Have you noticed how nobody really writes emails anymore?
Before the age of twitter, facebook, blogs, wikis and other social networking type thingies we had email. Oh, I know you still use it for work and stuff, but I can remember a time when it was the prime means of communication amongst people you actually liked. Now it's probably facebook, and you know what? It just isn't the same.

When I started out in the world of work, I did a number of soul destroying office jobs, but one of the small compensations of this brave new world, was a desk, with a PC, and and email account. Most of my mates were in similar dead end jobs and were looking for anyway to break the tedium. Thanks to email, we had the perfect means of communication whilst pretending to look busy. Entire afternoons would disappear as we set about merrily extracting the piss out of each other. Waiting for the next caustic email to ping into your inbox and thinking of a suitably bilious and well-crafted reply were the highlights of the day.

Perhaps it's because I now have a proper job and less time on my hands, (as do most of my mates), but I still think email has a certain charm that is lacking from sterile corporate world that is facebook.

Whilst we're on the subject, what the fuck happened to Instant Messenger? I know it still exists, but does anyone actually use it?
(Nitrous Nitrous, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 23:43, 7 replies)

Puppetry of the Penis
Thanks to a particularly low-hanging left testicle, I can do "Loch Ness Monster" in three seconds flat.

Fast stunter nut.
(ubergeekian, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 23:32, Reply)

Not that old but feeling it
My mate at Uni had a computer as he was studying 'Computer Science'. After getting tired of playing Doom on it, we decided to stick the whole setup on a dining trolley and wheel it into the kitchen, as there was only one phone in the building and it was internal only. He had worked out that using the newly purchased £250 'modem', we could dial into his department's computers and from there, out on to the internet.

In the dead of night, shitting ourselves because it was strictly forbidden, we slowly pushed the whole lot into the kitchen. He plugged it in and then began typing away like Ferris Bueller in War Games. A few attempts later, and it said something like 'Hello' in binary.

He ran a program called 'Telnet' which connected us to 'Janet' and the magic of the internet was before us.

Basically, there was a load of green text. We could look at which books were in all the University libraries across the world and a few other boring bits of crap.

We never did it again until months later he announced the arrival of a new program called 'Mosaic'. This heralded the potential of images through the internet and more importantly, porn. It hadn't been spoken about, but we knew what we were looking for.

We installed the browser, wheeled the trolley back into the kitchen, with the massive PC and logged in.

It worked first time and we went to 'Search', probably Altavista or the one with the dog. This time, all we found was the NASA website, the FBI 10 most wanted page and a site about how to make bombs. Still shit basically.

It probably took another 10 years after that to stream a 30 second porn movie without buffering and the internet was finally able to reach it's true potential.
(jimbobaggins, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 21:05, Reply)

hijacking a friends aol acount
and signing him upto god knows how many porn gay and reigious and loan sites any thing and every thing that needed a email i signed him up. shit load of giggles to be had for the first few days and then he had to start a new email acount to so he could get some work done and not get bombarded with spam.
callnetuk any one remember them? 1p a min like oh so many other isp's did my very first web site with them and as far as i know it could still be there, it was last time i looked about 3 years ago, and my god didnt it look shite.
fun and games chatting on #irc and playing with various backoriface trojans ip scanning and a hundred and 3 other things .
bulliten boards pn dial up 14k modems waiting to down load a pic .
( fluffybunnykiller Is feasting on the clitoris of life, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 16:19, Reply)

Veronica.
Hmmmmm. Slow brain death.

And irc, good old #gb.
(TallJim, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 13:32, Reply)

summer, 2002. first iMac G3. mother is out to get fags and i connect to our local ISP.
my mother is a single parent. having heard no end of man hate and small penis jokes since childhood, i spent many years thinking my penis was too small; that somehow i was unusual and would spend the rest of my life as a bitter man.

imagine my surprise when entering in "fanny" and "boobs" into google for the first time. unusual websites i found made my penis activate! "at last", thought i. "no longer is my penis an underachieving shrimp with no hair! even the willies on this website is bald."

a banner ad at the top of the page caught my interest.

