Thursday, April 9, 2009

My first time on the web

I was 18 when I first surfed the Internet.

This was back in September 1998.
I was joining a new school which had a computer lab with Internet access.
I was very excited, and the first day of class, for the lunch break, like many other students, I rushed to the lab to see this 'Internet' everybody was already talking about. (I was reading many computer magazines).

I knew I had to open a browser and type an address, I had written a couple addresses on a paper, which I obviously forgot.
I sat down at the computer, I was so excited that I could hardly remember any address, they were all mixed in my head, finally I typed "Yahoo.com". Something comes on the sceen, I didn't understand what it's for, it wasn't intuitive, no pictures. I tried another address "laposte.fr" (the french USPS), nothing to do there either, I can see information but it's not relevant to me, I have no interest for it. I knew I was on something amazing but I couldn't grasp why. I saw it as a great tool for companies, professionnals seeking information about other companies, nothing really fun yet.
I quickly discovered the IRC chat rooms with their online friendships, love stories, bot wars, MP3 music, games, created my first HTML page... this was just amazing and so far less than we have today, this was when we had never heard of google yet :)

How was your first time?

1 comment:

  1. We had dial up back '95. We would log in and there were no graphic intensive browsers like Firefox or IE. All we had was Lynx and it was painful to browse the web. Yup, there was no Google but there was "Webcrawler" - my search engine of choice. (It's still around, but different.) One of the first things I did was post a nasty comment about an Aussie cricket player on the Australian cricket team site as they had just beaten India.

    ReplyDelete