Your first connection and memories of the internet.

Ahh, mid to late 90s AOL and Freeserve, Netscape, Chat rooms and ICQ.

Then I found TFC.

I don't think my parents liked the phone bill
 
Dialling up a BBS on the Amiga at my mates house, then a £90 phone bill coming in for a demo we downloaded!! would have been around 700k in total, I think it was somewhere in the Netherlands. :o

The first time I used the Internet as it currently is was dialling in to CompuServe on a painfully slow modem.
 
Perhaps early 1994 when not a lot was happening. NCSA Mosaic was the only browser available to us at uni but there were hardly any web sites worth visiting. I spent all my time chatting up strangers in Iowa.

telnet bbs.isca.uiowa.edu sadly gone.
 
I first logged on in the late 90s, using the 20 min slots at the local library. I think I was browsing car sites and pokemon. It wasn't until mid 2000 that we got our own PC. It had a 56k modem and we used freeserve. I played games, browsed newgrounds and watched porn.
 
1998 when altavista looked like this http://web.archive.org/web/19990225162544/http://www.altavista.com/
And supposedly the best engine at the time.
Other than that, ICQ and IRC - Undernet, when being a chan op was huge, "look i can kick people!", the whole amazement of real-time chat with people from all over the world.
Paying per minute on dial up.
Pr0n sites with links to pics of tiny size that took forever to download and 5 second video clips.
 
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I remember having to go to electrical stores to get Freeserve CDs. Must have gone through 4 or 5 of them.

My history (1998-2014)

56k Dial-Up (Freeserve)
2Mb ADSL (Freedom 2 Surf)
5Mb ADSL2 (Freedom 2 Surf)
24Mb ADSL2+ (BE Broadband)
16Mb ADSL2+ (Sky - Not by choice but because they bought out BE, 1 month only)
76Mb Fibre (PlusNET)

It's mad to think my current connection is over 1,000 faster than my first one. I remember having to wait over half an hour to download a 3 minute song in the late 90s. Nowadays I can download an hour long HD video in around 5 minutes.

Just waiting for 1Gb FTTH to be available in my area now.
 
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Theophany said:
I'm convinced we had a Joanna Lumley type voice that said 'welcome to AOL' in the UK, but all the YouTube vids have a different voice... Is my memory addled by years of booze abuse?
Click to expand...

I definitely remember her saying "You've got mail" or "You've got post" it might have been.
 
Good old US Robotics 56K modem. Never hear of that company these days. Mind I heard enough back in the day connecting to the interwab lol!
 
AOL chat. Chat room 1. I was a 'reg'. Must have been late 90s/early 2000s. I do wonder what happened to all my AOL chat friends. I use to sit on chat from dawn til well after dusk haha was an addict.

I exchanged numbers with a fair few, but that was about 30-40 mobile phones ago now..

Back before free texts I could use 20quids worth of credit in a day. I use to have day long text convos with people I'd never met.
 
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Around 1996.

I had an IBM thinkpad with a 56k modem. Used AOL.

Best internet moment was when I had ADSL installed. Only 512k but didn't cut off when you used the phone. I absolutely bashed Napster when I got that.
 
Geocities. Wow.
HTML 2. Such <marquee>.
Blogs that weren't whiny 12 year old girl diaries. Very <a>.
Freeserve discs and 30 day trials in magazines. Such 56k.
A/S/L. Wow.
 
Dial up was great, I avoided loads of work call outs during evenings and weekends due to it. First online experience was Wall Street BBS, Hull, 1994.
 
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