"how odd. it says here i can get a monster penis by just clicking!"

i clicked.

no growth.

if you ever had one of these iMacs, you'll know there's a small gap between the desk and the computer that's perfectly sized for a small, prepubescent erection.

that's how my mother found me trying to fuck the computer whilst right clicking and downloading the banner ad .gif image in an attempt to make the monster penis somehow download to my chap.

length? about 5 1/2 inches these days.
( avant-hard thought UHT was a sex noise, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 12:40, 1 reply)

Never been cutting edge when it comes to technology
I had an Amstrad 3086 at uni (bearing in mind this was in '96)and no internet access myself.
I'd seen the alt.binary sites on a friends computer, so my knowledge of the internet was limited to poor quality, slow loading pictures of Pamela Anderson.
My first real solo attempt at the web was on a computer in the uni library where I was introduced to the joys of cheery tomato and from then on I was hooked on the puerile joys of the world wide web.
So, mongychops, thanks for getting me started on the internet.
( monkeyboyalpha jumping on the bandwagon since, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 11:21, Reply)

You are a right c*nt!
Would've been about 97, final year at Uni when I first experienced "THE INTERNET". When I say 'experienced', I of course mean finding a chat room (Port Vale FC, for some bizarre reason, I don't follow Port Vale) and experiencing the sheer delight in being rude and abusive to everyone else in the chat room.

Ah the memories.
(mulborough, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 8:27, 2 replies)

I'm not going to bore you with my first taste
there's more than enough stories here from my vintage of usenet, text-based irc and telnet. Even if I could remember accurately. (Mind you Mosaic was a fucking good browser compared to some of the shit that's been doled out since then!)

This story is about when I finally got ADSL.
For many years I lived in an area that was too far from the nearest DSLAM, had shitty copper wiring and the landline was basically dodgy.
So for many years all I could rely on was a 56k modem (eventually upgraded to V.92 then ISDN) for all my nefarious web-surfing episodes.

Now I regularly used my mums uni account (T1 no less) to download & burn/zip what I had to - bear in mind in those days a 256Mb usb key was absolute luxury. Barring those useless fucking BENQ slide-out ones which were next to useless.

We eventually moved and I got our 1st broadband account.
Ohh. The glut.

My first taste was downloading a 1Mb pic of Marg Helgenberger.
*Snap*
Like that.
Oh happy days.

Several terabytes of movies, music, tv-shows, archives, debs (as an apt mirror for more than a couple of distros) , executables, pr0n and youtube vids (amongst others) later here I am.
I regularly use over my 100 Gb. bandwidth.

Moore's Law. Pfft.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Sat 24 Mar 2012, 6:35, 4 replies)

I seem to remember this as my first experience of what the internet was...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo

Then it was just all MSN and GeoCites :D

Used to hate this sound www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0 now it fills me with nostalgia and warm memories.
(Nichowahla, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 23:15, Reply)

Just me.....
.....my Amiga 1200, iBrowse (and later AWeb and Voyager) and a 33.6k modem paying monthly AND by the minute. Demon, or U-Net or someone. It probably took me about a week to try and watch porn (and that was just loading the site), only to discover most movie formats used for the ten second teasers wouldn't work on my old Commodore. Animated GIFs at 1fps that took 10 minutes to download for the win.

Must've been a good 15, 16 years ago now.

First concrete memory? The blood curdling scream from my mother when the £300 phone bill turned up and she briefly considered killing her only child.
(MikkyX, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 23:02, Reply)

Antipodean Eye
Computers had been linked by various makeshift networks in the Seventies, but I knew something new was up (in 1982) when the Boss, who knew nothing about computers, nevertheless decided to use a new network (called the Internet) to monitor us poor students from around the world, so he could move to New Zealand for six months of academic labor and carefree Southern frolic. He pioneered the way for others to do the same: Saruman, Sauron, the whole gang!
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 22:35, Reply)

I've just been up an evergreen tree
trying to stop the bastards from the council from cutting it down to build a road. A bunch of us have been doing 1 hour shifts up there. It's OK, but we had problems with beetles crawling onto our heads, until someone had the bright idea of using protective coverings. Worked a treat, I discovered.

That was my fir stint hair net.
(ubergeekian, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 21:04, 2 replies)

Printing out the alt.bestiality FAQ in banner text on a gate-fold dot matrix printer.
Not the whole thing. Just the bit about choosing the best horse to perform cunnilingus on. They make a very satisfying smacking noise apparently.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 20:47, 1 reply)

early 2000
I (networking bloke) & then girlfriend (sysadmin/server lass), sat in the pub one evening & came up with the concept, & most of the how-it-would work, of what Skype is now

fucksocks
(weaselinajetengine, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 20:46, Reply)

Snakes on a Plane...

The story of my first actual introduction to the internet is for another time. I will however, mention when I first had it installed in my house, because I threw a bit of a bash...and invited some of the more sophisticated and suave members of my formidable social circle to indulge in the cultural significance and general magnificence of my new cutting-edge status.

