Fuck this qotw
I'm going over to /talk. It's slightly less shit.
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:48, Reply)

i don't have, and have never had, access to the internet

(Quintno EXPERIMENT RUINED CANCELLED, LEFT 4EVER, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:39, Reply)

It's where I discovered what a lesbian was
But oh how it lied about what they're like in real life!
(wehttamman via B3ta for microwave, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:36, 3 replies)

Slow loading porn?
I kept my stash of jpegs and (silent, low-res) clips on a zip drive. Remember them? Nice, satisfying clunk when the disk was inserted.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:36, 12 replies)

MUDs!
That is all...
(repooc, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:35, 4 replies)

I've been using the internet so long...
...that I remember when B3ta wasn't the exciting, thriving multi-faceted community that it is today and instead was just a handful of geeks sitting around talking about old websites.

I'm just glad that it's moved on so much...oh...
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:19, 2 replies)

Second-hand story, may contain liez
For some reason a mate of the college computing officer was one of our flats during a university party (friend of a friend, probably) and was telling the story of how said computing officer was responsible for detecting and sanctioning misuse of the college IT network. One weekend he noticed a huge and unexpected spike in internet usage, and narrowed it down to one single college residence, inhabited by...a physics student who had decided to convert his PC into a P2P fileserver, single-handedly accounting for 90% of college network traffic that weekend.

The Dean summoned the student and gave him a grudgingly impressed bollocking along the lines of "You can either get kicked out right here and now, or you can become the next computing officer." He apparently chose the latter option.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:09, 2 replies)

I used to chat with this guy called WOPR, we'd play all sorts of games!
turns out it was really some guy's kid and the FBI took all my computer equipment.
( Victor Meldrew, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 14:04, Reply)

I'll sum this weeks questions;
* Slow loading pr0n
* Geocities
* Dial up
* Chat rooms

Next question please.
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:58, 9 replies)

EMAIL ON A SPECTRUM ?!
Back when programs like 'live & kicking' started asking for people to email in, we looked into what this 'email 'could be.... turns out it was electronic mail, WHAT WITCHCRAFT IS THIS?!

Anyway, we decided to 'hack' into our school's 'records' (like they'd even have any sort of online connection back then!) with my mate's Spectrum by typing "HACK SCHOOL X, RETURN, RUN HACK". We sat there for a few seconds before my mate panicked and pulled the plug out of the wall turning the whole lot off, before we ran outside and hid in the field for the rest of the afternoon in case the police came around.

It would be about 10 more years before i had anything that contained a modem, let alone being able to connect to the internet.
( Victor Meldrew, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:57, 2 replies)

We had email at work two years before we got the internet
...and I got so used to getting everything we needed from mail groups that when we finally got the net, I was a bit "meh". I still am a bit "meh" and only use less than a dozen sites regularly. Luckily two of them are b3ta and xhams ....CARRIER LOST....
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:53, Reply)

BBC presenters giving directions on how to access their websites
"h t t p, colon, that's the two dots, forward slash, not back slash - you have to be careful, forward slash, b b c, dot, c o, dot, u k, forward slash, n e w s"
It was amazeballs that they actually had any time left for the programme content.
( P-MONKE We're all fucked, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:44, 2 replies)

Like most people, I guess
Local ISP where we had to pay £15 a month plus the cost of the phone call, 28.8k modem, first search (on Yahoo! obviously): porn.

Back then, when I wanted to go to hotmail, I would always search for it through Yahoo, then click on what it found, for fear of accidentally stumbling across some virus-riden site that would take over my computer... or , more to the point, a site that would download a dialer for an 0898 number.

This must have been 1993 or so. My wife still does the "type the site I want in the search engine" thing, only with Google...
(ScousersPet, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:38, 1 reply)

Times have changed.
The old days of the Internet:
"Oooh! A picture of a kitteh! It should only take 25 minutes to download over dial-up. Yay."

The present day:
"FFS @%**! IT TOOK FIVE FUCKING SECONDS TO LOAD ICANHAZCHEESBURGER. THAT'S IT! I'VE HAD IT. I'M CHANGING BROADBAND SUPPLIER! FUCKING USELESS SHOWER OF CUNTS."


I don't even like cats.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:36, 4 replies)

Eeeh, back in t'olden days.
Visited my pa at the univerity he worked at. Went on the NASA site and the Blue Peter page (which I'm fairly sure were the only two in the world at that point) using Netscape Navigator. Instantly bored.

Was so disinterested in the 'wonders of the web' that I didn't use the internet again until they'd invented Shockwave games and we managed to by-pass the school's security software by using IP addresses.

Mini-golf FTW.
(Miraclefish How appropriate, you fight like a cow, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:34, Reply)

I remember...1990....91
There was this 'comic shop guy' who worked in the IT department at Xerox, where I was working. He was telling me about this picture group he ran, it had alts and binaries in the name. I didn't really know what he was talking about. So he showed me.

