Remembering the first websites we ever visited
If you’re a reader of The Next Web, chances are the internet is an important part of your life. However, do you remember the first website you ever visited?
I do. I was 17, it was 1996 and I was at college. Rumour spread around campus that a computer in the library had been fitted with a modem. Suddenly, this mythical ‘internet’ thing we’d heard so much about was coming our little corner of England.
My Media Studies teacher managed to somehow arrange for my class to be the first students to try out this much-hyped, but still a little expensive, technology. Getting to the front of the queue I thought hard about what website I wanted to visit. I didn’t have long, the library’s phoneline was being tied up with the connection and the college was being charged by the second.
Eventually I chose Beck.com. I was (and still am) a huge fan of this American musician and I wanted to see what online wonderment would greet me at his website. I was hugely disappointed to discover that the website simply contained a splash image of the cover of his album ‘Mellow Gold’ and not much else. That site’s come a long way since then.
That was it for my experience of the internet for another 18 months until I arrived at university. The high-speed connection there (and the NME.com chatroom) had me hooked and I never looked back.
I asked the people of The Next Web Forum on FriendFeed what their first website was. Here are some of the responses:
• Yahoo of course (Atif)
• Telnet info.cern.ch 8080 (via www linemode in the spring of 1992) (ianf ⌘)
• CNN.com in ‘95 or ‘96. I was either 12 or 13 then (Baby Boomer parents who grew up in modest settings = NOT early adopters) (LANjackal)
• Probably one between altavista, lycos or excite – (Roberto (postoditacco))
• Hotmail. Just wanted to get my email id before anyone else. And it was in 1998. Now its been ages since I visited hotmail – (Sidharth Dassani)
Your answer may well show your age, of course. Some of you will be of the Telnet generation, some of you will be of the Google generation and maybe some of you were even surfing ARPANET back in the 1960s!
So, tell us – what was the first website you ever visited?
Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city's monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he is Digital Content Editor for Marketing Manchester. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Blog, FriendFeed
For me it was probably http://www.dds.nl since they were my first provider. Somewhere in early ’94.
it was sex.com
Either Yahoo! or Rocketmail, some time in 1997.
At my school the first available browser was Mosaic and it was possible to surf by category; I remember my first was a virtual visit to New Zealand, still my dream destination.
Mine was the Teletext website – it was 97 or 98 I believe, and I was coming from an ‘information’ world where my daily digital information binge was via Teletext – Digitiser, Bamboozle etc. So when I got to play with the web at a friends house, Teletext was my natural home. I was disappointed that it didn’t have the content of the actual teletext pages so I could really see the point…
I believe it was Yahoo! around 1996 when we first had the Internet at school. I was 13, and soon completely addicted. Nowadays my iGoogle homepage is my first port of call, then it was my customised Excite page, complete with my horoscope, links to the chat rooms and an email account I can’t remember the ID of, but which was probably something I’d be ashamed to admit now!
Mine?
404 Page not found :D
I visited altavista.digital.com which was the first search engine I ever used and probably Wired.com.
Tiscali .it ;)
Probbably http://www.veronica.nl at a terminal from the Rabobank data centre in Zeist in the Netherlands
http://www.troma.com/
It was on a friends computer, I was really interested in this internet thing. Still am by the way ;-)
Wow, that’s indeed some time ago. I remember my laptop computer with PCMCIA-modem of 14k4, trying to log into tmf.nl, since I was invited by phone to chat there with a good friend. This must be around 1996… I remember it took pretty much time to load, and I never reached that chat-part..
You said website, so I guess an intranet page counts too?
In that case it was most likely a university intranetpage, shortly after I got my account in April 1, 1994.
The first public website was probably a usual suspect: Yahoo.com, although Altavista.com soon became my search engine of choice.
During that time I also visited my own webpage a lot, creating using a simple text editor on a Sun computer with a black&white monitor –> quite scary to look at it in color for the first time after a month or so and find out the buttons were bright pink! After I corrected it, it looked somewhat like this: http://web.archive.org/web/199.....rpage.html (from its later location at web agency General Design).
Not another one. Yahoo.com didn’t exist until 1995 and neither did AltaVista.
Hmm… I guess it was yahoo.com although it has been months since I visited it now. :P
“I was 17, it was 1996 and I was at college… eventually I chose Beck.com.”
Really? Did you use a time machine to go forward three years to when that domain was first registered?
Okay snarky! :) Maybe it was
Geffen’s official Beck site. Essentially the same thing, anyway.
Must have been NCSA Corp’s website. I remember the pressconference where Netscape’s predesessor presented their first browser which later became Netscape Navigator. Very early 90-ties timeframe
This is embarrassing and I wish it was some other site. sex.com sometime in late 2000 (I was 15 then).