To this day I believe I must surely qualify for some sort of 'land speed record*' between the official connection of a broadband line and a group of half mutant, very pissed up twats entering the words: 'big gay porn' into a search engine, purely for the reason of leaving frankly hilarious pictures all over my desktop and filling up my hard drive with slowmo videos of fellas bumming.

However, a far more interesting 'Intro to t'interwebz' story involves my dad. Despite being so old that he witnessed the big bang first hand, he positively embraced this groundbreaking new information superhighway and demanded it...fucking sharpish.

At the time, the Internet seemed in it's opening throes; more 'Morse code' than 'source code', but my techno-tastic pater plunged in straggly-nose-hair first, hooking up with possibly the most pathetic and overpriced dial up connection this side of AOL.

He had a reason for such enthusiasm, for he was a man with a mission. He needed knowledge.

Bit of back story: My Dad used to reside in a little village on the outskirts of Coventry. A few weeks previously, The daft old fart had been walking his dog near the local woods when he saw...a snake. a fucking SNAKE! Slithering about in the undergrowth without a care in the world like an offcut from Medusa's latest trim 'n' blowdry.

It was at this point when my Dad launched spectacularly into 'Indiana Jones' mode. Unfortunately, I don't mean he adopted an 'heroic archaeologist persona', no. Instead he merely resembled 'some bloke who wears way too much brown, and pappers his kex at the first sign of anything remotely serpent-y'.

Although he was aware of the existence of such scaly shitwads in the British Isles, he had never properly seen one like this...in the wild, in the Midlands, and more importantly, in the middle of his fucking dog walking route. My Dad is a worldly wise, knowledgeable chap, and was aware of adders etc being seen slinking around these parts. However, this forked-tongued little twatbuckler didn't look anything like one of those. So the mystery deepend: What was this particular species? Was it a pet that had escaped? Why wasn't the dog trying to hump it to death like he does with everything else? How did Dad manage to refrain from flailing his arms around and running home like a big sissy girl?

Keeping his massive phobia in check, he continued to peer at the little bollocks as it hissed dismissively at him. He stared on, in an effort to memorise as much detail as he could about it...because one day soon...he would have the AWESOME INTERNET!, and the power of all knowledge would be at his two-words-per-minute fingertips.

The fateful day arrived, and just a few short hours later we were ready to rock, thanks to a phone-socket splitter gizmo and 30-metre extension cable from the phone point dragged through the house to the room where his PC lived (that incidentally looked like it was mostly constructed from a mixture of Meccano and stone, was hamster powered, and was originally designed by Charles Babbage).

He connected the computer up to the modem...it fired into life like a Boeing 747 with a deafening whirr of fans, clunky hard drives, and no doubt pistons, valves and wotnot.

Minutes pass by...manuals and installation discs came and went, until eventually he hit defcon bongle. He was on the motherfucking INTERNET!

I think it was Netscape he was using - and I don't even think Google was his search engine, but still, none of us could contain our excitement at having eternal global wisdom at our disposal. There was a moment of silence before I spoke:

"What should we look up?" I enquire, breathless with anticipation.

My Dad's mind wisely wandered to his earlier dog-walking experience and he smiled. "I know just the thing, boy...", he exclaimed authoritatively as he cracked his knuckles at the keyboard. Slowly but confidently, he then proceeded to make history and type the very first words he was to ever enter onto the majesty of the world wide web.


Tentatively, he tapped away. The first word was 'Large'. This was enough to get our imaginations racing.

The second word however, was slightly more ominous. 'Black'. Hmmmmm.

Then he typed the third word. 'Snake'.


'Large Black Snake'...


...


Ooooooh fuckeroo.


Even in the internet's infancy, it didn't seem to take too long for my old man's mighty 14" CRT monitor to nearly buckle under the strain of the sheer, non-stop volume of cockshots that began pouring onto it...each one being overlapped by different yet equally girthed young gentlemen, swinging their massively-endowed wares in front of my entire family's eyes.

Dad stayed calm, composed, and dignified. Actually...no he didn't. "Fucking FUCK!" He screeched, as he recoiled in horror. "What the fucking hell?" Eventually he woefully pleaded: "Son, How do you make the fucking cocks STOP???" as he waved his fist at the screen and bashed haplessly against the keyboard, praying to the web-gods that there could be some overseeing internet overlord who could 'magic away' the persistant stream of love truncheons being proudly paraded in front of us all like an out-of-hand audition for 'Cock-idol'.

We all walked away and left him to it.

