Birth of the Internet

I am writing a story that start about the time that the internet first came into our homes. While my own perspective is helpful, memory from so long ago tends to be spotty.

I'm looking for recollections from anyone basically from ages 25-45 but I am interested in all prespectives.

When was the first time you rememeber getting on the internet?

Do you remember the first time it was brought "into your home"?

What did you think of it?

What did your parents think of it?

What did you use it for?

Any and all anecdotes are welcome and appreciated!!!

 

Perhaps it will help to explain my own remembrances:

• We had to run a special "line" to my father's office to get him cable.
• I loved the beeps and static of the old dial up, made me excited
• We owned and "internet yellow pages" which is a bit ridiculous to consider in the time of Google
• I know that I talked on message boards but I think they were called "newgroups" at the time. And thought I connected with someone local.
• I remember AOL CDs being sent in the mail promising free "hours"

Any of this ring any bells for anyone?

 

One of the first times I used an internet pc was at high school - only three connected to the internet in the school. One of the first things I used it for was setting up an email address. That was around 1999. We got one at home around the same time.
We had to put cable on the outside of the house to get from the phone line to the computer.
I was a teenager at this time and me and my friends instant messaged each other (when we should have been doing other things), played games, emailed, it was a way to find out stuff. Ask was a popular search engine.

It was annoying that when you were on dial up how it blocked the phone line.

The internet was useful and positive. It suddenly gave the opportunity to discover new information.

Cds by acts in American genres of music like blues and country were available on the internet to buy in the UK. Some of this was Amazon but they were not the only one in 2002-06. Things like song lyrics were there for any any song (even the bonus or obscure album track or b side).
For the first time when you went on vacation you could find out things as well as having a guide book.
Not everyone had a computer or had the internet on it. The cost was one factor and considered luxury. Although there was positivity about the internet people were a bit vary. No one at that point realized how big and it would become.

I'd forgotten about the newsgroups where you had to email everything - these created hundreds of emails. The early internet sites would often only have a few pages and those pages were often quite basic - 1 or 2 colors, a picture and some text.

 

Well, I'm old enough that I was an adult when we did get it. lol
My husband was gifted an old computer that needed repair by his boss. It was a simple fix, and back then we got AOL free trial offers in the mail every week. So we used the free trial. It was dial up of course. So the annoying sound of it dialing in often kept me up at night! (Hubby is an insomniac and was always on it. It also disconnected frequently!).
Because it was dial up, friends and family couldn't get calls through. A few years later we paid for a service that basically acted as voicemail. It would tell us when a call was coming in. Then we had the option of disconnecting our internet and pick up the line or let it go to voicemail. The voicemail was electronic, so we could hear it through the device's software. I'm sorry I don't remember what this was called. But the device plugged into the computer and it was small and black.

I originally used the net for email and creating a website. The website wasn't much. Just some things about me, some writing I was doing back then. Links I liked to follow. Basically no one saw it but myself and a few other people. And I lived for new comments on my comments section! lol A friend of mine taught me basic HTML so I was able to create it pretty easily.

I eventually did college online. We were still on dialup and it was connected through an email server.

 

The first time I saw the Internet was at work, around 1997, and only a few people at work were allowed (and were thought to have the skills to) use it. I only got to look at it. Oh, there it is, the Internet!
It was useless and slow.
But I eventually got engaged in a internet mailing group about my favourite band and I had to go to internet cafés to answer that group. It was charged by the hour so I would always write the replies at home, on my first ever home PC, save them in a floppy disk in a Word document, and post the replies as quickly as I could. *mission impossible theme playing* It was expensive!
I only had broad band at home in 2004, I think. Unlimited hours, wooh! I spent many nights just playing cards against bots in Yahoo Games, and loving it, which is sad. Before the internet I would play Windows games of cards (Hearts), which was even sadder.
I grew out of it very fast the moment I found people to talk to about things that interest me. And that's how I got here with you fine folks.

I had a dial up modem for a year or so. We couldn't use the phone if someone was using the internet. It was paid by the minute, not as expensive as internet cafés but still too expensive.
Broadband internet is the best invention in the history of humankind, if you ask me. I can't make a wheel, but I can go on the internet and learn how to make a wheel. I can learn how to make fire from a stone. I can learn how to grow food. All humankind's greatest accomplishments available for all to learn.
Until there's a power failure, then I'm screwed.

 

Haha then I feel like a crack addict without their fix!

