What's your first memory of the internet?

[MyCheeryPearlTraybake]

Late 90s looking up wrestling results

Slightly different, but I'm reminded of my DH printing his PhD on an Apple printer. We can both still imitate the 'conversation' between the PC and the printer before the racket of the actual printing started.

I went to a science fair and looked up my name in Hawaiian. Probably 94/95.

I have a FWB who can wang on endlessly about his early days in IT, how he thought TCP/IP would never catch on, programming in binary, hacking for the fun of it, tutoring uni students when he was 14, etc.

It's fine to drift off to, but he could work on his seduction techniques...

It was, and it how I ended up in IT. A pathway straight from bar-coding books for the new UT system at my local lending library through Libs100+ to Unix and C programming as personal development, then an MSc conversion in comp sci instead of a library course.

Wondering what I could use it for.

Setting up a Hotmail email account
AOL dialup on my dads computer at home
Being taught how to search for something (using the yahoo search engine) in the new computer room at school. 1997ish

This. Spent many a happy hour in the Foster Building basement holed with similar anoraks until 9pm when the building closed, basically trying to break the system. Later on, one of the early-ish users of the WWW when you had to pay a fortune to use your phone line to dial AOL to access the web - there was nothing on it really (chatrooms etc. some holding pages) and saying that soon this will change - OH said "don't be ridiculous, it will never take off".

Handbag.com!
Boyband fan forums
Sneaking downstairs to go online and having to sit through the dreadful dial up screeching

Philadelphia cheese advert: “it’s the information super highway” 😁

using Infoseek which was the google of its day. And downloading the dancing baby from Ally McBeal

Wanadoo dial up internet and looking on the Nickelodeon website before I get told to get off, due to the cost!

Sounds great 😀. I stayed with academic librarianship, but all the changes and developments and how this has shaped what services libraries can provide has definitely been a reason it stayed fresh. I'm aware it's different in public libraries and how lucky I've been to have worked in well resourced institutions.

I also remember when Amazon was just for books.

1995, my friend at university telling me about this ‘thing’ called email. She was so excited and said you can send messages to people on the computer, you just need an email address. Then a couple of years later we got dial-up at home. I think the first thing we did was go in a chat room.

Ooh yes, 90s sometime and I can vaguely remember what the page looked like (very Wikipedia style, text format, no pictures) I think I was looking up something like the water system, precipitation or something similar maybe for school.

The funny techy noise that the dial up connection made through the phone line. And taking about twenty minutes to download a single photo.

Early 80s doing a Computer Science degree. Sendmail was running on 'mini' computers so used that, and also messed around with uucp.

Being taken to the computer room in school for an art lesson where we were supposed to be finding images to use for inspiration but instead just finding and printing images of Gareth Gates.

I remember during the mid-1990s I'd regularly come across websites featuring one of those roadworks triangular signs and the message "Site under construction".

Does anyone else remember the Cambridge coffee cam?

Around 1994, but had been using Prestel and "Bulletin Boards" since '86, which used the same protocols (TCP/IP) on a closed network.

Bulletin Boards, often only allowed one user a a time to access them, as they used a phone line.

My daughter using dial-up shouting "Mam, I've tried 76 times and it won't connect"

The first time I booked a holiday using the internet I was absolutely certain it hadn't worked properly and was amazed when the flights and hotel all worked out perfectly.

The old chat forums, MySpace and live Journal 😊

Horrendously nerdy point of order: Prestel was built around X.25, not TCP/IP. Dial-up BBS's didn't use TCP/IP either; they were just async serial ASCII.

1992 working for a bank. We already had bank feeds and stock prices, etc. but this was a search engine (although nothing like today's Internet). It wasn't until a few years later that I was able to book a holiday (to the US) using it.

The noisy dialup tone - only after 6pm of course
MSN messenger