However, to his great credit, he didn't let this experience put him off (as I said, he was on a mission). A few days later, he approached me, beaming triumphantly. "It took me 3 days son...3 days of trawling through seemingly never-ending nob pictures and ropey gay porn sites...but I finally found out what type of snake I saw when walking the dog". Unfortunately I now can't remember what species he told me it was, but I can vividly remember what I said next:

"Was it worth it Dad?" I enquired.

He paused thoughtfully for a second. "Not really, no." He replied, somewhat despondently.



*I admit, I didn't have a stopwatch at the time, but from my recollection it took about 0.00000008 of a second.
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Fri 23 Mar 2012, 20:34, 14 replies)

E-mail will never catch on
I was introduced to e-mail at my first post-college job at a large bank. This was in the days of fairly primitive internal networks before the internet existed in any form we'd recognize, and the bank was considered quite advanced for having this internal communication system. I gave the IT guys quite a laugh when I expressed how great it would be if we could communicate with people outside the bank using a similar system. Obviously I understood nothing about technology, I was an idiot for imagining anything like that could ever happen, it would never, ever happen, ha ha ha.

I like to imagine those guys living in their mom's basements, playing Pong all day and thinking that's cutting edge technology.
(bunnybutt, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 18:36, Reply)

Univerity of Central Lancashire one evening in 1994 with friends, 6 hours later I left a changed man. Went home and sold a guitar, bought a 9600 baud modem and connected to an ISP in Birmingham, one huge phone bill later I realised I would have to be patient just like waiting for the porn to appear on the screen.
(Celtican is 10! Old school or what?, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 18:21, Reply)

Indeed I remember when the Internet was all text
Archie and Gopher anybody? Then word reached us at the office that there was something miraculous out there. It just needed me (as the Unix bod) to install something called Mosaic on a nearby SPARCstation. And lo, we could behold the graphical marvel that was cisco.com. Followed shortly after by the less salubrious sites that mushroomed in those untamed and uncensored days of http version 1.0. (It's my SPARCstation, get your hands off and go wait for somebody to invent Netscape).
(AgeingGeek Father of Two, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 17:33, 2 replies)

Digital Equipment year 2000 (Compaq, HP)
My weapon of choice was alta vista and combined with an IT support team that didn't seem to give a shit about when you surfed, how you surfed and more importantly what you surfed this combined to make the most piss easiest job I have ever had. 20 mins actually working a day. Literally my job was to pick up the phone and tell potential customers they couldn't buy from us direct and to guide them to a disti. It was just when South Park became popular, so that's all my day consisted of Southpark, porn and internet shopping..... Oh the humanity!!!

*Definately earn my money now, the days of easy software sales are long gone :(
(bROKEN aRROW PUA HVI Master, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 17:00, Reply)

my first experience of the internet was at school
Word would spread that there was a computer with Internet, but more often than not, upon opening IE (as i had seen so many other people do and type in bbc.co.uk nothing would happen) then one day, I sat a PC for class, click IE and wahayyy, what was this? where was it coming from? Prior to this I was hooked on Brittanica CD-ROM which i had to get the librarian to fetch the CD of.

After that it was a case of going to the local council Library. A room in the corner was setup with several computers with massive CRT monitors, then a fat 'technician' would be sitting in the corner on an even larger CRT monitor. It was here I was introduced to SPAM. Opening an email on Hotmail and seeing a massive pair of Tits displayed, with the pensioner lade next to me Tutting in disaproval.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 15:45, Reply)

The dark ages of Photoshop
Having spent my teens using word processors to churn out god awful horror stories and avoiding the predatory advances of grammar-failures in AOL chatrooms, when I hit university in 2000 I was a girl with fairly good computer skills.

Enthused by technology, I discovered Dreamweaver and started building a personal website, complete with every gif I could possibly find. It needed pictures. Sadly, picture editing software had never cropped up in my computer past. So, instead of cutting down the pictures on screen, I cut down every single one of my pictures with scissors before running them through the scanner.

I have since gone on to a happy and fruitful career in online journalism, but suffice to say, the beginning of it required a fairly lengthy introduction to Photoshop.
(sallyohno, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 15:34, Reply)

Anyone remember Y!Pool?
Many moons ago the company I worked for agreed to allow the workforce to install Yahoo messenger on their PC's. It was we were told a business tool to help us communicate with different departments across the building without needing to waste time walking 20 feet or so. Cutting edge huh!
In practice in was used and abused in equal measure, generally allowing the blokes to flirt with the girls in accounts and quickly send around links to animal pron.

Some months later on a dreary lunch break, my mate who was in marketing discovered the game Yahoo! pool. It was a stunningly simple flash game but we were horribly addicted to it, playing every lunch break and quickly racking up hundreds of games. We were very close in ability so as we reached the magic 1000 game mark, there was only a dozen wins difference between us.

