Can you remember the first time you used the internet?

[Sysman]

Early 1995 and Compuserve. Didn't like the BT phone bill one bit, so bought an offline reader and stayed away from the web side of things.

1997 brought the first web experience at work, on a workstation which probably cost upwards of 15K when new, and broadband straight into a fat pipe too.

1998 and a new contract where they actually encouraged us to surf, so that we'd learn how this new technology worked.

[xoggoth]

Not sure, as before the internet we had bulletin boards. The porn on those was rubbish.

[scooterscot]

It was around the late 80's and we were using RTTY Packet transmissions over the CB radio in some DOS programme.

[Zorba]

On IRC (EFNET) from around 1993, wrote first web page in 1995 on my university account. Experimented with gif transparency and animation (the hard way - no Imageready then) and searches were on academic engines that actually found relevant results.

Was this on badly drawn Disney porn gifs?

[Churchill]

Not sure, as before the internet we had bulletin boards. The porn on those was rubbish.

- ASCII, Shirley?

[NickFitz]

Some of you are talking about The Internet and some about the World Wide Web. Which is it?

The WWW is an Internet application, so if people think their first use of the WWW was their first use of the Internet, it probably was.

Bulletin boards and proprietary online services like Compuserve were not the Internet, so they don't count. Although of course some of them later established Internet gateways so you could access the Internet through their proprietary services, so then it becomes ambiguous.

[Zorba]

The WWW is an Internet application, so if people think their first use of the WWW was their first use of the Internet, it probably was.

Bulletin boards and proprietary online services like Compuserve were not the Internet, so they don't count. Although of course some of them later established Internet gateways so you could access the Internet through their proprietary services, so then it becomes ambiguous.

What he said

If it wasn't linked to a .mil machine, it wasn't the internet.

[Fran]

Some of you are talking about The Internet and some about the World Wide Web. Which is it?

Stop being a smart arse