And that was how, 22 seconds after discovering the existence of the Internet, I was looking at a picture of a man standing on a stool fucking a cow, while his friend kindly held the tail out of the way for him.
( Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:26, Reply)

Anyone remember Neopets?
We started having "Internet" lessons when I was in middle school. Basically you could do anything you wanted, as long as it was online and not too dodgy. Cue a lesson- so an hour every week- where we were getting graded on our ability to collect Neopoints and win Destruct-O-Match.

The teacher who led the class made sure we all typed the "HTTP colon forward dash forward dash" bit of the URL, though. Very useful.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:23, 1 reply)

zelda
when i first discovered the internet(not that long ago, tbh), i pretty much ignored it and chose to simply play solitaire on the computer instead.
then, some utter bastard(he fucking knows who he is) introduced me to the legend of zelda: ocarina of time. i was a woman obsessed. i HAD to complete that game. unfortunately, i was a bit crap at it. but, lo! i had the internet! surely something on there could help me, yes?
as it happens, it could. i discvovered an ocarina of time walkthrough and pretty much cheated my way to the end of the game. this was spoiled somewhat by the sense of underwhelm-ment i felt.
now, i spend most of my time on here, facebook, wikipedia and looking at animated kittens, just like everybody else.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:22, Reply)

I want to believe.
The first time I saw the internet in action (apart from a friend talking about Lord of the Rings on a 14.4 noise box) was at an open day at Strathclyde University.

The idea is that you visit the departments, talk to the lecturers and ultimately decide if you want to waste thousands of tax payers' pounds at their institution or at another one across town.

What really happened was that they pointed at the Chemistry labs, impressive sports facilities and then directed us towards the computer labs. Fifty 17 year olds, all geeky enough to want to study science within a commutable distance from home.

"This is the internet - who likes Monty Python scripts?"

Like children with edible paint in a wedding dress shop, we didn't know where to start. Except our mate, he was straight onto the www.XFILESfansitewhatever.com.

It was amazing, there were moving graphics, official looking logos and FBI case notes. We turned the screen so no-one could see what we were witnessing, we were going covert, we were on to something.

Then he clicked on a secret logo, and entered a password...

Me: "Holy shit... like, um....how real is this.......?"

And that was the first time I felt like my Dad does now - he's always the millionth visitor, every time; he can't believe his luck.

Fuck you the internet.
( The Lurker Plenty One, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 13:10, 2 replies)

Aminet
I got myself a 14.4k modem back in 94 and logged onto BBS's that year for christmas I got a 12 month of dialup from Demon and spent ages downloading anything and everything off aminet.

Then I discovered newsgroups and spent the next few years on alt.binaries.pictures.boobs
(BiggestNizzy your company name here pm for rates., Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:55, Reply)

No adverts.
That was the beauty of it. You could read the whole screen without having to completely ignore the right hand side. Now the Internet knows everything about me and offers me pictures of girls in Aylesbury who want to be my friend.

Yes, I know, I can use AdBlock. But then I might miss something.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:52, 3 replies)

After discovering the internet, I spent three months looking at pictures of kittens before I realised the world wide web was my oyster.

( girlinthehole, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:46, 1 reply)

Compuserve
They had their own sort of browser/portal thing, which wasn't integrated into the WWW. You logged in via, and only got to see what they had on their system, which was all rather dull.

It took me about 4 months to work out that in the background you had a fairly standard internet connection going, so firing up a browser while connected to Compuserve broke free of their limited pages.

Translation - It took me 4 months to find any porn in the Internet.


[edit] This would be around 1994.
(username failed moderation, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:35, 2 replies)

I have decided to delete this reply because it was so boring.
Instead, here's a picture of a cock.


(ubergeekian, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:28, 3 replies)

Peter Kay was right
It really was quicker to look stuff up on Teletext

Booked it, packed it, fucked off.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:23, 1 reply)

At college
our IT setup was such that if you changed the browser homepage, it stuck for the next user. Pr0n ahoy!

Didn't really think it through though as they obviously knew who'd logged on last.

What was with the fondness for marquee text on Geoshitties pages?
( M3rx likes the Asian ladies, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:22, Reply)

Ah the joys of waiting for pictures to download, one line of pixels at a time
As a Top Tip in Viz at the time had it - Online pornographers: save your users' time by simply posting the images upside down so that the minge is at the top.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:12, Reply)

BOOBS!
Via a 28.8k modem, in 256 colours...

...it's quicker to turn to pages of a bongo mag instead.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 22 Mar 2012, 12:01, 5 replies)

i was the first one on it, EVER

(Bappage, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 11:59, 1 reply)

coming first

(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Thu 22 Mar 2012, 11:58, Reply)