 

Oh, you mean the good old days when you plugged the phone line
into the modem card and heard this earball destruction:

Losing the phone use, unless you happened to have a second line
setup to handle both at the same time.

It was slow, and took long times to load pictures that were not all
that big in terms of memory space, and videos were virtually non-existent.
Chatrooms were all the rage, and if you had webcam (that was glitchy and
didn't have a mic), or had a microphone, you were hot shit in the conversation.

It was an oddity that caught on far faster than the cellphone did, in terms of
availability to the masses due to not costing a small fortune, and it wasn't
mobile. Not that cellphones were huge in the 90's, but a desktop computer
isn't considered mobile by most peoples standard.

Granted it is much more prolific today, faster, and can do so much and handle
so much more than when it struggled to send a simple email on a digital slug
to another person. It is also much safer in terms of being secure where viruses
are concerned (mind you not opening email from shady sources, and not going
to shady sites, unless you happen to live on the edge. Though you can catch a
virus is some fairly common places that you consider safe and use fairly often
or daily. Though the risk is low for more mainstream sites being the infectors).
Though I think satellite internet is still priced out of the average consumer market.
Suppose it has to be a bit more, due to special installation of the dish and aiming it
in the right direction. Last I heard it was around $110-120 a month to be 'wireless'
in that sense, but I think having an external modem on DSL with a wi-fi relay is
much simpler and cost effective. Pretty sure sat-internet was the transition between
the old standardized built in to computer modem, and the more modern external
modem with DSL wi-fi.

 

I loved chatrooms. I'd always go into yahoo's chatrooms in the wiccan/witch chats. I'd do psychic readings for people.

 

Wow... the memories from these recollections are hitting me like a tidal wave of flashbacks. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I had even forgotten about the whole dilemma of the dial up line occupying the phone line. And of course when you mentioned it I felt like and idiot for doing so.

Did anyone else ever talk to anyone they actually knew in RL online? Other than email.

I remember talking to a boy I went to elementary school with online when I was in middle school. But my mother made me call his house to make sure it was him before I could keep talking to him. (Which in retrospect is ironic since I'm writing a story about catfishing.)

 

I didn't know him at first, but I did eventually meet up with a friend I spoke with online. We met on a forum and since we lived close decided to take our kids to the zoo together. It was a fun day but we never did it again.

 

My first experience with the internet was in a middle school Mac lab. It looked something like this:

We used it mostly for researching school projects as a supplement for the Encyclopedia.

We got the internet at home when I was about the same age, but didn't use it for much because it took up the only phone line and there wasn't much content to browse. When I became a teenager all my friends and I started logging onto AOL, then eventually stand-alone AIM. It was all still done on a family computer in the middle of the living room though. I remember one of the more common things to do on the internet was to play flash games. Newgrounds.com came around I think when I was in high school. Soda Constructor was popular among kids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_Constructor

 

I was first on-line in the late 1980s with an IBM knock-off, to a DoD first generation internet, I don't recall the name, but it was basically message boards and not very useful. If you didn't already know how to get there you could not find the way. Everything was text-based.

I was doing a lot of digital communications in the 80s by ham radio, radioteletype at 50 wpm, and some other specialized modes. I designed and built my first teletype modem from parts from a Navy modem including the neat little 2' monitor scope to see that the signal was correctly tuned in. I then went to a commercial modem that supported a lot of new communications modes, include an over-the-air internet called packet radio, that also took us to a variety of message boards. I wrote my own software for the message processing, running on a RadioShack TRS-80. Commodore 64 computers were also very popular with hams. We actually helped the Soviets out for the Yerevan earthquake around 1989, using a mode called AMTOR. Required a special export license to get the AMTOR radio modems to the Soviet Union as they were export-controlled!

So my first modern internet around 1990, a browser called MOSAIC, seemed very confusing, didn't see what it ever might be good for. Got on line around 1993-95 with e-mail and explorer. Windows made all the difference, before that it was MS-DOS, and the screens were mostly monochrome text only. After 9/11, I did open-source intel for the Army, reading various on-line sources, newspapers and so forth and collecting information, and by then it was pretty much what it is today, though the search engines still had a long way to go. We went to satellite internet connection at about that time.

 

I was first on-line in the late 1980s with an IBM knock-off, to a DoD first generation internet, I don't recall the name, but it was basically message boards and not very useful. If you didn't already know how to get there you could not find the way. Everything was text-based.

