When did you first go online?

My first time was probably around '98 with nothing to really search for. Simpler times.

September 94, University pegasus mail account. Virtual Blarney first venture onto online boards.

486 DX2 PC. Mainly for Doom LAN'd up in the halls of residence 😀

Probably in 95/96 when I visited a Univerity and they had computers connected to the internet. I remember when I actually started at Uni there were a suite of Sun workstations and they were the only computers with internet access. Uni email was via a CLI, think it was ctrl-x to send an email.

Bit mad that it's literllay everywhere now. When I think of things that have changed the world in my lifetime the internet and WWW is way out in front.

486 DX 2, wow I was slumming it on a 486 SX 25 which seemed like a rocket ship after my 8086.

Around '98 I think, dial up via Cable & Wireless.

94 at college for elec/mech engineering, 96 at home on fzzz……beep…….beeep……fzzz…..beep painfully slow dial up

For a while I was in the Compuserve and AOL curated spheres (nice try, guys!) but with email connectivity to the WW of the W.

I can remember searching on the web (presumably on Alta Vista?) in 1995 for ‘mountain bike’ and it returned…

…75 results.

alt.binaries. (saynomore)

Can't really remember the year but it was a while ago.

I often have thoughts when buying stuff online now, about how we used to do it. For example, car broke down - look in Haynes manual if not obvious, then ring round local car parts shops and persuade a parent/mate to take me over to buy something.

Actually having to go out to buy things was so different to having the world at your fingertips as is now.

Then came the good old days of Freeserve chat, MSN and Yahoo messenger.

The rest is history, as the saying goes.

Can't recall the year. Couldn't even take a guess. Pre-WWW though. First decent home computer was a BBC Micro (with second processor) and dial-up was either 1200/75 or 300/300.  My job was in IT for a large company, still using mainframes and dumb terminals for everything, so there was a weird mix of being both ahead-of and yet strangely-behind the curve.

We had a compuserve account for email primarily in 1994 or 95 I think. Then went over to Freeserve

We bought a used pc from a friend. 386 sc and only 256 colours. But 8 megabytes of ram and a 210mb hard disc. The hard disc seemed a huge advance having had a twin drive floppy disc machine before

1998.   Split from my fiancé 12 months prior, discovered Doom online as a singleton, then met Mrs K in an American Online aka AOL chat room late in the year and met IRL in January ‘99.  We’ve been together 24 years overall and married 16 years this Thursday.

2002. I was a late adopter.

I had a woman with her tits out as my screensaver and I mainly scoured eBay for tat and looked at, um, tits.

Obviously I’ve grown up now and have settled down with a lovely lady and an expensive iPhone. When I look the internet now it’s simply to scour everywhere for tat and look at tits.

Technically, probably around 1989.

For me it's a tricky question without a simple answer. Breaking out of JANET - or in fact even, breaking into JANET - was a hacker right of passage.

I still use a bulletin board today. https://www.mono.org/

1998, because I thought I should. I was an early adopter in some ways (Fuji digital camera in 2000, Rio Riot MP3 player about the same time) but luddite tendencies in other ways (first mobile phone 2007, and have never signed up to Instafacelinkedtwitterwnker). Big fish in a small pond, blagging free stuff from credulous companies until I slagged it off too much and the freebies dried up! Integrity is a burden.

My first ISP was Force9 - and still is, all these years later - although it is now owned/run by BT.

So probably my first online "experience" was in the early 90s

circa 1993/4 - Sun workstations the in the Medic building Newcastle University.
poking around NASA servers looking for space pictures....found a surprising amount of grot.

Dunno, early 00’s, once I had a work computer that was connected to the WWW. That’s when I discovered the wonders that are STW. Certainly before The Great Hack, a vague recollection says 2003-ish.

I’m pretty sure it was once I was given a Mac, the PC I used before was a 486/66, and doing a screen refresh in CorelDraw allowed me to go out to the machine, get a drink, and sit quietly watching the screen  s  l  o  w  l  y   r  e  d  r  a  w , it would have probably been slower than dialup using the internet.

