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Kept reading anything I could find in the news papers about the web, then in '97 bought my first Pc (would you like a modem ? Have to be external.) set it up at home one evening 7pm, before I knew it was 4 am !
My phone bill was hundreds of pounds that quarter.
2001 found Webmasterworld, and just looked, kept hearing about ecommerce...
2003, set up my first ecommerce site (registered here as well) - roaring success, so I shut down(?) as it was taking up to much of my time, never had such a successful site since. Never have worked out why I shut it down......
My biggest highlight was emailing Jackie Brambles of Radio one in 1997, asking had she ever considered getting a proper job, I received a reply from her asking, why did I not think it was a proper job.
Cant see that happening now.
The thing I find most amusing is that I come in to contact with children who have NEVER know a world without the web.... All in a few short years.
But the web, I saw an example of email while still in school. I had little interest.
Later while working, my boss mentioned it to me and asked if I though we should register the company name as a dot com. I advised against it, and I quote myself: "I don't see any commercial applications in having some computers linked together".
I got a computer at home in the late 90's when I opened up a mail order bookstore in my basement. I didn't want to spend the money on a website but my spouse was adamant that we needed one. So I broke down and got internet access at that time. My "mailorder" company almost immediately started receiving over 90% of it's business online.
And now I are one.
Started playing with hypercard and got my first email address in 1993. Built a personal homepage in 94, and opened my first webdesign company in 95, the rest is history.
Wow, makes me sound old!
In pre internet days I was visiting family about 200 miles away. One cousin was horrified that I drove all that way without a mobile. I pointed out that I had been making that journey at least once a year for the previous 25 years. Now I start twiching if I go to the shops without my mobile or stay away overnight without my laptop.
would you like a modem ?
And this one's the BEST, it's 14,000 baud! Dump that crappy 9600! :-)
My phone bill was hundreds of pounds that quarter.
Yes . . . <weeps> . . .
My first encounter with the Internet was not via web pages, it was via bulletin boards trying to solve a problem in the print industry. I can't even remember the name of the program, Gopher sounds right. Command line interface.
I remember seeing my first Webpage though. Mosaic 1/2.0, which I believe was Netscape's predecessor (?)
I think the year was somewhere in 1993-1995 range . . . I'm awful with dates (both kinds.)
I guess I'll admit . . . I was a single Dad and had no social life, Internet chat was one of the first forms of "social media" I discovered. It was also one of the first things I stopped using as it revealed far too much of the dark underside of humanity. This too was a command line interface until mIRC came along. By that time I was off on other things.
And oh yeah, it changed my life all right. I was in the print industry and had dabbled in everything from design/layout to airbrush illustration and had started a career in traditional prepress. The digital revolution was just taking off. I had the privilege of being in the middle of that and played a part in it (locally,) then add the Internet . . . wow. Just . . . wow.
Then there was an inter-company trial of this thing called email. I could type, so I was one of the managers who got this machine on their desk. Had word processing, too. Took a three-day class on how to email and word process. No context for anyone in the class. How to print was an afternoon. Screen was green phosphorus letters. I think there were about 30 people I could send an email to at first.
Lots and lots of meetings later, lots of articles, I get assigned a portable computer. First one in the company. I take it home, plug it into the phone jack and "dial in" to this Internet thing for the first time.
I tell my wife about what I am doing. She is bored, bored, bored with it.
I tell her about this service called Google as she is fixing dinner. She is not interested. Google is on the screen. I cannot think of anything to search about.
The cats suddenly zoom around us, and make us laugh. I type in "zooming cats" into the screen on my Netscape browser and up comes all of this information about why cats will zoom around at times.
I read some of what I find to my wife. She finds it fascinating.
Soon, everyone at the company is trying to figure out how they can get out of what they are doing now and into this Internet thing. Except for my staff, who did NOT want to change...
Started playing around with the "commercial" Internet around '94, making a very basic (and crappy) home page with my user space on my dialup ISP at the time. Went to a lecture at work in '95 by a visitng professor who was talking about this new concept called "E-commerce"- everyone else was bored, I was riveted in my seat, and the guy eventually had his consulting company bought by Gartner.
