Hello, Community friends! This month let’s go back in time and reminisce about our very first steps in the web world. How has it all started? Was it some online chat? Or maybe a discussion forum? News portal? We’re sure you all remember at least some details!
Share in the comments how your journey with the Internet has started. Feel free to share some screenshots as well!
Every participant of April’s Challenge gets 100 bonus points, a unique “Nostalgia” badge, and some priceless opportunity to share & explore other’s memories. Sometimes we can be shocked how much time has passed since we’ve started our vintage PC Computer & tried to connect with the world for the very first time!
Let me start with my school memory of the late 2000’s. It is a Polish, local predecessor of the modern-era social media platforms, Epuls. It was a true thing back in 2007-2008. Despite a quick fall and disappearance in favor of Facebook, the majority of Polish kids born in the late 90’s still gonna remember this website very well!
Well, in my early Internet days with not as many popular websites as available today and slow connections, I used it mainly for two purposes email (Hotmail and their 2MB of storage ) and gaming with friends/classmates. Mainly Doom or Duke Nukem.
My 1st ever interaction with a computer was when I was forced to buy one for my then-day job in the newspaper distribution industry, back in 1995: an i386, it was a beast at the time!
I only used it for Lotus 1-2-3 and nothing else…I was too scared to break it or accidentally wipe it :rofl: but not long after, I bought a 56k modem and hooked up my parents’ telephone line, much to their dismay and a sudden increase in their telephone bill! The sounds that thing made when connecting…I do NOT miss that, hahaha!
Playing online games never really was my thing and still isn’t, but the first game I recall downloading was Delta Force: Land Warrior - I LOVED that game, so much so that I kept a copy and eventually installed it again so that my son could play, more than 20 years later! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:
My first interaction was using my mom’s fax telephone line to connect to the internet. Back then in Sweden you had to pay per minute of calling, and my mom was not impressed when the telephone bill a few months later was 200 euros for a single month.
It must have been around 1994 or so. Once connected to the ISP I opened up Mosaic or Netscape on her Mac and entered “magic” into the address bar.
I was into magic the gathering at the time, and had no understanding of search engines such as altavista. Of course that just gave me some generic error message about “domain not found”, so I tried again with some different terms and never got anything. I gave up and probably didn’t try again for another month because apparently there was nothing on the Internet…
Oh my, Nostalgia! Where should I start? OK, it’s only going to be about the web, or maybe the Internet? I did start with a Spectrum sometime around 1986, but that doesn’t count, as it was only connected to a cassette player
Internet started for me in 1991, with a very interesting class of computer communications. So many new technologies! One of my first feats was sending an email to the teacher impersonating the president of the US. He was not impressed, the lab was a closed network, he must have looked at the originating IP, and starred immediately at me. Caught in the act
In the following semester, another teacher told us that the future would be something called WWW. We were not impressed
I finished University in 1993. I had to have an internship, which was mandatory at the time. Switched to Lisbon, and where I landed it was pretty clear: the future was gopher! www? nahhh!
I then went to the Communications Regulator in Portugal. Pretty impressive times, and Portugal was temporarily the second country with the biggest mobile penetration in Europe! Why? Because our fixed lines were so bad! The worst part there? When Management determined that we should disconnect from the Internet! Probably the only institution/organization that I know that did such a thing. A story so bad that I could write a book about it!
And this was all more than 25 years ago. Even before the first page registered by the Internet Archive:
Probably a little beast, no? I bought a 386 in 1989, and it had a 20 MB disk at the time. I could boot Windows and Xenix at the time! What a wonderful machine it was (except the price, I worked all University to pay for it)!
It all started in 1995 for me, my dad was a professor teaching microbiology and he had a Pentium at home and a Compaq laptop for his work office (which I take full responsibility for destroying it ). Let’s just say I tried everything possible on these two poor devices whether it is a software or a hardware “modification”. I remember the first time I played Doom, Duke Nukem, Command and Conquer: Red Alert and my all time favorite AGE OF EMPIRES (I still play today). My games library (over 600+ games) continues to grow with little to no time for gaming.
My dad was very patient with me trying to convince me to pursue a career in Microbiology and carry his work at that time, so he gave full access to both machines while not allowing any of my 3 older siblings. They could use it for school work only. One night, I was caught playing Resident Evil at 3am and my dad lost it, that was the first time I witnessed a flying laptop (See, I told you I was responsible for destroying it ). Today, my family still jokes about my computer shenanigans but I am the first person they’d call if they have any tech related questions.
In my case, the first touchpoint with the internet was at the University of Salzburg (I pretended to study Computer) Science) in 1992. We were playing with bleeding-edge technology in the WWW building the homepage for the university. If the following pic looks familiar to you, then I’m afraid you are about my age!
I remember my beginnings online in the early 2000s in Poland.
I was about 12 years old at the time. My parents installed one of the first network accesses in the housing estate where I lived - I remember the dizzying 128 kbps and weekend game downloads. Then a friend who had a 2X speed CD burner would come over to my home and we would burn those games to discs using the memorable Nero Burning Rom software. Later there was illegal trading on the estate with my friends .
In those days with friends I played an On-Line game called RedDragon, which was available in Poland and the Czech Republic. The gameplay in Red Dragon online takes place in a fantastic world inhabited by eleven playable races, which differ in their difficulty to lead. Thus, there are different factions in the game, such as humans, elves and dwarves, each with its own unique characteristics and units. The player’s task is to develop his state by managing its economy, territorial expansion often requiring fighting battles. An important part of Red Dragon is the association of principalities into coalitions.
A while later I became interested in making websites and I made my first website at the age of 13 still based on Joomla CMS. I remember that this CMS did not require too much knowledge of programming. And so it went on:)
I remember it as a very expensive hobby when I was young. That’s one of the challenges with growing up; when you’re young you have time but no money, when you grow up you have money but no time.
Delta force was amazing. Voxel technology was such a game changer for render distance. I remember looking down the scope of a sniper rifle towards 1 pixel moving around far, far away and trying to calculate how high you had to aim to make the shot.
) and gaming with friends/classmates. Mainly Doom or Duke Nukem.
). Today, my family still jokes about my computer shenanigans but I am the first person they’d call if they have any tech related questions.