Around '99 I think. Might have been '98. Mostly vaguely obscure music and mythology chat on ICQ IIRC.

Would have obviously been painfully slow dial-up, and on a self-built 386/something.

When I went to uni, literally the first day after fresher's week, so September 96. All downhill since then.

Pretty sure I was sending some prehistoric emails when at university in the mid ninetees. I know I was using forums in the late 90s.

I don’t remember, I’ll Ask Jeeves.

Jeeves was sleeping so I tried Altavista…sorry, Netscape is a bit slow for me today my 28.8Kbps connection is working hard here!

Fortunately I wrote it in my diary. It was 1996 when I first started emailing people sitting at a desk next to me.

2002. I was a late adopter.

I had a woman with her tits out as my screensaver and I mainly scoured eBay for tat and looked at, um, tits.

Obviously I’ve grown up now and have settled down with a lovely lady and an expensive iPhone. When I look the internet now it’s simply to scour everywhere for tat and look at tits.

Made me laugh as it's pretty much true for me too only around 1997, dial up pron was a lesson in patience and longevity training that's stood me in good stead for R/L relationships

1998 for me, can still hear that modem dial up sound now and the amazing 56k speed

1997 at university.

School had a "suite" (haha!) of the original Apple Macintosh 128k computers, the ones with a 6" screen so you had to zoom into to anything you were working on to actually see it. However they weren't online.

I remember for my final year at uni buying my own desktop computer and it cost £1200 and was delivered in about 7 large boxes (it included printer, scanner, speakers etc). It was still a rarity for students to have their own computers at that time but even then to get online you had to go across to the university library; the house had one landline connection in the hallway and that was it.

Even mobile phones were still in their infancy, I think my first mobile was 1999, an impossibly sized brick with a green screen dot matrix type display.

1996 for me with AOL on a 14.4 modem.  Cyrix 200, 16mb of RAM and a Matrox 4mb graphics card.  I’ve now been a Force9 customer  with the same email address and username since 1997 🙂

Either ‘91 from an 8086 at school or, if memory serves, ‘92 from one of the Sparc IPXs that Uni had in the computer department that were hooked up to JANET. My first real computer was a 486 DX4-100 in ‘95 and I still remember buying the RAM upgrade in what felt then (and now) like a drug deal.

I’m glad I got that extra RAM though, it was rocket ship fast for games afterwards.

93 at uni. Bulletin boards and Web rings.

How times change.

Somewhere a long time ago at school... making punched tape to do simple maths problems. Sent it off to a computer in Hull and teh answer in punched paper tape came back a week later...

Own Compuserve account early 90's perhaps..

Another one who struggled with JANET in the mid to late 80s but then it was around 91/92 when there was an (as in one, singular) Internet connected computer at work. I was one of the few who knew what it was for and how to use Mosaic to navigate usenet, and managed to use it to organise a trip to south Africa. Later on in that project I was allowed to use a laptop and modem to dial in and check on system build status overnight. What progress! But it was still a few years after that before I got my Nokia 2110...

1998 at work. We all got new desktops, and there was an icon on the screen....

2000 as a teenager. MSN messenger was my first taste of being in touch with everyone I know at all times. And that was only when I was allowed to log on so I didn't take up the family phone line.

My school had PCs with internet access in late 1994, not much you could do with it though.

Home PC with internet access was probably 97 or 98.

1990 at uni, postgrads had computing accounts including email and my girlfriend (now wife) had just gone elsewhere for phd, so we used that a fair bit, there was also usenet, possibly some online chat and I remember playing a little on some sort of chess server. Far from the internet as we now know it though, I actually went to a library to look at journals and had to order hard copies of research papers up to about the turn of the century. The horror!

oh it was 1991 she moved, so that was probably when I really started using it.

I think 1998 not long after i got my own house. Freeserve 33.6k modem which came with an offer to upgrade to 56k when they were available. Mainly used it for online gaming, Wireplaay was the place to be for various games.

