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?

Mine is using the Yahoo chatrooms, circa 2000. The sound of a dial up modem brings back so many memories!

I always quite liked the sound of dial up, but you had to make sure your mum didn’t need to phone Carol about line dancing (early 90s) I sent my first ever email (to my now husband) in the mid 90s, He was an early adopter and found my excitement really weird. Napster in the late 90s cemented my love.

Anyone remember Faceparty?

Whilst email and the internet was only available to the public from 1995 no, it was way before then.

The internet was blossoming as I left college (1994).

I remember those awful first web pages that were in jarring coloured fonts with a few scant photos thrown in that took ages to load. Soon after came the eye bleeding special effects like a photo of a horizon with shimmering animated water below it.

The first UK online shopping came out around 97? I think Top Shop was an early adopter and you could buy about 20 things on their site. Amazon was quickly establishing: mostly music and books and I remember sending my husband (then boyfriend) lots of cds to listen to while he was in a work trip in Colorado using an American account.

The first blogs were coming out in too. I used to read Heyoka (Reckless Sleeper), Shellyness, and confessions of a Disgruntled Housewife. Jenny and Ana cam were a big phenomenon.

@ChilliCheese123 we used libraries. I remember having to use a microfiche machine to look up stuff on old newspapers.

Oh and we used to use Play.com for CDs and DVDs, and now we don't even buy those!

Early 80s, Wang computers with MS-DOS. Basic text and a straight line was all you could produce. We had a couple of Apple Macs at work for anything graphic related, but very limited on functionality. Later we got Lotus Notes and that was the bees-knees! Oh how we lived 😁

On the internet - lots of pages with iframes! Dial up. Getting the internet on CDs. Later on, Lycos chat rooms (misspent youth in those...!).

Early experience of computers generally - printers which took the paper with the holes down the size. MASSIVE heavy monitors. Every single piece of hardware was a weird nicotine beige.

I was born in 1990 - my grandad was one of the first IT teachers in the country, so we had a PC from 1995/6 in our house, an old one from his work. We had a typing program called Mavis Beacon which I remember very fondly - I think that's why I can type so quickly!

@Jennifer2r I remember A/S/L!

Despite being 14 and living in the backend of nowhere, I used to always use a variation on 18/F/NY

I remember being very impressed when the new graduate used Excel to tally column of numbers. I thought the boy was a genius.

Ah A/S/L. And moderators insisting people didn’t have to answer it...

Going offline every 58 minutes to avoid the phone charges for an hour’s call!

And I miss proper libraries. And reading an actual journal, finding a relevant article, photocopying it and then having to track down the 20 articles it referenced, all in different journals, all suspended on some weird rack thingy. Then the wait for three weeks to be able to pick up the book you needed because the other students had got there first, and hoping they’d actually return it on time...

My daughter is doing some research at the moment for her schoolwork. She has to use reference books not the internet. And is outraged that she can’t simply copy and paste...

I've been an IT recruiter on and off since the mid 80s and used to place computer programmers and operators. They all worked on IBM, ICL, DEC, HP, Stratus and these huge machines would fill warehouse type spaces. The database we used as recruiters to find these people was sheets of paper filed in lever arch files. The head office had people phone around candidates to get their latest availability and any update to their experience. These callers would Tippex out the old info and write in the new, photocopy it and send it by DataPost to the branch offices. Then someone would drive to the post office to pick the parcel up to be filed again in the lever arch files. The extremes of technology in action

My year at school was the first to be offered O level Computing circa 1981. The teachers were learning alongside the pupils and there were only two computers in the whole school. These were wheeled in on huge assed trolleys and you were lucky if you got one go on them per lesson.
A few years later and still pre Windows we had blue and yellow screens with Pine mail which worked using function keys. All printouts were on that paper with holes down the side that was supposed to be shredded, but we all took it home for drawing on.
Ah, the good old days !

Mainly yattering with my friends on MSN messenger rather than doing my homework probably around 1998. I did used to go on to online chat room with AOL far younger, it was when it was still dial up and it was all new - my god, the risks weren’t even thought of really back then.

E-mail at work, around 1993-1994. VAX system. We had very limited quotas, so had to delete most messages soon after sending/receiving them. We had to go to a specific room to use a computer that connected to VAX, so there was often a queue.

@Grumpybuttons

Anyone remember Faceparty?

OMG ! that takes me back ... wild days !

Yup, 1997, had one computer in the living room, dial up on AOL and the godforsaken noise it made, having to tell everyone not to use the phone before going on, getting the glare from my Dad if I was on for more than 20 mins because we paid by the minute, clicking a link and settling in while it decided what to do with that information. And then a Joanna Lumley- esque voice announce to the entire living room that "You've got post".

@Grumpybuttons I remember Face party, MySpace and Bebo.
I remember my husband blowing literally all our savings on a second hand computer in 1989 and proudly proclaiming ' this is the future!'
While I complained bitterly that we wouldn't have a bloody future because he'd just spent all our savings!

DF worked in the Census Office - I remember pre school he'd bring old computer printouts home for us to draw on the back. They had perforated strips down each side with holes that you could tear off, thread wool though and make into bracelets. He used a chemistry stencil to draw programming designs and I used to love using that to draw shapes and colour them in.

In the mid 1970s he took me and my French penfriend on a trip round the Census computer rooms - there were rather a lot of them - all massive cupboards and it was very hot. I was more impressed that there were lots of doors that you needed a swipe card to enter and that his opened all of them.

I expect that there is more processing power in my laptop than in the whole room of computers DF showed us.

I can remember printing scatter plots in the 1970s, and having to then identify and label all the points because the program wasn't able to do it - this was on a PDP-11 "mini computer" (the size of a wardrobe) with I think 32k memory -can that be possible?

I can remember the excitement of waiting for the BBC micro to be delivered, and writing a printer driver in BBC Basic so that we could print with bold, underlining and foreign alphabets.

Then JANET, which I knew about but hardly used.

And finally, mid 90s, internet at home, with dial-up, and "usenet" where I met people who are still real-life friends. Each "newsgroup" had relatively few contributors, so you got to know people on-line, and it was natural to move to the next step of "meets" where you travelled halfway the country to meet people you'd only met on-line, often meeting in the home of one of them. (We hosted several ourselves). I miss those days.

Changing your MSN messenger name to sing lyrics and hoping someone would comment on it (usually a crush, whose attention you'd attempt to get by logging off and on again)

PHPBB forums, and making your own animated emojis for them (not that we called them emojis then)

AIM and the endless AOL CDs that everyone had.

I was 22 the first time I touched a computer. It has green characters on the screen and we spent a whole hour learning how to put in the codes for bold text (Wordstar I think this was).

[quote Grumpybuttons]@pipnchops badger badger badger was from “weebls stuff”. I remember it was half the reason why I went to uni and did an IT degree that included animation 😂

My husband and I met at college and we used to ignore each other in real life and MSN each other all night and at weekends!! So funny! Teenagers are so weird [/quote]
We've taught the kids badger badger badger

I found out the other day that DH doesn't remember hamster dance and the song that ended up in the charts as a result

We had internal email in my first job in 1985. I remember IT telling me that one day I may have to give people outside the company my email address. I guess it properly too off for work in the early 90s.