Happy Birthday Internet! (In Ireland anyway...)

danniemcq · 15-05-2012 09:39AM

Gyalist wrote: »

I guess that I was one of the early adopters as I went online with IOL around September 1992. I actually still use my old IOL email address.

Does anyone remember what programs were on the installation floppy?

can't remember what they were but i remember lots of them and that fecking whirring noise.

i think i still have some porn on some back at home... i wonder would i be able to get a floppy drive somewhere and get it connected.

see how innocent my fap folder was back then compared to now

Jesus Shaves · 15-05-2012 09:40AM

1998, i paid the princely sum of 3000 pounds for a fujitsu computermabob
Got Eircom internetz, First bill was over £600

Kev_2012 · 15-05-2012 09:40AM

Stiffler2 · 15-05-2012 09:43AM

I remember waiting for a single image to load. It could take 20 mins. Once that 20 mins was up it was time to masterbate.

Jesus Shaves · 15-05-2012 09:44AM

breffni666 wrote: »

Come to Cavan guys. Might as well still be on dial-up for all the advancement made down here. Joke service. I'd hate to be in business and rely on broadband. Terrible terrible down here. its a numbers game, if you've the population you've the broadband, if not tough!

people are just too scabby to pay for it

15-05-2012 09:46AM

Had a part-time job in a video rental store for a few months back in 96. The owner asked me what I thought of these internet cafes and what I thought of him expanding the shop into one. Me being far more interested in in him shutting up and allowing me to continue watching free movies dismissed it out of hand. "Jaysus don't bother with that rubbish" I said, "we'll never get a tap of work done around here if you start doing that"

Was about four years later I got one of those boxes that wired your television directly to your phone socket (for the life of me I can't remember what they were called as the entire network was since disabled - "Unison" maybe?) Got a computer the following year though still with dial-up, and went wireless around 2006 I think though even then it wasn't particularly fast compared to today.

danniemcq · 15-05-2012 09:49AM

I remember when Napster came out around 99 and downloading a song in 25 mins

then i tried downloading Bohemian Rhapsody got about 96% complete and then got cut off so it got to "anywhere the wind blows" at the end and stopped half way through blow and cut the chimey bit at the end

DeVore · 15-05-2012 09:53AM

24 years ago in sept. I had an account on a PDP 11 called SalmonD in Maths in tcd. We had a modem connected to it and would dialup from home into it. It could only take one user at a time so everyone complained if you stayed on all night playing Nethack.

Before that was FIDONET... Mr Flanaghan played a big part in bringing the internet into homes but he's skipping a lot of the giants who's shoulders he stood on there.

Bummer1234 · 15-05-2012 09:58AM

My first time on the internet was heading on and getting the numbers to key in for ringtones for my nokia 3210.

Beast of a phone!!

BrianD3 · 15-05-2012 09:59AM

I first used in it 1996 in university. Only a handful of the student computers had it. Both the connection and the PCs themselves was slow and unreliable. They were 386s and 486s. Even on the university network (surely faster than dialup?) images took a long time to load and when they did they'd often come up as crappy 16 colour images. From talking to my mates who went to various colleges it was a similar story elsewhere.

I got the internet at home in 1998 using a brand new PC (a Pentium II 350 Mhz) and modem and things were a lot better. Although I did have to restrict my usage to off peak time to keep the bills down. IIRC you were charged per 15 minutes or part thereof so if you were on for 15 minutes adn 1 sec you got charged for 30 minutes.

Vicxas · 15-05-2012 10:02AM

Got eircom dial up in 1998 and it was awful. 11p a minute to go online!

Then we got broadband in 2004. A heady 2MB!

I hate eircom.....

ibarelycare · 15-05-2012 10:03AM

We got the internet in 1996. I signed up to the chatroom Paddynet and used to pretend I was a veterinary student and part-time model called Chloe. I was 11 and my chat name was "catgirl"

wtf?! Pedo's dream right there!

Auvers · 15-05-2012 10:06AM

around 1995 using the Netscape browser, Internet Explorer didn't even exist

I think it was 15 pounds a month just to connect to an ISP and then phone charges on top of that

so being a lowly student, I went to the local library and watched the Assistant type in their password and then used their account when the library closed for the night :cool:

kfallon · 15-05-2012 10:06AM

ibarelycare wrote: »

We got the internet in 1996. I signed up to the chatroom Paddynet and used to pretend I was a veterinary student and part-time model called Chloe. I was 11 and my chat name was "catgirl" wtf?! Pedo's dream right there!

You said you'd come round and see to my cat, I waited and waited til he finally passed away

R.I.P. Tiddles

:pac:

kildare.17hmr · 15-05-2012 10:08AM

Stiffler2 wrote: »

I remember waiting for a single image to load. It could take 20 mins. Once that 20 mins was up it was time to masterbate.

Haha i remember sutting around a school computer in 1998 one lunchtime waiting on a picture to load up with the other lads from my class, we never did get to see the whole thing, it took that long to upload the bell rang

Kevwoody · 15-05-2012 10:09AM

Back in 1999 when I was 15 and working part time I saved up and bought a pc and got my a seperate phone line into my room complete with Internet, thought I was the dogs bollocks!

All went well until one day I got fed up waiting on some porn to download so I started fiddling with it (the pc

)

Long story short there was a switch on the back with 110v - 220v , it was on 220 so thinking it might speed things up I flicked it, puff off smoke as the pc imploded inside and every light in the house went out.

I was stumbling about in the dark trying to pull up my jocks as the old man came in shouting what the **** did u do now?!!