I was doing a lot of digital communications in the 80s by ham radio, radioteletype at 50 wpm, and some other specialized modes. I designed and built my first teletype modem from parts from a Navy modem including the neat little 2' monitor scope to see that the signal was correctly tuned in. I then went to a commercial modem that supported a lot of new communications modes, include an over-the-air internet called packet radio, that also took us to a variety of message boards. I wrote my own software for the message processing, running on a RadioShack TRS-80. Commodore 64 computers were also very popular with hams. We actually helped the Soviets out for the Yerevan earthquake around 1989, using a mode called AMTOR. Required a special export license to get the AMTOR radio modems to the Soviet Union as they were export-controlled!

So my first modern internet around 1990, a browser called MOSAIC, seemed very confusing, didn't see what it ever might be good for. Got on line around 1993-95 with e-mail and explorer. Windows made all the difference, before that it was MS-DOS, and the screens were mostly monochrome text only. After 9/11, I did open-source intel for the Army, reading various on-line sources, newspapers and so forth and collecting information, and by then it was pretty much what it is today, though the search engines still had a long way to go. We went to satellite internet connection at about that time.

 

Ah, dial-up. The sound of my childhood

I'm a youngin so my earliest internet experiences were in the early 2000s, browsing art and fansites when I was about 9. I was a shy kid so I never went out of my way to chat with anybody, really, but I remember joining forums here and there. It felt more anonymous then, since facebook wasn't really a thing yet. I'm sure social media existed, but besides knowing what blogs were, that kind of thing wasn't really on my radar. Telling people your real name, or even showing pictures of your face, wasn't as normalized as it is now. I had a different alias for every site I used, and the friends I made there I'd only communicate with on those specific sites. I didn't get into IMs until just a few years before MSN shut down

And since my parents, obviously, didn't grow up with the internet, they were really hands-off with what I did and what pages I visited, and would only notice that I was talking to another human being if I happened to tell them I was. I had friends whose parents were extreme on the opposite side of the spectrum, who just restricted any and all access to the internet without trying to understand what it was or how to use it safely. Which, in restrospect, I understand for young children, but when it went on in their teen years it was just a bit much.

 

75 MHz Pentium with Windows 95 and DOS 6.0. I disliked the internet because using a dial up connection costed lots of money and made me stressed. Our computer got viruses all the time and all sites were total shit with pictures of people's dogs, weirdly colored text and random gif animations. No anti-virus and websites had full access to the system because security was not even a thing. Everything was allowed by default, including ececution of native assembly with full admin rights on client side, so you didn't even need to find an exploit to browse around in the file system. Today hackers need to find some moron still enabling JavaScript for unknown sites instead of white-listing those who already have your payment information.

 

Ah yes, don't forget floppy disks. Not the 3 1/2 in plastic ones, the real floppy 5 1/4 " ones. And on my aircraft carrier we used in the early 80s, we used a Xerox 860 word processor, with a screen remarkably like Word (black text on white screen), and 8 inch floppies. My first hard drive was 20M, I put it in myself, and wondered what I would do with all that storage space. Ping brrrrrr-rrrr hiss.

 

The transformation of 'terrible' jobs.

It was always accepted practice throughout my dark ages that when you performed a 'terrible job' you just sat there in the night time awaiting a clock to strike 5 or 8 or whatever rule it was being observed. This was just the way with the 'terrible jobs.' One was 'at work,' obviously. There was no cartoons to keep you entertained.

Many years I sat in the dark facing a wall from 6pm to midnight, then on to 2am until the editor's late night telephone call.

'[Hic] All done,' he said to me...

I rushed a floor toward his desk, and counted his folios to ensure he could count also. Sometimes he misordered his many pages of typed words. This was a great honour for me and I would telephone his pager -

'Sir, with respect, your folios run 1,2, 4, 3...is this correct in the context of publication?'

'No, he'd say, 'would you swap my 4 for the 3?'

'Yessir...'

'And Mat, good work Mat...'

'Thank you, thank you.'

Then came the printer's messenger arriving in his van, and finally at half past 3am my taxi-ride home. Then I could read a real book, olden days. The internet ruined all that, and also heralded the ascendancy of techies which is a problem still for all/most of us all. As you know they are low-life.

Internetways, after Minesweeper came the Swansea Notice Board - for me - I stalked their chat-board - and then a porno decade, and then my kids and Club Penguin for the family/Doom.