please empty your brain below

I still remember going online for the first time in 1995. It was on the computer in the library at sixth form college.

I spent a while randomly searching for stuff, got bored and decided it would never catch on.

It would take to going to university the year later before I discovered email and newsgroups, and I never looked back. In 1999 I got my first job building webpages, and I have been in the industry ever since. I have no idea what I would have done after university otherwise!
I was using the internet at home from about late 1992. I certainly had a dial up modem at I think 56KBits and seem to remember Netscape as a popular browser.
I do know that I was using Packet radio from January 1994, -bit like Internet but uses radio instead of telephone lines, -that was even slower at 9,600 bits!. Still no telephone bill using Packet although its content was limited.
Now I just use fast fibre broadband. I wonder what will come along next...
It was almost like having another dimension, remember getting one of those network cards that used the newfangled pci slot, would it work - no it would't, you could download updated software from some bulletin board said the company.

Gave it a go - downloaded a zip file, expanded it, installed the software, network card worked.

Problem that would otherwise have taken a couple of days to resolve, cleared in a couple of hours.
Apart from a brief attempt at Sheffield Uni in 1998, my first internet enabled computer was bought in 2000. The modem was built in but I had to install a long cable to connect to the phone socket from the computer's location of choice. I still recall a problem with the Voodoo graphics card driver. It needed a new driver. This was 7MB. "Download it from 'this' site, the support line said. In those days it could take an hour to download 7MB.....it failed several times after about 45 minutes eventually revealing a problem with the modem driver . I still remember this each time a similar size file downloads in a few seconds today, athe joy when I signed up for 512Mb broadband about 5 years later.
My phone bills reduced considerably when it was pointed out to me that you didn't need to stay connected to read the content.

However, it was a pain reconnecting over and over again when needed. Cue hypnotic warbling sounds...
I remember the modem that didn't come with a driver but stated it could be downloaded from their site.

And how was I going to connect with their site without a functioning modem?
Have you kept some sort of diary or do you just rely on your memory?
First computer - Video Genie 1979 (Microsoft Basic).
First PC 1992 (running Windows 3.1)(Revelation! - the PC is a KIT - from that time onwards I have always built my own desktop machines).
Online 1996 using telephone line, transfered to cable wi-fi about 2000.
Joined internet of things 2016 with wi-fi connected solar panel array.
Woah, latecomer! I first used the internet in 91. I was amazed at how one could log on to a server on the other side of the world via anonymous ftp. First www experience, and wrote my first webpage in 95. I didn't use it at home until 1997 or 1998, though.
@John. DG does indeed keep a diary, probably putting Samuel Pepys to shame! See his post for 1st January this year celebrating 40 years of doing so - http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/diary-geezer.html
First went online in 1995 and I seem to remember a lot of very 90s content about the X-Files, the Jim Rose Circus, and music reviews and discussion (searching for music itself didn't happen for me until the early 00s).

I still get nostalgic for some of the web 1.0 content of longer thought pieces which would generate interesting comment and debate rather than today's faster paced social media. (The DG blog still carries a flavour of this era).
Ahh the nostalgia
I was somewhat otherwise engaged....
20 years ago yesterday I only had 2 sons.
20 years ago today I had 3 sons!

Husband is an IT bod so computers had featured in my life ever since I met him, but that was his department, not mine.
I don't remember doing anything internetty until at least 2001, which also coincides with my 4th and youngest son!
Discovers internet - stops having babies!!
I was first on the proper Internet (as opposed to the old "BBS, go voice!" days) in 1993 at uni. There wasn't that much to it then. Sure, Mosaic had just been released but there wasn't an awful lot of content on this "World Wide Web" thing yet, and Usenet seemed *way* more interesting. Not the least due to bandwidth concerns. I think it wasn't until a year later, when a 0.9beta release of some software called Netscape that things really started to take off.

I also remember 1993 as the year that DOOM killed the LANs all across the campus. :)
Never mind all that. Just revel in the memories of a time that incorporated Tandy, Our Price, and Chumbawumba.
I was 'online' before the graphic interface internet came along. I remember feeling frustrated that the internet was so slow as compared to the Archie route. I could see the potential benefits to come though and now feel like a very old person that can 'still remember' life as it used to be!
I saw an old Imperial typewriter in a museum recently - it was cutting edge technology when I went to secretarial college in the late 50's. I took a photo of it and posted it on Facebook with my smartphone.
How times have changed.
First internet access Victoria University Wellington (NZ) in 1990...

Anonymous FTP. Spending two hours downloading Minix 1.5 from the VU in Amsterdam. The internet "ran" at 9600 baud for the entire country....

;-)
Jimmy ->

Latecomer! I first used an internet connected (JANET) in 1989 at the University of Surrey and remember being astounded that i could send a message to my friend at the University of Brighton and he would receive it within minutes.

I once called him on a phone, sent the the email, and waiting until he received it and timed it. after that - we didn't phone much anymore, we just emailed.

