Internet when you started

[grungy-gonads 54]

This isn't to those people who've just logged on in the last 3 or 4 years, but those who were using the internet 10 years or so ago.

 

What was the internet like way back when you first used it?

 

I remember using email for the first time. Magic! Then looking at a few crappy sites out there - mostly badly made and just text, flashing gifs, hard to read text on flashy backgroungs etc (you know the ones).

 

The connection was so painfully slow, hard to even imagine now. (Almost current UK levels.... that bad!!)

 

How far we have come.

[Ocean11 0]

Getting a provider (for a Mac) was hard in itself, and setting up all the protocols with 3 different floppy disks and 2 different manuals took a whole morning (all for a load of badly scanned 80s porn). Yahoo was just a small directory then with no other services (but they didn't have horrible ads for toenail diseases), Google didn't exist, and my modem kept cutting out every ten minutes.

 

I remember my first HTML page made me feel so ineffably modern.

[badmigraine 0]

I started around February, 1995. I had just arrived in Japan and was using e-mail to stay in touch with family. I dialed into Compuserve's Japan number using a 14k modem. I used the Mosaic browser, then switched to Netscape. It was unbelievably slow and buggy. Once or twice an hour I'd lose the connection and have to dial in again. Terrible.

 

It wasn't until I got ADSL years later that I actually had the experience of logging off the Net because I was DONE, rather than because I'd had enough waiting around for things to load.

 

Remember all-night downloads?

 

Remember choosing Winsock becuase it was allegedly more "robust"?

 

[Davo 1]

Damn that porn used to take a long time to download! Broadband brings the booty out in a timely fashion

[JellyBelly 1]

I remember all those awful backgrounds and flashing gifs on massively long mostly-text pages. They were so much fun.

[damian 0]

I remember when wanna-be with it hip radio stations tried to latch onto the new cyber world thing. They would talk about some lame website and then tell you the url. Seems normal enough except the goose would read out the entire url, viz:

 

h t t p colon forward slash forward slash double u double u double u dot goose dot com dot a u forward slash index tilda forward slash c g i hyphen b i n forward slash d equal sign twelve dot h t m l

 

yeah, with it.

[Ocean11 0]

Yeah, but in Japan, when they quote an URL, they still always start with etchi teetee pee colon slashu slashu...

 

I tell my clients that when they put their URL on advertising, they don't need that bit, but they never listen. And they always correct 'email' to 'e-mail'. Being an old Internet hand, like, it can get a bit annoying.

[indosnm 0]

I got on in 96 while in living in Bali. Started using Hotmail, but alot of people at that time still didn't have email addresses. Wasn't till about 98 or 99 that alot of friends had them and used them regularly.

Porn, damn i can remember watching the screen load up a pic that would take 5-10mins! Paris Hilton would never have gotten so famous with the time it would have taken to download her full 30 min vid 10 years ago!

[rach 1]

I remember when I first got an account and how mind-numbingly slow it was - as well as how unreliable it seemed to be. It cut off almost every few minutes. Harldy worth the effort, although I was kinda excited about it at the time.

[BagOfCrisps 24]

I only started relatively late, not helped of course by the prehistoric connections and all here in the UK. I do remember lots of gaudy, difficult to read sites withe really naff animated gifs and the like.

[merryJim 1]

I remember there being virtually no websites at all. It was pretty much email at the beginning when I started, and even then not that many people I knew were using that. I can't believe we actually paid for what there was back then, it was pretty awful.

[happyhappy 0]

I came late, so I never experienced all those really early growing pains. Sounds like a lot of fun, hey?

[nagoid 4]

I hated it, actually. I got email - and only 2 other people I knew had it. The web was a mess. It was crap.

[sanjo 2]

It took an age to get anything faster than a 33.3 dial up in my town. I didn't bother until it was something semi-decent (ISDN at the time)

[brit-gob 9]

I thought I was so cool when I first started. Well, I was I suppose. Hardly anyone else was and most people didn't understand what the hell it all was (neither did I really). No point in having email when none of your buddies do! I'm impressed with how Japan has embraced broadband and the relatively low costs of joining up as well. That's only a good thing.

[fukdane 2]

Well the Japanese people I know in this fairly rural area of Fukushima sure don't get an annual household income anywhere near that. That will be pretty rare round here. (Unless everyone is lying).

[bejunper 0]

I was an early adopter and I remember all those terrible text-based attempts that took an age to download that were out there. WIth even half the same rate of progress, I wonder where the web will be in another 10 years....?

[brett_jackson 0]

10 years? I'd say the Internet will be completely wireless. Hand Held PC's will be everywhere (only smaller and more sophisticated), and most communication will take place via the Internet (Skype is already a concern to most big telco companies), so these handhelds will probably be connected to earpieces etc. and remove the need for actual mobile/cell phones.

 

50 years? Neural implants.