Online: Remember Your Very First Time?

Written on August 6, 2008 – 9:36 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Graphical Internet access with SLIRP and MacPPP

I spent hours tweaking this…

At TheNextWeb.org we like to look forward and talk about events as they happen. But today I would like to look back and make you remember the very first time you went online. How did it feel? What did you do? How did it change your life?

My first time online was in 1995. I had bought a modem after I graduated from art school and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A local ISP was very helpful with setting up ‘Config PPP’ and TCP/IP on my Macintosh Quadra 660AV. The whole procedure took us about two hours. I was one of the fist Apple Macintosh clients the ISP had. I think the whole company consisted of just one guy with a bunch of modems under his bed.

Getting connected took a few minutes and started with the familiar screeching sounds every modem used to make when trying to connect. It generally took multiple tries to get connected and often I would get disconnected without reason mid-session anyway. My dial-up speed was 14.4k and the first browser I used was Mosaic but I used that only to get to Netscape and then used Fetch to download a version of Netscape.

I don’t remember what version of Netscape I used but do remember the 2.0 version coming out not long after I got online. I also remember that a new version of HTML was introduced which allowed background images. Suddenly the web looked so much cooler!

My Macintosh Centris 660AV

Within a day or two I realized I wanted to build homepages too and had to learn HTML. So I got on my bike and went looking for a book that would teach me HTML. I remember vividly sitting in my parents garden reading my “HTML 1.0″ book and trying to explain to my parents how incredibly exciting that was.

Within a week or so I had built my first homepage which relied heavily on my Apple Quicktake 1.0 and Photoshop 1.0. Unfortunately within a month my ISP took my site offline because it was generating too much traffic. Ever since I have been hooked.

So, now it is your turn. When did you go online and what happened?

I hope you like that post!

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1995, history, internet, ISP, memories, online, word wide web

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com and The Next Web Conference & Blog.

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19 comments/trackbacks to “Online: Remember Your Very First Time?”

Aug 6, 2008: Remember your very first time online? « Blog Till you Drop!
[...] Idea for this post courtesy of The Next Web [...]

By Sherrilynne Starkie on Aug 6, 2008

I remember showing my boss the WWW in 1995, on dial up of course. She was the owner of a PR agency with a team of about 30 people. She got bored waiting for pages to load and declared that it would never catch on.

[Reply]
By Yuri on Aug 6, 2008

I used to work on networked mainframes from 1984 but my first experience of getting online from home sweet home was somewhere in 1994. It involved a wonderful piece of software called Trumpet Winsock, that crashed every other minute and an array of serives from gophers to usenet.
My first own website came online in February 1995 and it is still alive and kicking: http://web.archive.org/web/*/aquarius.net

[Reply]
By Robert Gaal on Aug 6, 2008

My first time was at school in computer class. I finally realized then what the “export to HTML” function meant in Word ;)

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 6th, 2008:
And that was last year, right? ;-)

[Reply]
By Robert Gaal on August 6th, 2008:
You got me ;(

[Reply]
By Patrick de Laive on Aug 6, 2008

ooof, that is a though question (but fun to think about). I can’t remember my first time online, I know it was in 1996.

What I remember was sending my first email. It was in 1998 at university. I got an email address 250376pl@student.eur.nl and I knew the student code of a friend of mine by head, as every student got automaticcally an email address in the format @student.eur.nl I send an email to my friend with the text: ‘haha, I bet you can’t do this yet’

He discovered it a month later when someone pointed him on the existence of email.

[Reply]
By blah on Aug 6, 2008

why do you post lame content like this to hacker news?

[Reply]
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 6th, 2008:
Because it is ‘on-topic’:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they’d cover it on TV news, it’s probably off-topic.

[Reply]
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Aug 6, 2008

My first time online was in a technology museum in Amsterdam: Nemo. I sent an email to Michael Jordan. The arrogant bastard never mailed back…

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By Wouter on Aug 6, 2008

My first time online was in 1995, I was 11 at the time. Through a service called DDS (abbreviation for The Digital City in Dutch). Was confused about the idea of “links”, which is “left” in Dutch. I thought I was navigating the city and only could turn left. After grasping the concept I was hooked and my parents had a huge phone bill for the coming few months.

The first site I built was a site where you could submit top 10 listings of music for a local radio broadcasting pirate.

[Reply]
By Marko on August 7th, 2008:
Hahaha! Sounds sooo familiar… I had to call interlocal, which was more expensive. And my parents complained that no-one could reach them by phone, so I only could call after ten o’clock :-) My mail came via Fidonet for which I called to a local number. Even e-mail took two days, because is was going from node to node and those nodes had to switch their computers on once in a while ;-)

[Reply]
By spif on Aug 6, 2008

1992: I was 12. My first time was on a Commodore 64, I borrowed a modem (big honking device) and plugged it in to the massive serial port in the back. Then I called a friend who lived 2km down the road and we had our first chat session. I remember that something was wrong with the character sets and ‘the me$$age$ looked like thi$%’. After that I would dial into bulletin boards and download games since there was no porn yet. (Although I do remember a friend showing me a game called ‘yab yum’.)

[Reply]
By Dario Salvelli on Aug 6, 2008

Mmm..my first time online..maybe on 1994-95, i don’t remember. But in the begin of 90s i spend much times with an 8086 IBM and DOS. :P

[Reply]
By Huub Koch on Aug 6, 2008

Aha! I went online at a course given by you in 1997 at Open Ateliers in Rotterdam

[Reply]
By Roy Tomeij on Aug 7, 2008

I convinced my parents to allow me to get an internet connection just before I turned 16 in the summer of 1996. My mom drove me into town to get a new 28k8 modem (to replace the old 14k4 I had been using for dialing up BBS’s since 1994), which she problable regretted for the next 2 years until fixed fee broadband connections became available. I do remember being one of the few at school with an internet connection at home (basically just me and Kees v.d. A I believe). My entire school of 1200 pupils had 1 (one!) computer connected to the internet for instance. Loved it from day one, and started at http://www.pi.net, which was back then the portal for my ISP Planet Internet. I started developing personal websites in 1997, and that was even greater fun. I found out in early 1998 how to make easy money online, in a not so legitimate way, so I quit just before turning the legal adult age of 18 ;) Turned to building websites for friends, from there professional clients and before I knew it we had our own company in 2002 :)

[Reply]
By Mark Kathmann on Aug 9, 2008

Sheesh I feel old…my first time online on the actual Internet was in 1989, a friend hooked me up with the number and an account at SARA (Academic Computer Center Amsterdam) which I dialed into with my Amiga and a great big honking 300 baud acoustic coupler modem. Telnet is your friend…

[Reply]
By Aj on Aug 11, 2008

First time on a computer network via telephone lines was around 1986 at a cousin’s house in the States with an Apple II on “The Source”

[Reply]
By 不锈钢管 on Oct 10, 2008

不锈钢管

[Reply]

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