When did you all first start using the internet and what age where you?

tomofson

What year did you all first start using the internet in and what age where you?

Okay I was first introduced to the internet when I was about 7 or 8 in around 99 or 2000 but I took no notice of it back then.

I started using the internet on a permanent basis around 2005 when I was 13.

What about all of you?

Grab All Association

Days of Telecom Éireann mid 1990s dial up

Canis Lupus

1997?8? It was in school, used to use it on lunchbreaks if we got lucky... More common was later 2000 onwards after going to college and getting a PC.

suicide_circus

1996/7

RocketRaccoon

Around 1997/1998 in a friends house, then a year later at home. So many memories of icq, msn and mplayer which was the first video chat room I can remember.

M.T. Cranium

There was a primitive version called PINE around 1994-95 that we used (aged 47) to chat.

The internet revolution was very rapid. I was actually employed as a computer-based typesetter around 1986 to 92 and the machine being used was very program-oriented requiring considerable training and math ability. Within three years (1992 to 1995) the internet provided much cheaper alternatives for customers which could produce almost the same quality of layout with no prior skill or experience, just the point and click technology. It was astounding to see how quickly that new technology replaced the old specialized machinery although I imagine some of it survived in highly technical publishing fields.

My memory tells me that the internet spread very rapidly between 1997 and 2000, probably adding 10-15% of the population each year during that surge, then slowing down to 3-5% a year for a few more years until it levelled off at its present nearly universal levels of usage. But in 1994 that PINE program, while primitive, was only known to a few techie geeks and was perhaps a 2-3% market capture.

tomofson

RocketRaccoon wrote: »

Around 1997/1998 in a friends house, then a year later at home. So many memories of icq, msn and mplayer which was the first video chat room I can remember.

I remember msn I used it daily during my teen years, pity its gone.

I do remember seeing my cousin use a really old chat room sometime aroune 99 it must have been icq

pickarooney

1993, aged 17. It was all gopher, newsgroups, alt.rec.wotsit and a single dot to send an email.

Then came the web and NCSA mosaic and all the rest of it.

theteal

That dial-up noise still haunts my dreams....

The first time I used the internet would have been in TY at the old school, so about 1998, we actually out together a website for a project. We didn’t buy a home PC until about 3 years later when I was a good 6 weeks into an IT degree

erica74

I had just turned 18 and it was 2005. I moved out of my parents house the evening I finished my leaving cert, moved to Dublin and the next day, the first thing my sister did was set me up a bebo account:pac:

RocketRaccoon

tomofson wrote: »

I remember msn I used it daily during my teen years, pity its gone.

I do remember seeing my cousin use a really old chat room sometime aroune 99 it must have been icq

Icq was similar to MSN in that it was just a messenger program. The symbol was a little flower and whenever a message came through it made a weird "uh-oh" sound that I actually had set as my message tone whenever I received a text for a long time.

_Kaiser_

suicide_circus wrote: »

1996/7

Same as. Initially in college but then work and home - ah good old dial-up when it would take 15 minutes to download an mp3

My computing life though started in the mid-late 80s playing pac man on the atari, and then games (playing and painstakingly typing in the code from the magazines) on the green-screen Amstrad CPC 464.
Later moved to an Amiga 500 and then 1200 before getting my first (VERY expensive!) Dell XPS pc.

Good times

smurfjed

Sometime in the 90's, we used to use getweb to build up a webpage, also remember getting 96 parts of a video that all had to be joined together before we could watch it. But in comparison around that era in this part of the world, a satellite dish needed to be over 9 meters in order to receive any TV. Long distance phone calls were made in a "call cabin" where you went in and requested a call, you then got your own personal phone booth and paid after the call.

Wanderer78

smurfjed wrote:

Sometime in the 90's, we used to use getweb to build up a webpage, also remember getting 96 parts of a video that all had to be joined together before we could watch it. But in comparison around that era in this part of the world, a satellite dish needed to be over 9 meters in order to receive any TV. Long distance phone calls were made in a "call cabin" where you went in and requested a call, you then got your own personal phone booth and paid after the call.

Experienced the 'call cabin' in Indonesia a few years ago, bloody expensive to.

The internet's would have been some time in the early/mid 90's

Try_harder

First used 1996
Regularly used from 1998 in college

Omackeral

Just this morning

Wanderer78

Omackeral wrote:

Just this morning

You re fcuked now, zombification has begun

_Brian

Maybe 1996/7 when I worked in a multinational. Win95 era.
Bought a PC at that time, £1200, felt like a huge investment.

