?

Earliest email - Demon internet via dial-up modem. You'd write emails, dial up to send them and to see if you had any more to download, then disconnect again before reading them, writing replies, re-connecting ... and so on.

Earliest internet - I can't remember.

Proudest moment - c.1995 I helped my workplace (about 25 people) set up their email system, and I designed their first company website using HTML.

We first got it in 2000/2001 I think. I used Celebdaq to buy and trade celebrities if anyone else remembers that also Neopets, Habbo Hotel, all sorts of Harry Potter/His Dark Materials/Lord of the Rings message boards and talking to paedophiles (presumably) on MSN chat rooms. I have quite vivid memories of being about 12 and people saying horrendous things to me on there. My parents would have had absolutely no idea, it terrifies me now I have my own children.

And writing programs in BASIC.

10 PRINT "HELLO. WHO DO YOU LIKE BETTER BROS OR PET SHOP BOYS"
20 INPUT A$
30 IF A$ = "BROS" THEN PRINT "YOU ARE WRONG. PET SHOP BOYS ARE BETTER"
40 ELSE PRINT "WELL DONE YOU HAVE GOOD TASTE"
50 END

I haven't done any programming, if you can call it that, since I was 14 so I have no idea if that is right, but that is the kind of "programme" I used to write.

Or just plain old

CLOAD

@CakeCakeCake21

The ELSE on line 40 would be on line 30

I changed my username specially just to say hi to @CakeCakeCake21, on the strength of that post :)

My first use of the Internet was staying after school to use the library in '98 I was so excited. Pages would take ages to load and you didn't get much done in the two hours I was allowed to stay after school but happy memories! I didn't get the internet at home for another 2 years or so (dial up and only after 6pm AND when mum wasn't using the phone... she was always using the phone!)

Forgetting to pick my sister up from a club because once the dial up internet finally got working my friends and I were so engrossed in it for hours we didn't look at the time

I am in my mid-40s but my father worked in computing, and we got our first home computer at some point during 1983.
We had an ancient British version of minitel named Prestel, which basically looked like the old ceefax pages for anyone remembering those. That was a sort of ancient internet.
We had two phone lines, one exclusively for the modem, even though it cost a fortune and my mum was always moaning about it.
I didn't have an email account until I was at university though- no-one emailed in those days, only academics.
When I began university there weren't search engines or even web browsers- I remember Mosaic being released, then Netscape Navigator. We had to use Gopher to find pages we wanted, which was a real headache. There weren't GUIs, even, almost everything was command line.
The computers ran windows 3.1, and once Netscape navigator was released, the internet became hugely more popular due to accessibility.

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