What's your first memory of the internet?

[MyCheeryPearlTraybake]

Late 90s looking up wrestling results

9/11. Obviously we’d used it at work before, but that was the first time I remember being amazed at how we all had instant access to the breaking news coming from the other side of the world.

Making Hotmail addresses with my cousin while we sat in my aunty’s office on a school inset day so we could use MSN Messenger.

My earliest memory is of sitting watching an image load up painfully slowly, line by line. Would have been about 1996.

Ironically, that still sometimes happens on our crappy Dorset internet speed.

Dial up Internet, usenet newsgroups, first online shopping with Tesco online and hoping like hell that my mother didn't ring and drop the connection.

Best thing ever though was being there at the start... every email service I have ever used has an account with my full name, one with my nickname and one with my chosen short garbage name (for quick passing at the till) simply my names, no numbers, and my name is common.

Chatting with teenage friends about new ‘chat rooms’ that were being spoken of and saying how sad and pathetic it was for people to talk to each other over computers.

Then being at college and getting excited about clip are that I could use to decorate my work.

My cousin showing me MSN on her new PC

Sat watching that little thing go round and round whilst it made that dial up noise .

I remember the weird start up noise it used to make ( plugged in with a cable not WiFi ) and every website you tried to go on took about 5 mins to load!

During my PGCE. It was a new-fangled thing in the University library. A friend tried to demonstrate by saying 'give me something you want to look up' and my mind went completely and utterly blank. After 2 or 3 seconds of silence I finally said 'cows'! 😂

Ah thanks for correcting me, I wasn't sure. (100% nerd score for that one!)

In the Sixth Form in 1993 or 1994 and seeing a sign up as the computer teacher was offering some lunch time sessions on how to use email etc. I didn’t go as I didn’t think it would ever catch on!

At uni. Late 90s. Set us all up with an email address.
Then I bought one from PC world , dial up , remember the noise and showing my grandparents Ask Jeeves.

University in 1990/91
University-wide network - a mix of Sun Workstations, Macs and PCs - with 24hr access to Usenet, Gopher (when that launched), and email, etc. (All technologies that predate the Web.) Much of this was only installed in the summer before I arrived - replacing a much less interesting VAX and green-screen terminals.
MUDing (text-only multiplayer adventure games) in LPMud… acquiring source code to other games and applications from Usenet and trying to get it to compile on SunOS.
Good times!

My first use of a network was in my first 'proper' job in the mid 1980s. The higher ups were sent on training courses, I wasn't. I'd done A Level computer science so when these new computers arrived people noticed I could use them efficiently. But that was a network between branches not the internet.

I think I first used the actual internet mid or late 90s, in a local library.

Late 80s dialling up to IBM in Poughkeepsie to look up white papers for the mainframe I was working on.