The Web Nostalgia
Currently perusing and comparing webhosting services, I went off a tangent in my head about how my perception of the internet has evolved since I started using it…I’m not one of the early children of the web, but I’m not too new to it either. My first contact with it was in 1997, when our teacher in Applied English class decided that we had to be open to the world, and dragged us at the school library for a few sessions on the computers. From 1997 to 1999, I went on accessing websites sporadically from college computers, when I had some time to surf; my main researches at the time were on the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Enoch, and websites related to Mage: The Ascension, so my use of the internet was a very basic one. Later on in 1999, the friend who was to become my boyfriend convinced me to take an e-mail address at the university, which I did: I had discovered the joys of e-mailing! From there, my horizons expanded, and by year 2000, I would access the web everyday, or almost.I suppose that all of us who went to gradually use this tool had our little lightbulb moments, as well as stupid beliefs on which we stood corrected later on. Here are some of the things I remember, mainly from these 1997-1999 years. In a way, it’s very funny:
- AltaVista and Lycos were the “in” search-engines. This is what we had been told in high school. Google was still so very young.
- I thought web pages were eternal, and could never disappear.
- Geocities and Angelfire were the cream of the cream if you wanted to host a website for free.
- I believed that only Netscape could recognize URLs, and that to access a site from IE, I had to type the IP address in the URL bar (of course, I didn’t know it was called IP, these were just weird numbers to me). Please don’t ask me why I thought this. It’s a mystery even to myself. Of course, by then I’d never use IE, it was too weird.
- Sites using frames put me in a state of awe.
- Come to think of it, any website put me in a state of awe.
There are probably many others elements I could add to this list, that I can’t remember right now. In any case, these really made me laugh.
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Gone Away
I remember my first experience of the internet very clearly. It was in about 1995 and a friend who was a programmer for Husky Computers (they made seriously tough portable computers for outdoor use – I wonder if they’re still going…) persuaded me to have a look at it on his computer. He sat down and asked what I’d like to find information on. After a quick think, I said “Formula 1 motor racing” and off he went. We searched high and low and ended up in the International Pez Exhibition in Los Angeles (remember Pez? Those little plastic fliptop containers for candy). Never did find anything even remotely related to motor racing and I decided there and then that it was just as I had thought – a huge waste of time.Come to think of it, that must have put back my internet interest at least a couple of years…
Yzabel
I can imagine how this would indeed make it seem useless. To be honest, on my very first use of the internet, I didn’t really understand what it was all about–we were at school, but without anything specific to search, and with four or five students on a same computer, well, we anyway couldn’t accomodate everyone. It’s only in college that I’ve started to really feel how powerful this tool could be.Of course, back in 1995, there were a lot less sites than nowadays, and probably search engines algorithms weren’t that perfect to start with, so the results you got isn’t that surprising 😉
Jennifer
Okay in 1997 I was a senior in high school and and I knew such a thing as the internet existed…My aunt (a huge computer person) would bring us online when she visited. Then I went to college and I got an email address and I remember emailing my parents every day…but I don’t remember when I realized ‘webpages’ and the oh so much fun I could have with them or the information I could find. I do know though by the time I graduated I couldn’t go a day without checking my email or visiting certain sites…And now I’m writing online diaries and creating my own webpages! All this with in an 8 year period. It’s scary. What happened to the days where I never turned on a computer?
Yzabel
For me, these days disappeared on the moment I got my own computer. I’d turn it on everyday just for the sheer pleasure of using a word processor!
Jennifer
Yeah I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t use my computer…if you took it away from me…why that’d be the best way to torture me. I’d tell you anything to get it back!
Yzabel
Hee hee. Take it away from me, and I’d probably die from frustration and from starting to eat my own members in the hopes of calming it 😉
Elvira Black
I think we started using pc’s circa 1987, but the internet (at least for us regular folks) was still a long ways away. I worked for a university publications office, and the old clunky DOS system, complete with floppy floppy disks, was the rule of the day.Little by little, more of our production was done in house–first typesetting, then computerized layout with PageMaker, and finally simply sending a totally composed disk to the printer for full-color reproduction. As a result, I think the typesetting, paste up and even printing businesses have been pushed to extinction as a result of all this DIY tech.When we finally got hooked up to the internet at work–around 1997-ish–at first I was completely clueless and intimidated. But soon I was researching all sorts of sites, e-mailing freelance articles to newspapers, and so on.When I went for my master’s, there was no internet available. It boggles my mind how much easier it would have been to do research and access documents on line. Instead, I spent countless hours in the microfiche stalls, fiddling with old reels of tape, or perusing fat reference books to try to hunt down an old article or document.In any case, now I really couldn’t live without it!