Peregrinus

Early 1990s on a beta test version of IOL dialup. It was all usenet and text-based chatrooms and the like. The word "website" had not entered the English language. There were no videos, and only a few grainy images, invariably as separately-opened attachments to messages in chatrooms. Uploads and downloads were incredibly slow.

tomofson

Peregrinus wrote: »

Early 1990s on a beta test version of IOL dialup. It was all usenet and text-based chatrooms and the like. The word "website" had not entered the English language. There were no videos, and only a few grainy images, invariably as separately-opened attachments. Uploads and downloads were incredibly slow.

I have a bit of a fascination with the internet and I love everything about it, including its history. I'm always looking up how the internet was long ago via time machine website.

Danny Donut

Not exactly the internet, but in the 70s at school we had a terminal to a university's mainframe.

We would spend days typing out programs on ticker tape. Programs were fed into the terminal and the result - a rather crappy dot-matrix poster - would come back in the post.

Our favourite trick was to write a certain sequence of code on the tape that made the machine spew out 247 sheets of paper. Teacher kinda lost it a bit when we did it.

hmm... around 95/96 I think. Just before I went to University. Mirc was the thing. What a wonderful porn landscape for a teenager, alas that shoddy dial-up connection (and few ways to hide folders properly) (and the rather limited monitor).

Tech really has jumped. Doesn't seem so long ago.

Blazer

97, company I started with has an direct line to a pipe and we had about 10 meg download.
Dial up at home seemed so slow and it would be 2005 before I could get a whopping 3 meg at home.

Now who remembers yahoo chat rooms and paddynet?

Peatys

1998 i was 20.

Got a shítty job in ibm and they sent us on a week long course to learn email and internet..

Lotus notes and Netscape navigator..

Peatys

Blazer wrote: »

Now who remembers yahoo chat rooms and paddynet?

Buzzchat

_Kaiser_

Peatys wrote: »

1998 i was 20.

Got a shítty job in ibm and they sent us on a week long course to learn email and internet..

Lotus notes and Netscape navigator..

I may know you was there around the same time.

Yea notes and navigator... And OS/2 Warp. Meanwhile everyone else was adopting Windows and office/exchange.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

September 1987. I was 43 at the time. Dial up and dead slow.

ilovesmybrick

1994/1995, I was at a friends house whose parents got it in for their business. We had no idea what the internet was or how to use it so spent about 20 minutes on some shoe websites as those were what was in the browser history from his mam! Got the internet at home in 95 and the first website I hit was kellogs, as they had a URL on the box and it was the only one I was aware of!

Wibbs

1993, mid 20's. Computer wise I went from very basic dabbling in the early 80's Sinclair/Vic 20/Dragon 32 era to nada until 1990 when I got a Mac SE30, shortly followed by a colour version(can't recall the model), so I missed the whole MS-DOS command line thing and went straight to a GUI.

circadian

93/94 was about 10 years old. I remember playing Doom multiplayer with my brother in university. Good times. Once windows came to the PC things got a lot better with IRC and newsgroups etc.

I still have a fond memory of the John Tutor story in the latest 90's and the rise of flash games sites like Newgrounds. Many hours wasted.

Oh and Quake, lots of Quake and Unreal Tournament.

Mrs OBumble

I was using university mainframes from 1985.

Don't know if the BBS system they were running used the internet or not.

But i got into Usenet groups on a different mainframe from 1988 and they definitely did.

Not telling how old i was. Old enough to be at college.

cstaff

I first used email in about 1997/98 but I remember a story about a bloke that I worked with back then. They were just learning how to email and were being trained in and the IT guy instructed him to email his colleague across the room but instead of doing this he emailed All Staff (btw this was an international firm - about 500 staff) and he jokingly emailed about the boss in London passing comment on him and calling him all sorts of names. He became a legend in that firm - even with the boss eventually when they met a while later..

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

JupiterKid

Email in 1993/4 in my first year of uni at age 18/19.

Proper internet about early 1997 at 21/22. God it used to be painfully slow...

passatman86

At home got first pc around 2001 , and used it to mostly play championship manager 01/02.. internet dial up was so annoying for going online , also so many wires involved with the whole pc

Peatys

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

I may know you was there around the same time.

Yea notes and navigator... And OS/2 Warp. Meanwhile everyone else was adopting Windows and office/exchange.

i was in Clean and Claim.. hated every bit of it! I started in summer and was gone by Christmas.

The writing was on the wall when myself and the lad i worked with got a first and last warning from American Doug (with the perfect hair) for mess fighting

chrissb8

Late 2002 early 2003 had our first computer. Banjaxed my computer downloading loads of porn off of Limewire/Bearshare. Parents couldn't understand what had happened. I was about 12 or 13.