Thank **** for iPhones nowadays!

seamus · 15-05-2012 10:11AM

I don't really know the dates. I think it would have been 98/99 when I first started using it properly.

I think what's weirdest is that I don't remember discovering what the internet was, it seemed to just "be there" and be normal, however I do remember my first exposure to the internet. And that was babysitting for a neighbour with a couple of mates. The neighbour had a home office so he could telecommute (he was a journalist) with internet. We looked up porn, predictably. Think I was 14 or 15, so that's around 1997. Then I went to Jersey on a holiday and used a web cafe. I didn't look up porn

A friend then got the NoLimits package in his house in 98/99 and practically every time we were there, the computer was on and we were surfing. Just general nonsense, chatrooms and the like.
We then got hooked up at home, but it was still the per-minute stuff and we had to run a cable down the hall into the socket on the wall

so it was really only for an hour or so the odd night, checking mails, trying to download songs on Napster, chatrooms, etc.

When I moved out of home I was in college, and where I worked through college had an unfiltered 2MB line. So I didn't need or want to pay for internet in my own place till about 2004.

Jogathon · 15-05-2012 10:12AM

1997 - and I still use my email address from then. Recently some IT guys I was dealing with commented that my email address must be ancient! No hyphens or underscores, just my name @yahoo.co.uk (before yahoo.ie existed!)

15-05-2012 10:13AM

Good times using Eircom dial up around 2000. Taking 5 minutes to load up a picture of Anna Kournikova and fap like crazy.

Funglegunk · 15-05-2012 10:19AM

I wrecked my family's phone bill playing Team Fortress and Counter-Strike in 1999/2000. I also tried to pretend I was a DJ from Liverpool on Yahoo chat, my ruse was seen through fairly quickly. Also, who remembers Neoplanet?

Gyalist · 15-05-2012 10:20AM

Jogathon wrote: »

1997 - and I still use my email address from then. Recently some IT guys I was dealing with commented that my email address must be ancient! No hyphens or underscores, just my name @yahoo.co.uk (before yahoo.ie existed!)

I managed to get my full name on my Gmail account by getting an invite on the first day it opened for beta testing.

Funglegunk · 15-05-2012 10:23AM

Jogathon wrote: »

1997 - and I still use my email address from then. Recently some IT guys I was dealing with commented that my email address must be ancient! No hyphens or underscores, just my name @yahoo.co.uk (before yahoo.ie existed!)

I still have my first e-mail address from 15 years ago.

(It's hotmail, admittedly).

zagmund · 15-05-2012 10:23AM

In UCD in the early 90s. Probably 1990 or 1991. I remember someone showing me satellite imagery from NASA or some European weather site. It really was amazing.

Prior to that the nearest thing was on the macs up in the back room in the Arts library - I'm pretty sure they were networked to something. There was an app called trickle which I thought was cool at the time - you could set up a list of files you wanted to download and they would "trickle" down to your account overnight when there was less demand for capacity. It meant you didn't have to sit there and wait for stuff to download. I don't know what I downloaded with trickle - I have a feeling it was Simpsons .WAVs. I used to have a great collection of them.

Other than that - I would have been online at home around Windows 95 release time. Had my own .ie domain registered since about 1997.

z

Vicxas · 15-05-2012 10:26AM

Funglegunk wrote: »

I wrecked my family's phone bill playing Team Fortress and Counter-Strike in 1999/2000. I also tried to pretend I was a DJ from Liverpool on Yahoo chat, my ruse was seen through fairly quickly. Also, who remembers Neoplanet?

Neoplanet and oceanfree.net. Oceanfree was an amazing chat room

15-05-2012 10:27AM

Got a PC Christmas of 1998 and we loaded "the internet" onto it from a free cd, iol or similar, in 1999. It was all hotmail and chat rooms. Who knew we would end up having the world wide web literally in our hands just a short time later!

kfallon · 15-05-2012 10:30AM

Funglegunk wrote: »

I still have my first e-mail address from 15 years ago. (It's hotmail, admittedly).

So do I, set it up in 1996 tho I had to reactivate it around 2003 cos I'd not used it since I had left college!

I was a bit more posh than you tho, mine was Yahoo :P

Ledger · 15-05-2012 10:30AM

Deleted User wrote: »

Got a PC Christmas of 1998 and we loaded "the internet" onto it from a free cd, iol or similar, in 1999. It was all hotmail and chat rooms. Who knew we would end up having the world wide web literally in our hands just a short time later!

I knew, for I knew ALL!*

may or may not be true

Duggy747 · 15-05-2012 10:31AM

Microsoft Comic Chat! :pac:

Ben D Bus · 15-05-2012 10:32AM

Back in 1986 (yes 1986) I had my first experience of the internet when I got my first email address. Along the lines of bdbus@vax1.tcd.ie.

We got a PC with dialup in the office in the mid 90's but I waited until 2000 to get a Y2K compliant (

) Dell at home.

kfallon · 15-05-2012 10:39AM

Ben D Bus wrote: »

Back in 1986 (yes 1986) I had my first experience of the internet when I got my first email address. Along the lines of bdbus@vax1.tcd.ie.

We got a PC with dialup in the office in the mid 90's but I waited until 2000 to get a Y2K compliant ( ) Dell at home.

There was no need for the internet for me in 1986, I was only 7 (for most of it) and as far as I was concerned Masturbation was probably some sort of He-man character rather than a nice leisure activity :P

Happy Birthday Internet! (In Ireland anyway...)

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