The next month 'attachments' were a thing, and i saw my first pornographic image via a computer, and i remember thinking "Well this is going to be popular..."
UK households with internet access

1996 2½%
1998 9%
2000 25%
2002 42%
2004 49%
2006 57%
2008 65%
2010 73%
2012 80%
2014 84%
2016 86%
Like John upthread, my first experience online was packet radio (only 1200 baud, half duplex). I made some good friends scattered over the globe that way.

Dial up internet at home didn't come until 1997. I used the university internet for serious downloads and browsing.
No idea exactly when, but it was the early to mid 90s in Hong Kong. No worries about the phone bill as all local calls were free!
Remember day 1 on the internet well: got the kit and a teccy friend explained all. Even remember the first website visited: www.varesesarabande.com (an American music company specialising in film soundtracks) probably because I had purchased one of their CDs on a recent USA holiday. Also remember well first attempt at buying stuff online: failed and had to email the supplier! Dial -up was a real pain, expensive and inconvenient. Now just 10 weeks ago, out in the sticks, got connected to high speed broadband (anything from 50Mb to 1000 Mb) rather than a fraction over 1MB! Times change, and just for once, for the better.
gronda gronda, rangdo!
Like the Abba reference!
Was running buses in Brighton & Hove and in the very early 1990s went to a seminar about the 'Information Superhighway' where a well informed expert advised me to register the domain name www.buses.co.uk.
Is that Oasis album any good? If I give you a C90, would you be able to copy it for me?
I had my first World Wide Web experience just before Christmas 1997. A friend was working for one of these new fangled internet companies near Warren Street station and I was meeting him there prior to an evening out. As I was early he sat me in front of a keyboard and screen and said "Have a play with this". As I recall I looked at websites about Arsenal and one that had lots of pictures of Melinda Messenger wearing underwear (in his favourites I might add!) It would be another two years before I got online at home but recently I decorated my office/room where washing dries on rainy days/general dumping ground and found tucked into the door frame the cable that passed through the wall into the living room to the telephone port behind the sofa that was our only link to the web when the room was last done up. I got all nostalgic for that dial up sound 😂
Ah, the heady days of Trumpet Winsock!

@Roger French: I always wondered how B&H managed to bag that domain name!
I remember we had some Australians come and work in our office in 1994/5. After work they took us to this place called Cyberia in Whitfield Street, where they could do amazing things like message their friends the other side of the world and get instant replies. I think it was the UK's first proper internet cafe. Even then I couldn't imagine that one day I'd have all the kit to do just that at home.
Oooh, you had a RiscPC! I'm dead jealous, 1997-me really wanted one of those...
Woah! I must be old. I persuaded my sysadmin to allow me off-campus email access when I started at University in 1987. I'd already used the internet briefly back in 1982 at Herriott-Watt. I've been on there ever since at all the universities and colleges I've worked at. I first got proper dial-up with WWW browsing at home in 1993 when I built an IBM-compatible PC to supplement the Amiga 500 I bought in 1990 with my third pay-packet (the first two having gone on a rent, deposits and household expenses). The Amiga 500 had an external modem, but it was really only any good for direct CLI dial up to my computers at work.
I remember my first time on the WWW - I'd got a job fresh from Uni as a programmer (with a Latin degree, wouldn't happen these days) and they had a special room containing a few web-connected PCs. We could book a session to "go and explore" - I remember looking up Monty Python, and enjoyed the whole concept of linking, but was bored fairly quickly. That would be early '95, I think. Connected at home a couple of years later (ah, Freeserve). Is there anything else comparable that's gone from nothing to so all-pervasive in such a relatively short space of time?
We're both born in '65, and I too bought my first internet-capable PC in '97, early in my career as a copywriter. Prior to that I'd had to write on a second-hand Macintosh Classic, dump the file onto a floppy disc and leg it round to the client (or get it couriered).

I bought all the gear by going into a Gateway showroom in Covent Garden and paying a hefty £1500 (tax-deductible, over the years!) for everything, which was then delivered to my home some time later in those distinctive piebald boxes.

Some clients weren't, even then, equipped to send emails. I'd receive their faxes on my screen. I remember spending ages on MetaSpy to see what other people were searching for on the World Wide Web. It was quite an education (especially with the 'unfiltered' option).

The internet is great - just last weekend I went to visit a close friend who I first met online in 1998 - but I've probably spent a bit too much of my life on it (much less so now that I have a different job that is far less IT-oriented). You may feel the same way.
I moved from school to university in 1997, and that's when I got my first e-mail address and proper internet access. We had Ethernet in our rooms, but I hadn't bothered to bring my PC with me! So it wasn't until Christmas that I built a new machine and that was that. But when I went home the next summer and fell back to a 56k modem, the difference was quite a shock! (I also remember joining one of those con ISPs where you paid something like £25 for 0800 dial-up 'for life'. Of course they went bust, but I got a good few months out of it and it was certainly cheaper than the phone calls would have cost at the time!)
I had a Demon account when I first connected to the internet back in 1996, the old £10 a month dial up access. I kept that going right the way until last year when Demon closed their email services and sold the domain names off to a third party. I still have my Demon nodename for email even though I rarely use it now. Trumpet Winsock, KA9Q and Turnpike are all names from the past fondly remembered albeit archaic to today's software.
At some point in the mid-nineties a friend of mine who worked for a now non existent mobile telecoms company told me that "soon all the things we could do on the internet would be possible to do on our mobiles". needless to say I laughed heartily because in those days you just got phone and a new fangled thing called texting....
The Diana page is actually hosted on the 1997 election section of the BBC site, which is the sort of thing webmasters liked to do on the primaeval internet before anyone realized that no one cared about neatness of sitemaps.

