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?