Shortly afterwords, I had my first paid web site project. Due to a disagreement over the direction that it should go, I quit to do my own site (which, by the way, is still the basis of my online company over a decade later- the other guys' project folded after less than a year). Then just before the .COM implosion of 2000, quit the corporate world to start my own online company and haven't looked back.
95 First Clasic ASP site, 96 First ColdFusion 2.0 Site.
In 96 asked my boss(a dear friend) to fire me(sales)... several days passed... Went into Web(ColdFusion Dev). It's what puts that Pint of Honey(...) on my kitchen Table ever since!
Even at 1:22 am EST!
I'm just waiting for the day they can just give me internet by IV drip, got told off by my optician this weekend for how much time I spend in front of a PC, then my internet access went down and I realised that without the internet there was nothing to do on the pc!
a very basic (and crappy) home page with my user space on my dialup ISP at the time.
LOL! Can anyone remember . . . Netscape Composer? :-) The things you can do with <font> tags, WOW! :-)
Can anyone remember . . Netscape Composer
My first memorys was using compuserve. Actually getting into web development was when I had just turned 15. So that would have made it around 2000
I remember being the 1st person to get adsl though and I was underage. They faxed a doucment through signed it and sent it back.
£70 for 512 now my 2mb is free. Well until next month.
It wasn't long before I had a reseller hosting agreement ironed out, and started creating websites and marketing online, both for me and for clients.
I guess i'm an addict.
I got my first machine in '78 (first of dozens LOL), modems ran a screaming 110bps or 300bps if you were lucky enough to find something to connect it to. Wrote my 1st BBS software around '82 or so, catering to maybe 30-40 members. A few years later it all started to explode and around '86 or so we were all running Fidonet and sending relay email around the world in as little as 1-2 days.
Back then many were fighting with the phone company just for the right to have modems on a home account without paying commercial fees.
Anyway, the evolution to the web wasn't that startling as you could see it coming like a freight train when literally 100 BBSs were operating in a single city, people were playing games online, QuantumLink (AOL) and Compuserve were collecting large numbers of clients, the web was already happening, it just wasn't linked together yet.
Nostalgia is nice, but the modern web is much better!
Problem is the people that didn't see this all coming are still reeling, some of them still in denial, and many don't see the next wave rolling in that's already starting disruption all over the place.
Only problem was, I couldnt work out what to do ! All those @ thingys, where were they on the keyboard.....
Old time BBS. Back when 1200 baud was the Cadillac of Speed.
My, how things have changed!
All the old modems, computers etc are nice to remember but the best thing, the very best thing? We were there before it was completely and utterly commercialised!
That alone gives me a very smug feeling when I look at the kids of today on there :-)
A friend used to come over and use my "blazing fast" 1200baud modem to log into his account at University to do some work, and transfer information around "the net".
Around '88, my Dad (who worked for the phone co), brought home a 2400bps modem so he could use TTY emulation from our home computer and access work emails and such. With that Hayes 2400 modem, I was the envy of our local CGAG (Computer Guys and Gals, more often referred to as Computer Geeks and Gweebs).
Yah. Being in before things got commercialized was an experience. Everyone just wanted to see what everyone else was doing. "Hacking" was about getting into code just to figure out how things worked.
I remember Gopher from the early 90s (91, 92?) and Spider, I think it was called, from around the same time.
I was hooked before it was "The Net". Actually, I got hooked in the late 70s, going with my dad into his office on the weekends. He'd plunk me down in front of a TTY terminal, and let me bash away. Text only BlackJack, and an early version of Rogue (which later morphed into uMoria, which I've installed on every PC I've ever owned)... I would have been 7 or 8 back then.
Damn-it. I'm supposed to be working. Now I'm going to have to spend an hour dungeon crawling ASCII graphics just to get over the nostalgia.
On the plus side, most of the people in this office are too young to even know what an ASCII graphics dungeon crawler looks like, so when they see that window up, they just assumed I'm Telnetted into a server and am actually working.