Mobile internet from about 2004 onwards, no pc at home till about 2007/8. Low wages and divorce meant I couldn't afford it.

1992 - University had new fangled Macintosh and early windows PC's. Netscape Navigator and bulletin boards FTW.
1994 - a house mate introduced us to some more online bits and bobs, I *think* I signed up to a Netscape email address...
1994 - University gave us an email address (ooooooh)
Actual own computer - 1995 I had an Amstrad PCW for my dissertation.
1997 - work had one huuuuuge lead acid battery mobile phone for occasional use between all 12 instructors and the boss.
In 2000 I bought my first PC off a friend.
In 2001 we bought first personal mobile phones when eldest was born.

1997 in Australia whilst backpacking - got a temp job in Sydney manning a call centre for Telstra selling ISP packages to Aussies. $20 a month for a package that gave users 4 hours dialup a week!
Naturally the phone didn’t exactly ring off the hook so there was lots of time to practice using the product so.
I stumbled across a Melbourne yacht club with the same initials as my home club in Edinburgh- emailed them and got an invite to their regatta. Stayed with them for a week. The Internet looked like it had useful purpose after all!!

Define "online".

First time I dialed in to anything would be 1986 while on call at work, a portable* IBM XT with a modem the size of a shoebox.  Portable only in the sense that you could take it home, couldn't actually carry anything else as it was that heavy

Proper internet would 1992, still using a work PC but we'd moved on to Toshiba's (no battery, just mains power).  It gathered pace vastly then, along with mobile phones to what I'd say was a full-on-public use by 1996 with mobiles not far behind, probably 2001/2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100

I’m still impressed that a phone line that could only transmit at 3,000 Hz could send data at 56,000 Hz. I think I know how it was done

Somewhere on the back end of september 1992, when i started at uni.

JANET, chatboards and trying to learn how to formulate searches without the benefit of anything that looked like a proper search engine!

It was around '95/'96. I was on holiday in the US over Christmas, staying at my brother-in-law's place in Washington DC and I was emailing Chipps about a job on one of the cycling titles at Future.

I remember my BiL had an Apple Mac but other than that nothing.

92 - 93 .
Lolz @JANET and Green txt.
Remember thinking it was cool to get 'live'update chat on screen,from the bods in Holland that were running some big wave tests. However,the time delay on screen refresh was so flaky/slow,it was quicker to just phone them 😆 🤣

Odd connections to things early late 80's 90's....mid 90's for dial ups to the internet.

Alt.binaries 🙂 home access.

Demon internet rings a bell.

Mid/late 90's odd works places had it. Everywhere after 2000 onwards.

I did have a Dell pc (97) that came with a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, had no idea what it was for. Like seeing a spreadsheet for the first time, and having no concept of what it does or could do. Miles ahead of its time.

Also, storage. I remember at the same place that gave us all the Internet (insert choir music here) and a massive downturn in everyone's productivity, also installed a 1TB hard drive...For the entire company of maybe a couple of thousand employees. TBF not all of them had access to the 'net, but I remember them saying that we could save "entire contracts, not just the sig page", and we could take as many photos as we wanted as we'd "Never run out of space"

gentler times.

Probably 1999 on an iMac RevB. The sound of the modem negotiating the connection is imprinted in my subconscious.

No idea. Got first email account when I went traveling 1998. Still use it today.

Must have gone on line before then but no idea why....

It would have been a year or two after this when I got a 486 - but this period of my life is bit blurry recollection wise!

Similar to many (it's our age group), working for Portsmouth Poly in the early days of connections - green screen email on the DECs is the first thing I remember, no idea what year. Then came bulletin/chat boards, few years before the 486s started appearing on the desks with Win3.1. Oh, why oh why did I think moving into supporting that shit was a good career move?? If I could slap my 20-odd year old self round the head for that decision.