For reference:
04/10/97 – BBC adopts its current logo
04/11/97 – BBC News website goes live
09/11/97 – BBC News 24 launches (on certain cable providers only)
??/02/98 – I get my first internet connection
Ah, my favourite species of DG post.

Could have done without the Sooty reference mind ;)
ac.uk email address in 1990
ftp and gopher and usenet newsgroups from around the same time
I recall the primitive Mosaic web browser c.1994, and the first Netscape Navigator - the green dinosaur, and then the throbbing N.
And the delights of a text-based Web browser (lynx).
The shift from the likes of Yahoo to Altavista and then the shiny new stripped down interface of Google.
Cricket commentary on IRC, a distant ancestor of (now ESPN)Cricinfo.

All these moments, lost in time, like tears in rain.
First used email and the internet early 1994.

Browser: Mosiak (or a text-only one the name of which I forget...Lynx I think)

Email programme: Pine

Telnet as well.

Seemed so simple then....

Got my own dial-up account with Compuserve after I graduated 1998. email address made up of numbers with a comma in the middle. £30 monthly subscription on top of phone costs.
Think I was first on in mid 90s in uni.

Have you seen the Wayback Machine website where there's an archive of old websites by date? Great fun rolling them back.
1998 here.
1997 for me too. This was when I started University. I stayed in University accommodation for my 3 years which came with the bonus that each room had a connection into the University network and internet for which I think I paid about £20 a year. It was a shock when I graduated and the only access available at home was slow dial-up-access, having been used to broadband like speeds. Of course technology at home soon caught up and now most people have broadband or fibre connections.

I'm still using the PCI Network card I bought for my PC from University back in 1997 right now to send this. It's had a good innings working perfectly for 20 years in different PCs though I might have to retire it when I next change my PC, as a lot don't come with PCI slots now (though some still do).
Can't remember the precise date I went online. I was with Pipex and had one of those strange pebble shaped modems. My inital net experience sounds similar to DG - a little bit of E mail but then newsgroups, IRC and ICQ. I'd forgotten about the last two until I read your post. Still pop in to usenet newsgroups occasionally but they're slowly dying the death as other forms of chat take over.

I also remember the astronomic phone bills in the early days as the phone line was shared and it was sometimes a battle to get online if someone else got there first. Making them cough up their share of the bill was "fun" (not).

Not sure if the internet has been quite as revolutionary for me as it has been for DG. Still it's got me published as an article writer, name checks and requests played on radio stations plus a silly number of followers on Flickr and Twitter. Who knew people would ever be interested in what I had to say or what photos I take with a digital camera? It's also put me in touch with people I'd never otherwise know and cost a few friendships along the way.

@ Roger French - now I know how you bagged buses.co.uk for B&H Buses. I've long wondered how on earth you got hold of it.
1997 for me too. I was living in Germany. The early 90's recession wasn't kind to me, but there was this thing called the EU which made it really easy to give the Poll Tax Tories the middle finger and move to somewhere more promising, where I got work within 2 weeks. After several years there, going online suddenly meant that I could access things like my UK bank account, which was revolutionary. I was probably online for 1/2hr a on average, but still the distances fell away. I still use the same email address I first went online with, though the oldest email surviving on the account is a mere 13 years old.
@Tim. Thank you for the diary link
The first thing I looked for was 'pictures of kittens'.
Long delay in answering due to need to search that archive store known as the loft...

My first access to online searching was to scientific journals via Dialog Information Services. See the wikipedia article on Roger Summit, who has apparently been called the father of modern online search).

In 1990 access wasn't via the fledgling internet, but by dial-up to their computer somewhere. My modem used an acoustic coupler on which you plonked the telephone handset. For some documents I would pay extra for a printout (to be sent through the post).

Though it was a facility that is now available from my favourite search engine I guess it was unusual for a private individual to subscribe, rather than a library or educational establishment. That might explain the strange phone call I received one evening from someone who didn't give their name, but knew a lot about me, and asked in a way that didn't brook prevarication exactly why I needed the service. I think that was my first and so far only contact with Special Branch.
First encountered the internet in '96.

Was there anything else other than porn?
First computer in '97, the 1st iMac, and my first ISP, Waitrose.com :-)
I still have a Waitrose.com email address today, which causes no end of issues now as everyone assumes I work for the poshest grocer in the kingdom.










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