When did you first get on the internet?

Richard Dower

1995, the joys of 56k modems and crappy speeds...it was all sooo new and fresh back then. Realplayer was king!....ICQ :eek:

Things have changed very sharpish, a 20GB hard drive cost over 200 old pounds :eek:

TheMilkyPirate

Must have been around 1998 or 99, Used to have to drag the whole pc plus desk out to the hallway so i could plug the internet lead into the phone socket.. It's hilarious when i look back on it now and amazing to see how far we've come seen as i'm now lying in bed on my smartphone on boards :P

tails_naf

Richard Dower wrote: »

56k modems

Flash bas***d, 14.4k for me....for many years.
Stuck with eircom 'broadband' in the countryside now.
Think the 14.4k was a bit faster....

Was in 95 when I first got on too. Remember paying 120 punts for 4mb of ram. Made my computer a rocket though!

LighterGuy

Sega Dreamcast in 2000.

The console was already out since October 1999. But Sega didnt allow the internet service become available until April 2000 for Irish owners.

The web browser wasnt the best. But it was alright at the time. Couldnt download anything tho. But the problem was that the internet was evolving fast around that time. So by 2001-2 the sega dreamcast browser wasnt good enough anymore.

Sticky_Fingers

Think it was '97 or '98, crappy dialup that cost an absolute fortune, had to use it late at night to keep the costs down and even then it was only for a very short time. I remember being completely bewildered by the whole thing and struggling to find my way around.

Also dirty pictures took an age to load and what with the possibility of being discovered at any moment by the parents it was a very trying time for a lad my age;)

stoneill

1993 - Vax based gopher system, all text mostly ascii and no graphics.
Until I managed to get my hands on Netscape!

Senna

1997 or so.
Used to spend hours just typing random stuff into Yahoo. Then Napster arrived and i'd spend a full night downloading 4 songs. I'd just sit there watching the download speed, if it got over 4kps i'd get excited, you couldn't use the internet while downloading a song and thinking back, i mustn't have realised minesweeper or solitaire were there:D

PeakOutput

too soon

WindSock

95 or 96 or something. When Yahoo was the most useful thing for me. God, what a mess it was.

Senna

Our home computer was in the kitchen and the whole family used it. I panicked when i realised the search box in Yahoo remember what i had searched for:o.

Yakult

around 98. Only used it for tabs and then Broadband came and my life left.

JONJO THE MISER

First time i was on it was in 1995, i remember thinking it was just nerds who were into it and i really had no interest in it until 2000 when i read about flutter.com which was the first and best betting exchange and i guess it took off from there.

Pdfile

anyone remember BBS ??

anyone remember the first on ??

i beta tested that with echo...

and thats all i done, still on the net though. :pac:

JohnathanM

Pdfile wrote: »

anyone remember BBS ??

I remember acoustic couplers, very large phone bills and very angry parents.

enda1

Can't remember when exactly, but I do remember I did it without family knowing. Got a IOL disk in the door one day with a free trial number. Then you were supposed to pay for the right to ring them as an ISP?!

I used this number continuously for about 6 months I'd say.

I do remember musicmatch jukebox being one of the first glimpses at mp3s. The early versions had only the ability to rip 3 or 5 songs for free before buying the ****ty software.

I guess it was in the mid-nineties. I remember the computer having an 8gb drive I think and windows 95. Brand spanking new Packard Bell piece of shit.

Garseys

1999, Crappy Eircom Dial up.

Then we got NTL's first Broadband offering!

tallaghtmick

only about 7 years ago,im going on 27 this year so i was a late bloomer,my parents never had use for a pc so we never got 1

deman

1996... 28.8k modem (btw, are you 56k modems were available in 95?)

Used IOL free disc. No email or anything.

AltaVista was my favourite search engine.

Rick Deckard

went into compustore on Stephens Green, got a packard bell with 16mB ram,
<1gb hdd.

was too nervous to go to actual porn sites, so was an avid member of Yahoo Clubs!!

late 97ish..

Funglegunk

96/97.

I had a 33.6k modem, and spent a lot of time on yahoo chat, irc and icq. The following year I ran up the phone bill like **** once I discovered you could play half-life online.

pickarooney

1993 from a SPARC station. alt.rec.humor.bestiality here we come!

jester77

95, the memories... mozilla browser, geocities, fortune city, angelfire, hotmail, altavista, chat rooms and the joys of waiting a few mins for a blurry pic to load to see if it was worth saving to a floppy disk!

Sunnyisland

2007 :eek:

_feedback_

1998. Eircom dial up. Using netscape navigator to visit the oceanfree chat rooms!

galwayrush

Too lazy to google the year, but the headlines were about Princess Diana's death.

bonerm

1996. Clinton was in the White House, Ireland still had a good football team, the end of the world was only 4 years away....

Gyalist

At university in 1987. The www didn't exist then.

jimthemental

2004 I think. Didn't even know how to use email until half way through first year in UL we were so starved of experience with computers in Kilkenny's Vocational Schools

up for anything

2004 so a late starter compared to you but I was using electronic mail back in '89 in work on an IBM5520. Started on dial-up until I got a 400+ phone bill and then ordered Esat BB. It took a full week to install the fecking modem. Nightmare. Once I did though real life took at back seat for nearly a year. I think that's when my kids started going wrong and were doing the equivalent of waiting for daddy outside the local inn back in the 20s!