Do know I got my first personal email account in 99 cos it had 99 in the name. 🙂

1997 when I was 6/7 years old. Used to go on forums, skateboarding and snowboarding websites and online games, a lot of chat rooms and messageboards etc then habbo hotel and runescape in the early 2000s 😀 I remember Windows 95, 98 and ME. And other jewels like Ask Jeeves, AOL (that came on a CD as it's own package and was almost like adware), Lycos, Napster, Limewire and Morpheus, and MSN. Wasn't long before I had MSN Messenger and used to be on it almost every night after school.

My parents were both technically inept and still are for the most part, all I got told was "don't look at pictures of naked ladies and don't tell anyone where you live or you'll be grounded" so I was given pretty much free unsupervised reign of whatever I wanted to look at and do on the family PC.

I remember virus's being rife, especially that one called drinks holder that would open your CD drive and not let you close it. Also the BSOD issues all the time, my dad was that sick of paying his mate at work to fix our PC after every virus and BSOD that he sweet talked the bloke into printing out instructions on how to re install Windows OS off the CD drive, my dad worked away so I ended up just formatting and reinstalling windows every time we had an issues and saving everything we needed to keep on floppy disks.

Probably says a lot about why I've now got a career in IT management

First university email address in 1990.

Gopher and Mosaic from September/October 1993 ish

Shared use of my parent's Compuserve account around '94/'95, I'd say.

Proper native user of the Internet with my own email address when I went to uni in '97.

I do miss the multi-page back and forth arguments between Sheldon and Jobst on rec.bicycles.tech still. I think those two would put even TJ's arguing skills to shame 😉

I had a woman with her tits out as my screensaver and I mainly scoured eBay for tat and looked at, um, tits

Err, that's what the internet was for wasnt it, and still is?

I started in 94, possibly 95. AOL for a month, then BT. Freeserve came out a bit later, that was the big boost for the UK. We had a 386 with a 40mb HD, Win 3.11. Newsgroups/Usenet was a lot bigger then, and the Providers promoted them, leading to Eternal September, which is still referred to occasionally on the Usenet groups I still frequent.

Sometime in late '92 when I persuaded work to give me a Compuserve account and a 2400baud modem, because it was the best way to get support for Gupta SQLWindows. Then got Netscape pretty soon after the first release (0.9?).

97/98, I was in year 10 anyway. I remember that because my mate Jamie had Y10 in his email address and I remember thinking at the time that it wasn't going to age very well. Not that I've still got access to lornehead@hotmail.com either tbf. We had an IT suite in the library with a DSL connection.

I remember being distinctly underwhelmed at the time having heard about the internet and thinking it would be amazing, best thing I managed to do was download Timmy the Turtle by nofx and save it to a floppy disc, it was the only song short enough and flash drives hadn't been invented.

I got my own PC about a year or so later ready for my A level 'studies' which mostly consisted of making playlists on winamp then recording them onto minidisc via a line out. I couldn't download songs myself, they were either ripped from CDs or from my mate John who had a HD caddy and some weird satellite internet connection and no job.

about 96/97 at uni, a few lads on my course used to go on a forum and troll. they seem to enjoy it

Dial up Prestel pages on a BBC Micro in the late 80s....

 also installed a 1TB hard drive…For the entire company of maybe a couple of thousand employees. TBF not all of them had access to the ‘net, but I remember them saying that we could save “entire contracts, not just the sig page”, and we could take as many photos as we wanted as we’d “Never run out of space”

gentler times.

😀 I can remember the moment i passed the 50%/1TB threshold on my 2TB external drive at home.

I now have about 10TB of stuff on three NAS's.

JANET? Early 80s. Late 80s? SEAdog mailer? It was prob '88/'89 when late at work one evening my computer started typing back at me. Spooky af. I typed "who are you", answer being the name of some senior IT fixated guy based in a different city to me. But no, probably usenet, early 90s. First thing I remember posting being on one of the rec.bike (or cycling, forget) groups about mittens for some reason. So a while, if a bit half heartedly, predates the web anyway.

1995 at uni. I remember being shown Netscape Navigator in the computer room down in the bowels of the library at Brunel.
And thinking "well this is shit....and slow".

