World Wide Web Day

[Xibor]

I can't remember it's been so long and so many lives ago...
My first 'beyond my tape storage device' exposure was the wonderful dial-up modem days with the cradle for the phone handset, and I can still remember the sound of the electronic handshake when the devices connected. That was long before the Internet and I was typically connecting to bulletin boards and playing early versions of online games (go figure). I was also amazed how fast certain types of pictures started appearing...

And yeah Daz I got the early DOOM versions too. Had all my special config.sys files so that I could squeeze every drop out of the whopping 16k memory (or was it 4/8 back then) that I had to cram it into the system. For it's day the best game by far (still rivals some modern ones IMHO).

I don't remember much changing for me after that until cable broadband was available in my home town and the birth of AOL and Yahoo. And shared games with chat rooms.

[Nogbad]

Similar to Xibor, it was such a very long time ago. Suppose first "internet" experience was around 1965, looking at a project called ARPA. Had some neat ideas to create a network with so many routes it couldn't be broken, kind of similar to the National Grid for electricity.
Much much later when I had my own computer, it was the delights of Bulletin Boards and FidoNet on my Amiga.
But as it's WWW Day (apparently), first real experience was while helping out in a friend's computer shop, he'd just got a modem and we were dying to give it a whirl, of course some inconsiderate customers took him away from the fun so the rest of us carried on.
First search was for Aleister Crowley and after waiting for pages to load, we went back to the search results and found a suggested one for "pharmacalogical anarchy", but clicking on that caused a complete crash. Guess even back then there were things Big Brother didn't want you looking at.
Anyway, we managed to get restarted and following the Crowley idea again, there was a link to "Princess Love". We couldn't resist. The page started loading and there was a picture which took an eternity to load, line by line, (I still prefer text only sites for that very reason), and a lot of conjecture passed between us as the pic slowly revealed. A hair line appeared, then later we got to a forehead, slowly the face revealed itself and so far all seemed normal. Then, as the rest of the pic slowly revealed itself, it became clear that "Princess Love" was a rather chubby American girl of no more than 12 years of age. My mate yelled stop it across the shop but the thing was still buffering and carrying on, and a button labelled "click here to see some of my friends". "Don't you dare" came a strangled scream.
To save him from having a complete meltdown, I used the magic Alt-F4 and shut the browser down.
Already we'd formed the opinion that this new thing had some very odd people using it already.
later on , we played around a bit more, and discovered that the combination of Aleister Crowley and Anarchy was a guaranteed crash every time, before doing something more constructive and ordering a copy of Heretic which soon overtook Doom as our favourite game.

Oh, and I did manage to "kill" the computer in the Science Museum whilst playing "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral" (with the prophetic choice of Lemmings), and "How to get to any Tube Station from South Kensington" (it hadn't been taught about the escalator link between Bank and Monument).

(Also got suspended from sending programs {handwritten in those days} to the University of Chichester from school when I managed to teach myself how to write nested loops to disguise multiple "PAGE" commands, the paper on their printer used to launch across the room).

[TheFairy]

1st August is also the official birthday of all horses. Happy birthday to all horses everywhere

Maybe 1 Aug is for southern hemisphere and 1 jan is for northern hemisphere? I used to work for a person who bred racehorses, so I know its good for us "down unders"

[Nogbad]

1st August is also the official birthday of all horses. Happy birthday to all horses everywhere

not racehorses though, think that's 1st Jan.

[Afke]

My first internet experience was in the late 1980's, I don't remember the exact year. A colleague of mine was a huge Apple fan and convinced me into buying my first computer, a Mac Classic... not the latest model available but new on offer for half price... It was a tiny thing, and no colour screen lol. It came with a dial-up modem of 14.4Kbps - I remember the sound that Kriegor posted earlier AND the long time waiting for a connection so well lol - and a slot for floppy disks. There wasn't much to do on the internet yet as far as I remember but I do remember the bulletin boards...

[Petrichora]

It was around 1995 ... my friend, who worked at a University library, showed me a "website" that he had built. It was yellow and had red blinking text. Who knew I would find a career there?!

[Brotherjon]

For me it was a long, long time ago. Father would shovel coal into the furnace while my younger brother operated the bellows and bought the boiler up to steam. After an hour or so, mother would pull the master switch, which would then divert power to the primary valves and bring life to our 5" Bakelite monitoring device. As you can imagine in those days a lot of heat was generated, so while we were waiting for the crystals to fully energise, we hung our damp washing up around the room which housed our `computer`. Father would sometimes warm his meat pies on the outer casing of the main circuit board. After around 3 hours, the machine would be relatively stable and up to working temperature, we would then attempt to establish communication with the outside world. Rather than a mouse, we used a system of pulleys and ropes to control a dot on the screen and typing was by means of an old modified typewriter with rods and pistons connecting to the main circuitry. We didn’t have any means to load and save anything, just used chalk and bits of slate or flat rock to write things down. Access to the internet was restricted in those days between the hours of 11pm and 2am and with `downloads` of information onto the screen taking up to 24 hours a time, information, such as a new cheesecake recipe, had to be collected over several nights. There were no pictures of course, but once my brother was convinced he saw a brief image of our Queen, when the machine had finished and had entered into its 2 hour cooldown cycle one time. I think it was just a reflection on the screen of my mother taking down some dried sheets though.

[Chynaman21]

I remember my first experience was on dial up and having to wait 20 min plus to connect and just as long to get a response from the server just before i suffered blue screen death, mobile phones were called rabbit and looked like a guider counter attached to a brick with numbers . the good old days yea you can keep them give me broadband every time ha ha
Happy settling b
Chyna

[Thejollyone]

If I recall correctly, mine was with my 1st PC a lowly 486SX around 1989/1990? A DUN connection that could drop for no reason.

I seem to remember there being a monthly(?) paper directory of website name & IPs which was about £3 at the time.

[Nogbad]

Don't forget that "visionary" Bill Gate$ - "The Internet will never amount to anything" and of course the classic "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need".