When did you first get on the internet?

Badgermonkey

TV Explains the internet in 1994

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nTPX4JW_Ts

Earthhorse

Hmmm, I thought it was around 96/97 but my Hotmail account only goes back as far as 2000. I did have an "another.co.uk" address before then for a while though as well as a time when I had no e-mail address.

Those were the days though. Visiting Wasteland on MIRC and watching it crash, HotBot was a decent search engine (but there was nothing to find). We had a fax line in the house because my dad ran his business from home so we could go online without holding up the phone.

Shapey Fiend

First time was on a mates computer. God knows when it was exactly. The machine was Windows 3.1. We logged onto the TCC (The Childrens Channel, which later became Trouble.. I think) chatroom and tried to chat up girls pretending to be 25. Neither of us could type so I recall it taking an eternity.

Got my Ennis Information Age Town PC in 1997 (complete with 33k modem.. why did they even put one of those in?) and I was hooked. The Da knocked the living daylights out of me one month for racking up a £100 bill. I'd cut down for a couple of months and then it'd be back up to £80 again, cue huge arguments.

Miguel_Sanchez

Shapey Fiend wrote: »

Got my Ennis Information Age Town PC in 1997 (complete with 33k modem.. why did they even put one of those in?)

Totally robbed Castlebar for that so ye did!

LambsEye

I'd say we were late enough, around 2000.

My sister and I would get an hour each, and if we went a minute over that hour, you best BELIEVE mam was thick.

I remember the first three songs I downloaded:

Eminem: Stan
GnR: Sweet Child of Mine
Oasis: Wonderwall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svmYyeRY11o

Tom Cruises Left Nut

Early nineties, can't remember exactly when.

irc.iol.ie ftw !!! :cool:

First got on in 1998.... first ''got off'' around 5 minutes later

nosietoes

1997 - just after hallow'een. I was fifteen. I had been bugging my parents for about a year to get it. Spent hours and hours on NMEChat, building a website on tripod, and then wasting time on ICQ while obsessing over usernames.

kickstarted my love life though: first three boyfriends were found online, and none of them were psychos. Well maybe the first one a little bit...

seamus

I don't recall tbh. I remember that a neighbour, former editor of the Evening Press, had an office with a computer and internet access. This must have been probably 1997. We used it to look up some very slow porn when we were babysitting his son one Saturday night.

What's odd is that I can't remember when I became "aware" of the internet. At some point I just "knew" it existed. Shortly after that I think one mate's Dad got connected, then my family, then another mate bought his own computer and had access from his room. Probably all around 98/99. We used it primarily for looking at stupid websites and trolling chat channels. As best as you could do on dial-up.

Then I went to college and the wonders of high-speed lines. 20Mb (what I have at home now) was a pipe dream at that stage. I was working part-time in a place that had an insanely expensive 2Mb line which was lightening fast from our perspective in 2001.

biko

Yeah around 1995. Good times.

Setun

Must have been online around 97/98 I think. I remember whenever somebody rang the house phone the internet would crash :P

How many other people remember using yahoo chat? Wasn't there a room in it called The Vampire Tavern? If you went in there was a load of people pretending to be vampires/vampire slayers throwing stakes at each other, biting, and so on. Good times.

zeusnero

September 1999 - On my first dell, 6.5 gb HDD

Esat "No Limits"

pawrick

It was around 1994/95 for me possibly earlier but from what little I remember windows 95 was brand spanking new, I used Netscape and yahoo...even have my old yahoo.ie email address. Also, my Technology teacher in school was telling me about some people he heard of setting up google and that it would be the new big thing with the internet. boy has he got egg on his face.

piotrish

Dymo wrote: »

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

Still can't get broadband where I live

Lumen

About 1993.

I got a student job doing tech support at Compuserve in 1994. Scarred me for life. I vaguely recall being able to tell what protocols a modem was using by listening to the boing boing noises.

jester77

95 seems to be very prevalent here, wonder had it something to do with the release of win 95.