By the time I got to my final year in '99 I ended up in a networked hall of residence & my parents bought me a Tiny PC with a 17Gb HDD & 256Mb of RAM.
There was a lot more stuff online by then and I had (what I thought was) a half decent collection of downloaded MP3s.
I remember a computer geek on my floor in halls being amazed that when we used to play networked TOCA touring cars, I could run the graphics at max everything & also have Winamp running in the background. I had no clue, but apparently this was seriously impressive.

JANET!

Probably early/mid 90s. 1992/1993 for bulletin boards first. Then 1994 gathered the various bits of IP software together from bulletin board binaries and Demon’s floppy discs for my Amiga. ‘ftp.wustl.edu’ and all that. Then in due course Mosaic browser. Then Netscape and so on.

Anyone remember the ‘finger’ application?

Learning to use Wordstar 6 and Quattro and then using Minitab on the Vax.

I had a 286 1mb 40mb 16khz running MS-DOS 5.0 and then 6.0

Upgraded to WordPerfect 5.1 💪

1994, May 6th. Remember the day like it was yesterday. There was a new Model Village (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/990033.stm&ved=2ahUKEwjToc6Mvu2AAxWGIMAKHSb_CXoQFnoECAwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3wuj0CYBtRGm8Rxoq2Jfi z">Crickhowell Televillage) being built in my hometown to cater for the new breed of WFH people that the Internet would usher in and they did a big demonstration at my high school. It was the week directly after Senna had been killed at Imola and news was scarce on what was happening so pretty much everyone searched for news on that. The company behind the new Village had paid for a specially dedicated line into the computer suite form the exchange just over the road from the school entrance, a big cable that just crossed the main road and came down the school driveway! Had yellow ramps on it to protect it, madness when you consider it wasn't that much faster than dialup. Considering we were in the middle of Wales, a technology black spot back then with no Internet for private homes or even the school, it's strange to think now that it's exactly what everyone is moving towards. Connected houses with a small office tucked away for remote working.

I cant remember what year it was but we didnt have search engines, we did have webrings though.

Dial up to Sheffield Uni Timeshare with an acoustic coupler and a teletype back in my 'Computer Club' days of early 80s! Man I feel old!

Best memory of on-line is working for Gillette Dec 31, 1999 waiting for the Millennium Bug to wipe out their internal network. They had a single internet connection for the whole company (US, Europe, AsiaPac) . And I had it all to myself to browse RSN for snowcam pics so I could decide where to go skiing.

30,000 ish employers. 2 megabits/second internet pipe 🙂

I couldn’t download songs myself, they were either ripped from CDs or from my mate John who had a HD caddy

Early 90s for downloading music were nuts. Around the time of the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, I think that was one of my first downloads. I had an FTP client and a super-fast* connection from my desk at the Uni. For a few years work time mostly consisted of finding FTP sites and downloading as much music as possible to transfer onto my USB drive (probably 2-3 albums 😀 ) and burn onto CDs . I don't think it was in the job description though.

*seemed that way at the time. Like, 2 albums a day!

I was "introduced" to the net by a mate of mine who worked for Telewest Communications in 1994.

Its fair to say the introduction involved "Frankie Vaughn"

C. 1998, I purchased a PCMCIA (?) card modem for my work laptop and got a Virgin internet account.

A couple of years later I had a Sony mobile with Bluetooth and a Bluetooth card for the same laptop, so them I had MOBILE internet! Not that you could do much with it it was so slow. Ping off an e-mail with no attachment was about it's limit, but it was useful.

PCMCIA: People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.

Personal Computer Media Connection Interface Adaptor? (I didn't google it so that's a guess). It reminded me of the one  we had issued to us as field engineers and EVERYONE broke the tab off where the RJ11 cable clipped in 🙂

Before that ubiquitous Texas Instruments V22/V22bis modems. Used to dial up to 'netwire' to download some random driver for Novell Netware on 2400 baud connection. Occasionally leaving connected overnight!

