My first Internet experience dates back to August 2001, when I arrived in Montreal, Qc. I had never surfed the Web before that date! I created my first hotmail address, which I still use by the way, and discovered IT on the way, to then make it my job. I was 26...
Danny DeVito as Gollum would've been incredible. I think I began using the internet around the same time, at least by 1996 I had my own personal computer and used 56k internet around that time. I still recall using a 30 meter or so spool of telephone cord laid from the living room where the landline plug was, all the way to my room just for some evening browsing and ICQ fun. Incredible the people I met through that service. It's not as fun reaching out to random people these days as everything was just more innocent feeling back then, but that might've just been the early teenage mindset of course :)
Haha good point about Gollum :) And yes, the right word is "innocence". It was a blessed time when the internet was virgin and pure, at least much more than it is now.
I had been around on BBSs for a while, and then the walled gardens of CompuServe and AOL, but in 1995 my high school got something called a T1 connection. All I knew was that meant blazing fast internet. Like, faster than I thought possible. The teachers let me linger in the computer lab and use the expensive equipment based solely on my sheer enthusiasm. I was allowed to use some pretty cool stuff at school before going home to my 486/33 and using AOL dial up. Eventually I thought, hey, why don't I put Netscape on my home computer and see if I can get on the real internet outside of AOL's walled garden after my dial up connection is established. It worked! I had the internet at home! I was about to start college and these events established my entire career path. :)
It was pretty much the same story for me! And for many early home users for sure. The BBS and AOL were one thing, and the entire web for yourself was another. Thanks for sharing
Great video and great memories. I used 1993 the web first time. At university on a Sun sparc cluster. Mosaic, later Netscape (Gold) Browser. Web was mostly text, a few pictures back then. I used all of the mentioned search engines back then, until i discoverd google with its simple interface.
@@RetroDream Same here. 1994, Netscape 1.0, Sun Sparcstation 10s and 20s. First sysadmin job. My "PC Demos Explained" page from 1994 is still online :-)
Gosh, this is great. My first exposure to the internet was in 1993, living in someone else's house as a teenage immigrant. They had these nice Macintosh computers - not my dad's Norton Commander-running PC he used in the Soviet Union. They were beautiful, elegant, enticing. One day, the adults of the house were excitedly talking about something called the internet. The lady of the house was exploring something on her Mac, and connected to another person somewhere, via chat. She freaked out and shut her computer down. She thought a stranger knew where she lived. Got creeped out. I don't recall the details of my first personal experience with the internet, but it was sometime in 1994 or early 1995.
Thank you very much for this interesting feedback! Indeed we can imagine very well the scene you describe, with the elegant looking Mac and the excitement as well as fears of the first time using the internet...
Heh, 95/95, internet cafe on the way home from school with a group of mates... Was into happy hardcore dance music at the time.... Well you can guess how my first search went!!
Ohh wasn't happy hardcore part of the underground back then? Electronica still was. It was a delicious secret I relished like no other. Bring back the 90s!!!
I vividly remember borrowing and using a modem for the first time and then buying my own modem. I witnessed a tiny bit of the end of the BBS scene, helped a few gamers on Prodigy with hints on some King's Quest games, and very fondly remember the Christmas themes and yule log gifs/videos of AOL during the winters in '94/'95. I don't remember my first Web search though it was likely using WebCrawler and it was likely nsfw >_>
Oh yea, Prodigy... this brings back memories! Also many people mention using the BBS for long before the WWW, but the addition of hypertext and picture support made the online experience really different. Thanks for sharing!
I remember doing my first internet search in 1996 but not what I searched. It was during a computer class in elementary school and the whole class was being taught how to use internet explorer. I didn't have my first real personal experience until 1998 when I used google for the first to look up video game cheat codes, dragonball z stuff, pokemon etc.
for me it had no browser, no mouse, no photos/videos, ....just text in a terminal environment...... if you ever made it to a website you could navigate by selecting (a), (b), (c), etc....
