When did you first go on the internet and what did you do?

[Keith Jordan]

I remember the occasion very well but do not quite remember what year it was. I think it was 1996. I got a Compuserve from a local Dixons shop and took it home to the 3GB hard drive PC of the home in the kitchen. I hooked the computer up to the telephone socket via a newly purchased V90 modem and listened to it screaming code down the phone line until the Compuserve homepage loaded. I had heard of Yahoo so went on that and saw there was some news on there with some wicked looking pictures. I wondered to myself what is the point of this useless crap internet.

What is your first memory of the internet? What is your story???

[Hudini]

My first internet experience was also around 1996. I went to a friend whose dad had a firm with internet connection (for correspondence), so we wanted to try out that new technology. The first thing we did was to search for song lyrics on AltaVista; he searched for Manowar or something like that, unsurprisingly enough I searched for Pink Floyd. The second thing we did was to download porn pics from some lousy Slovenian site.

[mosespa]

The first time I used the internet proper (I once worked at a newspaper where we had a state-wide net that gave limited free access, but it wasn't world-wide,) it was 1997 and I was in a rather impressive library that had TWO (*gasp*) computers connected to the internet available for patrons to sign up to use for an hour.

I spent my hour looking up (and printing out at something like six cents per page,) REM lyrics.

[danielcaux]

Deja vu? Haven't we discussed this before or is just my imagination?

[Keith Jordan]

Yes, it is time to discuss it again as new people have joined... possibly the internet itself!... since then.

[SteveB]

Hmm. Was at college in 1997 and they were running (gasp) Windows 95. Sh*t, at home I was stil on 3.1.
The Internet was one of the Learning Modules to study in the IT programme I was attending, and I seem to recall the boot-up process consisted of endless pages of fluent-Hungarian scrolling past until the green/white screen of joy.
One of the first things we learnt was how to grab yerself an email account, which we duly did, and I still have mine. Er, though those were the days when 200 spam emails for (ahem) body enlargements were the norm. I actually purchased a paperback book via Amazon some time later 1999/2000 which I'd searched for for years. I remember thinking, hmmm, this WWW makarky may have a future.

[ddebil]

WTF do you think?!!!!

[MY RRRRS]

i figgured that would be your response

[henno]

ho0nestly not sure what i did first.. probably a pink floyd related search... i remember alta vista being a big deal at the time, so this must have been 94 / 95

[drafsack]

it was the early/mid 90's at work, the search engine was netscape and yes my first search was pink floyd

[Stephen]

Amongst the first things I did was to find that I could download music for free from a Russian site. It took ages to get just one track as I was on dial-up at the time and an album probably cost me about the same as buying the thing. The PC had only got a 2GB hard drive so there was little space left to add music and it usually meant if I wanted to add an album I had to delete another one as the CD burner didn't work.

[princessDungan74D]

I was looking up stuff about Star Wars at the time and Russian history I guess! I started going on-line as a Pre-Teen years ago! I was into Tsar Nicholas II for some odd reason and I was a fan of Star Wars for a short while!

[snifferdog]

1997/1998. Can't quite remember the date but it doesn't really matter. One of the first sites I visited was Yahoo, probably because it was one of the most well known sites out there. It did look a lot different back then and Internet Exploder 3 had a tendency to render certain sites with a horrible grey background. I was in a sh!tty job back then and in the afternoons when I was bored and everyone else had cleared off, I'd go onto Yahoo's chatrooms and tell people all sorts of lies. I'm sure they were lying too

I remember feeling like a kid in a sweetshop when the original Napster came along because it was the first time that I could easily access mp3s. I went through my collection of cassettes, made a list of the songs I wanted and chucked the tapes into the wheelie bin

[henno]

it was the early/mid 90's at work, the search engine was netscape and yes my first search was pink floyd

ah yes netscape!!!.. that little shooting star thingy.. and was there a globe that went round and round as well??

that brings me back to my early college days in 94... fcuk im old!!

[snifferdog]

The internet didn't exist when I was at college or at least not that they were telling us! Though seeing as we could log into the library catalogues of other colleges, perhaps that was a boring form of the internet?

Anyway, if you want to feel old, take a look at these screenshots of some of those old browsers and see how far back you go.