Back in 99. Expensive slow dialup that I could only use for an hour or so at a time :rolleyes: There began my lifelong addiction to the interwebs :pac:

robinph

Via an acoustic coupler back in '80 something from the parents Amstrad machine, nothing interesting so left it alone. Then started using email to keep in touch with the brother in the US in '92 via the university "Janet" network I think it was called.

bonerm

robinph wrote: »

Via an acoustic coupler back in '80

Have always wanted to used one of those ever since I saw the movie Wargames. Must have taken ages to download porn over one of them tho.

antodeco

About 1995. Was using a US robotics 28.8 modem, that was X2 (meaning it could be moved to 56.6 with a firmware update). Was basically chatrooms is all I went into!

robinph

bonerm wrote: »

Have always wanted to used one of those ever since I saw the movie Wargames. Must have taken ages to download porn over one of them tho.

Porns not so great when you've only got a mono green screen text output available.

Rick Deckard

robinph wrote: »

Porns not so great when you've only got a mono green screen text output available.

you make do!

daveyboy_1ie

About 1998, in college and immediatly got the family to get the slow as be damned dial up, still seemed a marvel to me at the time.

Stargate

March 1995 a day i will never forget

14.4 modem and dropping the connection every 15 mins , having to dial back in and been charged Eircon crazy prices :rolleyes:

Forget trying to download even a 5 mrg file ....it could take a week :eek:

Anyone remember the newsgroup back then ??

Awwww 1995 happy days :pac:

Stargate

Loomis

robinph wrote: »

Porns not so great when you've only got a mono green screen text output available.

peatcass wrote: »

you make do!

It was good enough for the lads in the Matrix


Signed up to Hotmail in 2000. So must have been then or possibly a year before. Thought it was longer tbh. That's how much time I spend online...

ejmaztec

Whenever Oceanfree started. In the end, I used to get a couple of ok emails and about 3000 spam ones everyday.

...MP3s. Leaving the dial-up connected for hours just to get one. By the time you downloaded a whole album, you could get it for 10p in the bargain bin at your local record shop.

Solair

I think we got the internet in about 1995. We were connected via a tiny little ISP in Cork called Eirenet on a 28.8 modem! Fast for its day. Netscape 1.0 and Eudora mail

We then moved onto IOL or Indigo (I can't remember) and 56kbps modems, then ISDN, then eventually eircom iStream DSL in late 2001.

From there it's ramped up from 1mbit/s to 24mbit/s with eircom, BT, eircom, UTV Internet, then eircom again! Then Smart Telecom unbundled

robinph

Mr. Anderson wrote: »

It was good enough for the lads in the Matrix

They had a network port in the back of their necks though, I suspect that added to the quality of the images they saw.

Spore

Back in 95. Immediately saw the lulz potential in trolling internet chatrooms (I was 14). "You're all a bunch of fags!" Cue response: nine people hitting the ignore button, one person taking the bait "No you're the fag, fag!" Ah, good times...

pajor

1998, Indigo 30 day free internet trial

Probably used it only once. Remember my mum using it send a load of faxes though because it was easier to type than write it out!

morgana

1993ish with a small local Cork Internet provider just email and bulletin boards on a 2.4 modem. I remember the excitement browsing a site in the States on Lynx (that was the text based browser). Nothing much to see but just the thought ...
The moment IOL was available in Cork I was on it :P with an amazingly fast 14.4 modem.
The joys of a graphical browser - remember Mosaic? Now that was progress :P

Duggy747

First got a glimpse of the interweb back around the mid-90's but it wasn't until 1998 when we got the internet in the house.

My, the wonders of the high speed before having to get off it because Mammy wanted to talk to her friend for 16 hours on the phone.

Ah, little did I know that when I got onto my first website which was Gateway's homepage that I would end up many years later trawling the perverse side of the web like it was a stroll in the park :pac:

Anyone else have 6,124,643 of those AOL / etc 30 Day Free Trial discs that were never used?

I still get Vietnam-esque flashbacks of the sounds of dial-up...................*shudders*

Dymo

Richard Dower wrote: »

1995, the joys of 56k modems and crappy speeds...it was all sooo new and fresh back then. Realplayer was king!....ICQ :eek:

Don't laugh but my area only got broadband in the last 12 months, I've been using 56K for the prior 13 years

Rick Deckard

Duggy747 wrote: »

I still get Vietnam-esque flashbacks of the sounds of dial-up...................*shudders*

just spat my tea all over my keyboard in work!

could tell if it was going to connect by the tone:rolleyes: happy times.

Tabnabs

My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles.

95 for me with college picking up the tab. Lycos was the search engine of choice and we browsed on netscape :cool:

Solair

To remind you of the good old days :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Kinetic^

2000, dial up with eircon. Got broadband in 2005 and it was an information overload!

orourkeda

Solair wrote: »

To remind you of the good old days :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

That reminds me of the giddy, tingly bolloxed sense of anticipation I used to feel at the prospect of a long hard night of fetish porn viewing.