I remember Windows 3.11 was the OS of the time but if you bought a box of floppy disks from Verbatim you got a windows 95 demo disk ... on one whole floppy :eek:

Xivilai

We only got broadband a couple of years ago. 14 kbps dial up till then.
Have been using it since the mid nineties I guess

Agricola

First saw it in action at a friends house around 95/96. Remember him running this phone cable from the hallway socket into his bedroom computer and I didnt really grasp how hooking up to a phone line would help us see porn! Then 3 of us excitedly sat around the monitor as we watched an image slowly appear of a hot looking girl staring at a large erection. Good times!

First used it myself properly in 2000 when i started college, (school had pcs but no internet) and finally got it at home in 2001. I was still on 33k dialup untill 2 years ago.

Miguel_Sanchez

zeusnero wrote: »

September 1999 - On my first dell, 6.5 gb HDD

Esat "No Limits"

Ah '"No Limits"', I remember being kicked off that for usage "not in the spirit of the service".

Earthhorse

Can't believe the number of people still on dial up in recent years. How do you even find the net usable?

Xivilai

Earthhorse wrote: »

Can't believe the number of people still on dial up in recent years. How do you even find the net usable?

didn't, stopped using it

Captain Commie

first got on in 95 when an internet cafe opened in my town, had 4 computers each with their own dialup connection, was so slow but back then was quite good.

frist time i went online i setup a hotmail account that i still use today, hard to believe that my email address is now 16 years old

bonerm

Jeff_Lebowski wrote: »

Ah '"No Limits"', I remember being kicked off that for usage "not in the spirit of the service".

I was kicked off too. Funny thinking about it now as I'd imagine the monthly amount of data I downloaded to "push their limits" would prob take about 5mins download time with my current broadband.

Agricola

Earthhorse wrote: »

Can't believe the number of people still on dial up in recent years. How do you even find the net usable?

We didnt. It was a case of using it like teletext. Just going on now and then to check light websites that were mostly text based. I turned off picture rendering in Firefox, just so pages would load in a reasonable time. Also had a little program installed which compressed websites into a pixelated barely readable fuzz, just so they would load in a reasonable time.

It was fúcking awful. Im now paying a wireless provider a ridiculous monthly charge for a sub par service. But Im happy to pay it when I think of the alternative.

Debthree

1995 - my boss got the net so when he was out we'd take turns to sneak into his office and surf. None of us realised there was such a thing as History at the time.

I got the internet at home in 1996. I remember frequenting Lycos chat rooms a lot and AltaVista was a mighty search engine. I still don't get why Google ended up being the king of search engines. I had a Mac 9600 - you could go away and get a coffee and a bit of toast while Lycos.co.uk home page was loading.

My average phone bill was 400 POUNDS back then. :eek:

An elderly neighbour of mine asked me about email back then and I explained it a bit and he said "and after typing your letter and pressing 'send', is it that it prints out in the GPO and the postman puts it in an envelope and delivers it?"

stimpson

94 when I got my first paying job we had horribly throttled interwebs, but interwebs nonetheless. And I remember Workgroups for Windows 3.1 with it's flaky TCP/IP stack. And Webcrawler was the Google of it's day.

A couple of years later a client paid for us to get an ISDN line installed for a project I was working on and I had a massive 64kilobits all to myself, and more importantly, not logged by IT. Cue a massive downloading orgy. Happy days.

Debthree

^^^ Ah good ol' ISDN. I got that in as well. It required a second land line. Jeez, it cost a fortune and I hardly used it in the end.

boomslang

1991-92
using an amiga and a 14k modem
and getting a mosaic browser to run was a nightmare on an amiga.

Hank Scorpio

around 97 i think. my old man used to go nuts cause of the bills it was causing. eircom 56k, there was a charge everytime you connected aswell, total rip off

BrianD3

Late 1996 in college. I remember it being slow, rubbish and unreliable. The first thing I searched for was not porn but pics and info on military aircraft. Low res pics with small number of colours on a 14 inch monitor. The PCs were 486s running Windows 3.1. In a room full of 40 PCs, only about 10 had web access.

Mid 1998, I got a decent PC and dialup access at home. Because of phone charges I had to limit browsing time and wait till after 6 o clock before going online

Onto 2009, I was still using the same PC and still using dial up but at this stage had a package that allowed 5 hours browsing per day at a flat rate. I had changed the modem a few years previously after the original one was fried by a lightning strike near my house.

Only in mid 2009 did I get broadband and a new PC.