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

Days of Telecom Éireann mid 1990s dial up

1996/7

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.

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:

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

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!