I miss the innocent days of MSN where talking to girls in your life was so much easier than having to talk to them in person as a shy kid, bebo defining a large part of your popularity. Then just ebaums world which gave your computer AIDS. Good tymez.

copeyhagen

playing quake online as a kid on the dialup, something the noughty generation don't ever have to worry about.. "whoooo picked up the foooooking phone, im dead now"

and downloading all the clips on the hun.com

Billy86

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Same as. Initially in college but then work and home - ah good old dial-up when it would take 15 minutes to download an mp3

15 minutes? Luxury! I remember you used to b killing it if you were downloading above 4.0kbps when Napster was brand new, or if you happened upon the MP3 websites that came before it. The things took so bloody long I would often download the midi version instead to save time, even though it was the bloody midi version! I'm not sure kids today even know what midi is.

Whereas the other day I downloaded a game on steam at 30mpbs, so only about 8-10,000 times faster.

The Backwards Man

1995, Netscape and AltaVista.

jmayo

pickarooney wrote: »

1993, aged 17. It was all gopher, newsgroups, alt.rec.wotsit and a single dot to send an email.

Then came the web and NCSA mosaic and all the rest of it.

Ahh the days when it took lots of time and work to download a nude picture of Pamela Anderson from a Newsgroup.
One had to ftp files down, piece together multiple files, uudecode them and eventually you got to see the pic.

I fondly remember Newsgroups.
I remember a great battle between the English and the Yanks in a soccer newsgroup pre the 1994 world cup in the States.

The English complained the Yanks knew nothing about soccer and their sports were cr** full of stoppages and ad breaks.
It ended up with the Yanks start retorting how they had to bail them out of two world wars and the English claiming there would be no America but for them settling the place.

Kinda reminds me of some boards threads, although there was more humour and no mods picking sides.

NCSA mosaic and it's nice globe in the corner.
Hell I would say most around here don't even know of it's successor Netscape.

Outlaw Pete

Internet Cafe on George's St (downstairs in Laser Video, cost £5 per hour) late '97 I think.

Back then all the talk was off chat rooms and how you could find out anything you wanted online.

I had two questions, how did Gary Holton from Auf Wiedersehen Pet die and could I please see Drew Barrymore's Playboy pics.

The information superhighway was my new best friend.

retro:electro

Around 2005. I was 17. Bebo was big as was Rate my Teacher. Time was spent divided between being a Bebo stunner and trolling my teachers

Grayson

93 when I was in first year in college.

It was all telnet and FTP. When browsers came out all my friends were talking about them. I tried it and pretty much exhausted the supply of available websites in one day (I think I might have completed the internet) and went back to my telnetting. It was a good 6 months before I went back to a browser.

I remember magazines that used to review new websites. Most sites were made by hobbyists.

Grayson

Billy86 wrote: »

15 minutes? Luxury! I remember you used to b killing it if you were downloading above 4.0kbps when Napster was brand new, or if you happened upon the MP3 websites that came before it. The things took so bloody long I would often download the midi version instead to save time, even though it was the bloody midi version! I'm not sure kids today even know what midi is.

Whereas the other day I downloaded a game on steam at 30mpbs, so only about 8-10,000 times faster.

I worked in an internet cafe at that point and we would get maybe one mp3 an hour.

my first MP3 player had an amazing 64mb of storage.

Billy86

Grayson wrote: »

I worked in an internet cafe at that point and we would get maybe one mp3 an hour.

my first MP3 player had an amazing 64mb of storage.

I hopped in to that market on holidays to the US and managed to get an iPod before they were even out here - if I recall it even had 128gb!

Before that it was all CD-R and when we got CDRW my god it felt like heaven (and helped me avoid the Minidisc fad), though I remember downloading an album could be an all night affair... which probably came to more than the album when you factor in call times, and why my MP3 collection was so tinny sounding and sh*te . This is when I got exceptionally jealous of Americans with their free local calls (e.g. free internet unless out in the wilderness, at least that's what I assumed at the time).

rainbow kirby

Late 97/early 98, I was 13. IOL dialup at home.

DEFTLEFTHAND

Didn't have regular access until 2004. I was 15.

TerrorFirmer

I remember when I first started using it when I was about 10 there wasn't really much for me to look at - or more accurate, probably I just didn't know what to look at. Used to spend my allowed time of 30 minutes every evening just marvelling at the novelty of it rather than looking at anything particularly interesting.

Only really got into the swing of the internet big time around 1999 with the glory days of Unreal Tourament and MSN chat.

maccored

1995 and started web development (sorry, being a 'webmaster') in 1997

spurious

1995 or so, in the days when you needed to be a bit techie to manage to get connected at all.
'Twas a great sorting method.