online for nine
Just curious, when did you first go online?
I opened my first World Wide Web site in August 1996. I had just started working part-time at a small tech recruiting firm in Fairfield. Part of my new job was to post position specs at a website. Although I was pretty office computer savvy (Windows 3.1!) I had never been online before and had no idea how to find anything; I just had this vague notion that all websites began with “www”. I remember the morning during my second week on the job when I tentatively opened Netscape and typed in “www.thecure.com” and this whole site full of Cure photos and news magically opened up. What fortune!
For the next two months until my position expanded to full time, I drove down to the university library every early afternoon after getting off work and surfed the web on one of its two dial-up internet computers. My initial interest (obsession) was band information, since articles and books on The Cure, Siouxsie, cranes, et al were rare. Then I started buying magazines off the newsstand full of links - magazines like the now-defunct Yahoo! Internet Life - and poring over their pages with a pen, circling links to check out.
Once I was working full-time hours and couldn’t spend afternoons online at the library, my boss realized how bummed I was and gave me a key to the office and permission to come in after hours and on weekends and surf the web. (Such a sweet guy!) I used to bring guys with whom I had flirtations into the office at night to show them this wondrous thing - the web. For all of them, it was their first time online. So yes, I took a few men’s Internet virginities.
My first e-mail was a Hotmail account (the still-active emily7@). I would come into the darkened office and teach myself HTML and post to the alt.goth newsgroup. I started designing my first homepage in Geocities in September. (Ha! Here’s a rough cut of the page in Jan ‘99. “An abyss of magick, poetry, music, and gothic beauty” Ha!)
The web back then had a very different feel from now. I can’t tell if it’s just that I wasn’t really into news/soc./politics back then, or if it really is true that the web seemed more like just a diversion back then than it does now. The mid-late 90’s was a popular time for factoid and “time-waster” sites; online retail had yet to take a strong hold and homepages were comprised more of photos and poetry than commentary on issues. It must be me, that I use the web for more “serious” purposes now than I did eight years ago. I say this because I know people who know how to use the Internet just well enough to check their web-based e-mail, Google for terms, and glance at CNN.com headlines and not much else. This always shocks me; I can’t imagine not tapping in.
ben said,
January 18, 2005 @ 11:18 pm
Some people could just don’t get along with computers at all, ya know?
That, and I just wanted to say that I *heart* your geocities username. But of course, I would.
Sara said,
January 19, 2005 @ 6:27 am
I have no idea when I first used the internet!
Probably pretty early on ’cause my Dad is pretty “hard core” into technology and computers…and Dan for that matter. I can’t imagine not being led to the water pretty early on. Hmmm, I wonder.
Pamela said,
January 19, 2005 @ 1:36 pm
I remember it distinctly, because I bought my first PC (a black Toshiba, a disaster of an instrument), in July of 1996 on credit. I paid over $2,500 for it, and that was on sale. I had that dinosaur, incidentally, until 2 years ago. And yes, it was dialup, an account called Hollygisp because I was into Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Anyway, I went to see Chri Isaak live and had a fabulous time. I believe it was July 5th or so. Just like you, Em, I typed in “Chris Isaak” I think into the Lycos or Excite search engines, and up came this world of information. Also like you, I spent my initial evenings in complete and utter awe, and it was all about pop culture for me. Music (also the Cure, Siouxsie, other long-lost musical passions). Using the internet for serious information probably didn’t occur till I started back at school in 2002).
leblanc said,
January 19, 2005 @ 3:01 pm
it was as late as august of 1994, since that’s when i went to college and we had to start using email and the internet to register for classes and get notes, etc. as soon as we got there, but it might have been a little earlier. i just remember a lot of Pine email and TelNet and Netscape, and oh yeah - how it SAVED MY ASS so many times when writing last-minute papers, like the time i filled up a good 10-12 pages of a shakespeare paper with shakespearean-related images i’d pulled from the web. although the paper was a useless piece of shit, the instructor was impressed by my”‘creativity” and “how long it must have took me to find all those images” and i got a 4.0. ha.
college without the internet would have been hell. i really feel for those pre-1993 college people.
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/