I remember using it in 1992 when I was at university. Its all a bit vague though as to what I used it for and you certainly didnt have a search engine !

I do remember that beer was 99p a pint though

TBH, my first job had less access than my uni did.

92-96 i had unfettered access to anything i wanted. Especially once i'd got myself into the inner circle with the IT admin for the uni engineering network.

96-01 i was essentially internet free at my employers, we had one connected computer in the library (14000 people on site at the time), that was completely isolated from any other machine in the company. Also had all it's ports switched off AND physically blocked or removed. In late 2000 they started to allow a few select sites to be accessible via (i think) a windows emulator on our SG machines. But you had to apply to get sites added to the list of sites you were allowed to access... So i never even bothered. You needed to apply to get external email added to the address book, if they weren't on the list, you couldn't receive or send. Biggest issue with this is that a lot of the guys we actually needed to email had their email addys handwritten on the back of their business cards, and that wasn't good enough for our IT security officers.

So we just didn't bother with email or the internet.

I guess they're still hammering the fax.

dial up pron was a lesson in patience

Kids of today. I remember ASCII Art pron.

Even mobile phones were still in their infancy, I think my first mobile was 1999, an impossibly sized brick with a green screen dot matrix type display.

My first personal mobile was in 1999, it was a tiny Siemens S25.

93 at uni. Bulletin boards and Web rings.

How times change.

I'm logged into a bulletin board right now.

Personal Computer Media Connection Interface Adaptor?

Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. (I didn't google it either). Later renamed as "PC Card," probably due to GHill's mnemonic.

Sep or Oct '94. On a uni induction course. I'd been away from the UK for a few years and arrived back straight into (slightly) mature uni life and to be honest I'd never even heard of the internet so it was slightly baffling.

3 or maybe 4 minutes later I was introduced to internet porn. Surprisingly by an 18 yr old girl in the group heavily into trying to be shocking (and sex it later transpired).

Pretty sure after that first experience I didn't go back online for a few more years. Didn't have it in the academic dept I was in or student accom. Probably next online experience was when I got a landline in my rental house in about '98 and bought my trusty dx2 66 a sound card and a modem card.

My first personal mobile was in 1999, it was a tiny Siemens S25

It was around that time that my boss came back from the pub at lunchtime laughing because "there was a bunch of guys bragging about who had the smallest"

Probably '99 or 2000.

Windows ME was the flavour of the day, and a huuuge 30gb hard drive.

Internet speed went up to broadband 512 after about a year of 56k, when you couldn't use the landline and internet at the same time. Life changing🤣

Autumn 1998. We'd pestered my parents for a PC for years and eventually got them to buy a Pentium 2 333mhz, 64 Meg RAM, 6gb hard drive, Voodoo 2 12mb graphics card, and 56k modem.

Got given one of those "Freeserve" discs from PC World when we bought it and used that to get online. Later used BT Wireplay for online gaming but from memory that cost more per minute to use and I used to get into a lot of bother from the parents when the phone bill came. Good job I had a paper round to pay for it.

Yahoo Messenger, then later MSN Messenger became the way to communicate and arrange meetups among mates at school. This was may before the days when schoolkids had mobile phones.

@cardiff.ac.uk in 1993, I think. Pegasus and Gopher as a result of having to use the computer labs to write copy for the student newspaper, which only had half a dozen Amstrad 286s for the writers. Used to bump around on the early MTB mailing lists with that there Mike Davis fella. I think one of the earliest things I turned up on Gopher was an article about Alex Pong and the Cannondale V4000.

Very early 90s.  My mate at school's dad had a work computer and modem at home.  We dialed up and connected to a handfull of telnet addresses, couldn't find anything to do on there then gave up.

Then again in 94 at uni, and I'm not sure I've been offline ever since!

486 DX100, 14400 bps modem that dad bought home from (nicked?) from work. Some Microsoft closed network that wasn’t the wwww. So when was that? Early 90s I guess.

Doom II on 4 floppy disks.