When you FIRST saw the internet, what ya think

Wasn't really bothered when we got it at home ('94/'95)... My dad had been using it at work for years previously and had droned on about it excessively. Took a good while (maybe years) to really get anything out of it.
 
My thoughts were mostly centered on the £300 phone bills. Praise the lord for the day that Claranet "Free Weekend" came along!
 
First thoughts were along the line of "dont see the point, and a waste of time". However, i was about 10 at the time, and my dad just used it for chatting, I didnt actually get proper use of the net until about 4 years after it was installed, then i found out its fruits :) Back in the day when no one gave a stuff about P2P, those were the days.

Ill never forget when my mam went metal because the phone bil was £85 :p
 
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1996 on work experience at my dad's place. Only one of the machines in his department had AOL dialup access. His colleague let me use it for the afternoon and before he left he said "if you type in sex don't let your dad catch you". LOL, well obviously that gave me ideas for my first search query. I didn't actually get anything as I was confined to the AOL portal and didn't know how to access the web properly. I had a chat with a few people in America and it was like a door had opened, and the world had shrunk. Suddenly I was speaking to people from different cultures and walks of life. It was a novel experience.
 
Hmmm... Virgin Net chatrooms, TNG face-grafted pr0n - Picard & Riker, Krusher & Troi :o
Netbus, Subseven & mailbombing.
Looks like I had a rough 33/56k upbringing.

Edit/.. and oh yeah, netscape before it was called that... bah.. bad memory...
 
Hmm, I was BBSing around on a 2400bps Gandalf modem back in the days (1989/90 IIRC), that was my first online experience really.
First time I saw the internet as it was (Gopher etc) was when I got paid a bucket load for installing a modem and cd rom drive for a guy up the road and we connected up to Compuserve. I thought at the time that it just seemed a lot of money to read some text TBH...
The web as we know it now came along for me later when my parents mistakenly installed AOL.
 
I remember signing up with Pipex, getting the modem and being unable to connect. I recall phoning Hayes (modem supplier) and them telling me I had to write a script to get the modem to connect, several days later I remember a friend finally got me sorted. The net didn't impress me at all as most of the sites were US sites and I ended up using the PC just for email (which was the primary reason for getting it in the first place). It was sometime before I ventured onto the net again, I think around 1996. I remember stupid phone bills!
 
14.4kbps was what it was all about. When my dad got a 28.8 then a 33.6k modem I was over the moon about the speed increase!

I was kinda neutral about it to start with, didnt really look at anything until I got my own machine and started surfing properly...

I even remember asking my dad what surfing the internet meant!
 
i think the first time i ever used the internet was at school, first website we went on i think was hotmail.com and the teacher guided us through making our own email address, that was 1998 i think
 
First time I ever saw the net was back in 1998 when I started college. We were using Windows 3.1 and the Netscape 3 browser I recall (we were basically working with 256 colours), and some buggy email program called Pegasus or something.

At the time I thought it was amazing, like this whole new world had just appeared before my eyes. The net looked crap back then, now that I think back to it, shoddy and very basic designs on most sites, it took a couple of years before the general standard of designs started to rise.
 
I remember getting a US Robotics 14.4k External Modem in 92 I think. All of the PC magazines were waxing lyrical about how the internet will revolutionise our lives.

"In a few years you will be able to pay your bills on line and check your bank balance" claimed one prominent rag at the time.:eek:

I think my first ISP may have compuserve. A real Eureka moment when I foud out Playboy had a website :D
 
paradigm said:
Back in the days i first went "online" (via 9600baud modem) BBS systems and compuserves WINCIM were about the only things available, the "internet" didn't really exist.

So in answer to the original question, I never really first "saw" the internet, it evolved around me. So its all normal to me, and always was.
Click to expand...

What he said! I used to run a BBS too, great fun :)
 
Role-Playing community on CompuServe using Zoltrix 14.4kpbs modem, then old BBS' with various multi-player RPG games. :)

Then I realised CompuServe also charged by the hour so ended up with the phone bill + CompuServe billing. :( :eek:
 
My first thoughts?

<connected for first time ever>

WOW! We are now connected to the World Wide Web.. OMG How cool is that!!

Right.. what now?...

<taps fingers on desk>

Pah..

<disconnects>
 
AOL, 1996. 33.6k modem. Used to use yahoo a lot as well as other sites. Also I used to go on a few IRC channels, some were good. Vividly remember going onto the french ones and swearing at them in french till they kicked me and the religious ones, changing my name to satan. In my defence I was 11 at the time :)
 
I was at school in the old days around "94, and was a cocky little ****. Our School got approached by the BBC to see how the "Emerging Technology" would help school kids, and I along with 2 friends were asked to play around with it at school.

THis was basically a chance for the school to get a free Top of the Ranch computer and mondem. Think it was a P90 with a 14.4 modem. (must have cost thousands).

The three of us were allowed to use this computer at school in lunch and break times, becouse it had a phone line, it had to be put in a little office at the back of the school libary.

One memorably lunch time, when we had a crowd of about 8 - 10 lads watching and cheering (wooping and holloring wasn't invented till after I was in HE), as the top half of a naked woman slowly appeared on the screen, then the Deputy head came bursting in. Yelled at everyone, though all the others out apart from the 3 of us who were meant to be "Researching", then we spent the next half hour, trawling for naked ladies with our deputy head.

eventually we went on an all expenses trip to London, to present our findings at this converence, the three of us (all around 15) and a teacher got meet at Kings Cross by a limo from the Beeb, taken to a hotel, fed and talked to all day by IT bods and Meet Martin Lewis (anchorman of the BBC 6 o'clock news), Prince Charles and Clive Sinclair all in the same day. Stayed in a hotel overnight, when for a tour of London the next day, eventually traveling (1st Class) by train back home.

My first thought about the Internet, "Wow, naked ladies and loads of money..."
 
First went online sometime in early 98, my first thoughts were "so every min I'm online it costs money, DISCONNECT!" as I was about 15-16 at the time and had no job.

Shortly after I discovered Ultima Online and celeb photos, got a part time job to pay for the £600 phone bills every 1/4, the rest is history.
 
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