Driven by our competitive nature, the games soon began to spill over into work hours and we became incredibly adept at playing for hours by minimizing the game window to a size that wouldn't arouse suspicion.

This continued for months until one day we were both summoned (separately) to HR for a chat. Completely unbeknown to us, when you're playing Yahoo! pool, your user name takes on a slightly different appearance. Mine looked something like this:

BinDipper01(y!Pool)

Talk about rumbled. Thankfully our boss had only noticed for about a week so had asked HR to give us a talking to. Had he known the actual hours spent potting those virtual balls, I doubt a light reprimand would have sufficed.
(BinDipper, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 14:53, 1 reply)

(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 14:25, 13 replies)

1997?
AOL quickly followed by BT proper. My dad believed it would help him work from home.

HA. Thankfully for me he had no idea how to even operate the computer let alone use the modem. So it became my domain.

15 years later, I'm a computer programmer with no other real life skills.

Thanks Dad.

note - I'm trolling slightly here. I'm actually very grateful for that opportunity. Independent learning ftw!
(skgorsky, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 14:02, 1 reply)

Relative newcomer to the internet...
Unlike most people here, I only got proper internet access in 2003. Sure, I had access in school but with one 56kpbs modem between 40 people, the internet was, would you believe it, boring.

Anyhoo, in 2003 Bit Torrent hadn't quite taken off and the current kids favourite was none other than Kazaa. This magical tool let you type in the name of, say, your favourite band and within tens of minutes, you could have one of their songs, maybe even an album.

But you could also search for things other than music. Like pictures. Or Videos. And being at the height of puberty at the time, it was inevitable that I would eventually use the internet for what it was intended for - porn.

However, as I'm sure you already know, I'm a bit of a dimwit. While anyone with any sense would just search for "Porn", or even "Sex" or "Lesbians", my mind went absolutely blank. I was probably already harbouring a raging meat club simply from the very thought of seeing some naked flesh, causing much distraction. Too distracted to think straight, but getting nowhere with a blank search box in front of me, the oddest idea popped into my head - search for "French". In my mind, the French were renowned for being Romantic and Steamy. Je t'aime was banned at one point for being too racy, so surely the french knew their shit when it came to porn. Oh how right I was.

I did it, I searched for "French" and struck gold. Pages of results! I selected one that implied something about two filthy french lesbians and off it downloaded. What felt like hours (and in those days, it could well have been) passed but the video finished downloading. I opened it, undid my pants and prepared for seconds of intense pleasure.

The video started. There were the two women, already starting to undress each other. This is good! Yes, take each other's clothes off. Ohhh, I'm saving myself for when you're both naked and...touching, I guess. I wasn't really sure what lesbians did, I just presumed they rubbed together or something. In any case, I was about to find out!

Eventually, they were both naked and after some delicate kissing, one of them climbed onto a chair...backwards, so she's bending over the back rest. A little odd, she seems a bit high up to me but I'm rather inexperienced at this whole porn malarkey, let alone French lesbian porn.

The other bends down onto her knees. By now her face is level with the first girl's rather fantastic arse.

Something good is about to happen, something wonderful, I can feel it! I can feel a lot of things, actually, like the urge to just... OH MY FUCKING GOD SHE'S SHITTING IN HER MOUTH, EW EW EW EW!!!

...somehow, I managed to 2girls1cup myself before it was cool. Thank you, internet.
(Kushan just wants to fit in..to your mum, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 13:55, Reply)

I would guess I was about 10
And we were on holiday in Cornwall. On one of those rare father son moments, he took me on a small boat about a mile out from the beach and we started a bit of jigging. (if you don't fish, I'll give you a bit of leeway here.) After all the stories of catching thousands of fish, we caught just one. Well, I caught it. And when I say caught, I merely mean it was hooked and I was pulling it in with no knowledge of what to do next! Dad was quite implicit with his instructions, "Get it in t' net!"

I haven't looked back since. Although I fear this herring will bite me on the arse.
( Blind Meach Cautiously optimistic, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 13:47, 2 replies)

We got the internet...
in 1997, practically in its retirement compared to most of you. It was dial up and I was allowed 1 hour on a Saturday morning. Yahoo was the first site I ever went on, heading into their chat rooms and the first thing I was ever asked was 'how big are your tits?'.

I also remember steak and cheese and rotten and watching pictures load *really* slow, Geocities and their shiny GIFS that took an age to load.
(vampyre_gem has been dead since, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 13:47, 1 reply)