What's your first memory of the internet?

[MyCheeryPearlTraybake]

Late 90s looking up wrestling results

In 1992 we had a new type of computer delivered to the bank where I was working. Someone came in to train us on how to use it. I couldn't work out how he was moving the cursor across the screen so asked. He explained that it was done by moving the tool he had in his hand which was apparently called a mouse, I had only used a keyboard before and was very impressed.

I was cabin crew and had made the move 300 miles from home. I used to sit in the internet cafe at the airport and email my parents and read what they’d sent to me a couple of times a week before flights

I read an article in a Sunday magazine about the World Wide Web and thought that'll never catch on...

1980s at university. Part of JANET, I think? We had to book time on dumb terminals in one suite of rooms. If you knew your friend was also online, you could send them a message and it would pop up immediately and interrupt their work. Such a joke 😏. But I don't think it was called email, and I don't remember what happened if you sent a message to someone who was not active at the same time.

My first email address was a work address in the early 1990s. Lots of discussion about proper email etiquette. We were very formal at the time, and this was the beginning of having interactions with colleagues and clients that you had never met, yet addressing them by their first names, when we would not have done so on paper letters. I still use 'Hi' on emails, but 'Dear' on paper.

Dial up weeeeewwwooooo and having to type a random number in from home to login on work laptop and the number on this device would constantly change. I remember I was WFH and my then bf emailed to say he was trying to call and couldn’t get through
All he wanted was to know which film to from Blockbusters

1987 - Joint Academic Network, or JANET for short, at university.

1994 - very excited, got a key to the computer room at college, loaded up a browser, typed in the address of a Blur web site from the magazine page I had torn out, .... And then had no idea what to do as didn't know about navigating by clicking on things. So closed it all down and went away.

Sitting in the bedroom of a friend's house, with him telling us how all the computers in the world were going to be able to link up, so you could type into one and everyone would be able to see it. Would've been 1987, and he was just about to go to university to study computer science.

He updated us every holiday. He's now a professor at a Russell Group, so guess he knew what he was talking about.

At uni 1992 and going to a computer lab to try out the World Wide Web. Just for fun.

it wasn’t a thing throughout my degree and first 5 years at work.

Secondary school IT lesson, sat in front of a PC, handwriting notes on what 'The WWW' is (next to a labeled diagram of the PC) and being told to memorise the definition for our end of year exam.

I saw a billboard advertising a company which had a presence on the new internet. The web address you had to input was so long and complex it spanned almost the entirety of the billboard. I remember thinking who the hell is ever going to remember that!

I'd forgotten about those telephone modems! I saw my first one even before uni! My parents were friends with a definitely quirky couple. Home ed-ers whose idea of education was to allow their son free rein to explore every project, and support him in doing so. He showed us his modem. He dialled a number, and when we heard the shrill wee-ooh-wee trill he placed the handset down on a receiver attached to his computer and waited for it to handshake. Don't remember what happened next, but I do remember his dad calling up the stairs, "Max, I need to use the phone!" So we had to disconnect.

Dial up modem in 1991 which we were only looked to use after 6 in the office to communicate with fellow medical researchers in the US ( we were UK) . Very much rationed

Like this.

AOL teen chat rooms.

University library 1989, JANET network.

Mid 90s, at med school. It was incredibly slow. None of us could see any point to it!

Then later, internet cafes watching hamster dance and other sites which were really pointless. This was before any shopping sites or anything else actually useful!!

Mid 90s. Chatrooms that were very cliquey.

Summer of 1997, in America the dad of the family I was staying with told me he could get cheap internal flights on the Internet. I had never used it at this point. Spent most of 1997 travelling abroad, writing letters home and ocassional expensive phone calls.

Sept 1997 I got my first email address (.ac.uk) and I remember being seriously impressed one of my friends already had a yahoo address.

In 1999/2000, on year abroad I used internet cafes to email my boyfriend. He was using dial up at home by then.

I can still 'hear' the sound of waiting for it to dial up the connection (and during that time, no-one can use the phone).

1997, loading up an AOL CD-ROM, choosing a screen name and then replying politely to scores of unsolicited messages from randomers on AOL Messenger for the rest of the evening.

1993 University library. Email, using pine - like letters, but so much faster! I could email my boyfriend who was working for Compuserve. He was the only person outside of work I knew with an email address.

1994, working in another uni library, I had to train users to access MedLine and Netscape.

The first time it really felt like the internet/www was very early 90s. I was working in an academic library and things like newspapers and journals were going online - well articles rather than what we now think of as online journals. We still had dumb terminals and the www searching came up in the bottom 8th of the screen. I was - nevertheless - able to help determine the availability of titles to purchase in print and articles to read online.

A few years earlier in 1987 my first cataloguing job was at an academic library with an online catalogue. 4 of us shared a terminal for the element of the work that was online. I think it was just checking subject headings. A lot of the work was on printouts of data sent on an enormous continuous microperf from the British Library. The data sheets were 'matched' with the books, we added and improved on what was there on the sheet and the data input staff carried out our edits online.

The change in 5 years was huge, in 10 phenomenal.

Using dial up internet, had 10 minutes and took me the whole 10 minutes to get on before my mum said time to get off I need to use the phone.

Oh the nostalgia.