There is a programme on television at the moment about getting people online in the UK. The presenter has been asking older people if they are online and if not why not. It occurred to me that I was very early online, actually one of the first in this island. I first went online on 9th December 1994.

When did you join up?

Sometime around 1996 or 1997 is the first time I can remember having Internet at home. My parents, I think, had Internet access at work prior to that, so we didn't have it at home until I was old enough to use it/need it for school.

I loved using the internet and back then it cost a whole lot more plus the PC than it does now, and it tied up the phone line when you went online, and were metered every minute you used. Many firms also charged a monthly fee on top of that so was really for the elite here when it first arrived. I went in an internet cafe around 1996 as I had some research to do, before that a friend used to do it for me as he had free access at university and printed everything out and gave it to me.

Once I'd used it myself the first time I was hooked and went to the library regularly where I got an hour free, and the odd friend's house if they let me as well. I had a list of sites to check I worked through and was content doing that till my neighbour presented me with a computer to do his accounts on rather than have to go there every week. You can see the exact day I went online at home as it's on my profile- this was the first site I joined of course!
17-2-2000

Towards the end of my working life in 2001 there were a few computers at the office with Internet access, and I used them for a few minutes now and again, sometimes for work-related matters and sometimes just for fun. One of the sites I discovered there, while looking for an answer to a trivia question, was Fun Trivia.

So when I retired in October 2001 I went online at home.

I was just looking at my papers from my first ISP, it was £175 per year and I had a dedicated telephone line for it and paid a higher rental fee on that line for unlimited free local calls. I think my total costs were about £300 a year for unlimited time online back then. I now pay £18.53 a month for my broadband so it is much cheaper now, and I was able to do away with that second phone line.

I remember sending messages with Gopher in 1991. I had no idea what I was doing but I thought it was so cool.
Sometime in 1994 my friends group set up an online message board, but we still had to FTP everything.
I have consulted IMDb since 1996-ish, had my first email account in 1998, but didn't have home internet connection until 2003.

We first got the Internet at home - on January 30th 2004. And not surprisingly, as soon as I got a acceptable email address, the first website I joined was here I had joined the quiz side the year before, and used my local library computers for my "Quiz Fix". The Internet has opened a new world for me!

Jane, I remember you before you were Jane Marple as well. I doubt many would remember me before I was satguru but one person here remembered answering my questions on day one at least.

It was in early 1995 for me, so Sue has me beat by a few months. I had a pentium based computer with a 90 mhz processor, a 14.4k baud modem and a dial-up connection. There really wasn't very much online back then, I frequented a few usenet newsgroups and an old bbs that a friend of mine had started years before but that was about it. About '97 or '98 the web really started to explode with new stuff and I got 56k service. Man, I thought I was really flyin'! About that time I found a really good game site called Uproar.com. On that site they had a particular interactive trivia game called "Cosmo's Conundrum" (later known as Trivia Free For All). It was really cool. It was a real-time game where you played against other users all over the world. It had a chat function, and they even had cash prizes. It was kind of similar to the "Last One Standing" game that was once available on this site. I spent many late nights on that site.

Then in May or June of 1999 I found FunTrivia, and have been here ever since. Btw, the reason I chose tim10001 as my user name here is because that is what it had been on the Uproar site. I really wish I had just chosen "Tim" here when I first joined, it was probably available at the time.

I'm not actually sure...I don't remember.

What I do remember though, is going on when I first started school. That was maybe 97-98? The school had internet then, and I must have used it at some point. I actually remember using it about year 3-4...research projects, games, etc.

At home I played DOS games.

Oooer, I had an 14.4k baud modem and a dial-up connection too, my friend's husband only had a 9.6k so we were super fast!

When we first got it my computer didn't have windows, we didn't have Netscape and really it was all a question of 'chatting' with the screen split in two.

I have the documents which came with my connection and have a book giving a brief history of the Internet and says that by mid 1994 there were more than 2.2 million registered hosts and some 30 million users. It also tells you not to 'shout' and gives a few smilies.

I had another book, not sure where it is now, and one of the suggestions was to call up the US President for a chat, it gave the address to type in - so my son did. What followed was surreal since someone 'claimed' to be the president came on then handed us over to the VP as ' he knows more about this stuff than me', more chat then we tried to end the call but it wouldn't end, it was bizarre, we had messages claiming to be from the FBI. Finally we switched the computer off at the wall to disconnect the chat session. Ten minutes or so later the phone rang and it was our ISP asking what we had been doing as they had had the FBI on the phone to them! So whatever the truth is we will never know but we definitely didn't type 'talk president' again!

Soon after this I upgraded the computer so that it had 4mb of RAM then we installed windows and Netscape, ah that was wonderful, we could visit the South Pole weather station to see what they were doing. We used to surf the net, clicking on links on one site and moving on that way, it so much fun back then.

Tim! Amazing. I was at Uproar.com too. It was great fun , and the chat function worked really well. I am still in touch with two of the members there(who met at the site and got married.)

Round about 1997 or 1998.

I joined here not long before having the Internet so sometime in early 2001. Before the internet we had a email only programme as the phone lines were too noisy for the 'net. Amazing the difference to now!

I can't remember the exact year but it was sometime in the mid/late 1980s. I worked in a university then and my office had the administration's first link into JANET - the Joint Academic Network. All British universities were connected to JANET and JANET was connected to the USA equivalent. Some academic departments had been connected before then but we were the first administrators. I remember staring at the terminal's black screen as we typed in the DOS commands, waited, waited some more, and then, hey it was the Library of Congress! I bet someone in the USA got the same thrill when he/she first got through to the British Museum.

I joined listservs quite early on, groups of users with a common interest who circulated emails to each other via a server, and some people on of my groups gradually began to use this "new thing where you can see pictures and text on the same screen". By 1995 I was running my own Web business. I went into various companies to demonstrate how the Web could have an impact on business - whenever I clicked on a hyperlink to go to the next page or to call up an image I could hear jaws drop all round the room. Some companies took a lot more persuading than others. One marketing director told me that his finance director would never pay for it "he refused to pay for a fax as no one else he knew had one, so lord knows what he'd say if I asked for that!"

I remember building a site for a Fortune 500 company in 1996 - their advertising agency was supposed to supply the images and wanted to know how they should send them. I said "shove them on a floppy disk" and could hear the horror down the phone line. I wanted images at no more than 96dpi, they never dealt in less than 3000 - in the end they sent a courier with glossies and we scanned them in. They said that with those standards "it would never catch on".

Back then we removed colours from images one by one until we got the filesize down so it would load reasonably quickly via a 14.4 modem - now I have 8MB at home and sometimes think it's too slow.

Not quite sure but it must have been in the early 80s.

I remember my dad talking about the new electronic mail system he had installed back in 1986 but it was another ten years before I first went online. Then four years later, much to my surprise, I started building websites for a living.

I knew about how the net worked because I had friends from that Berkeley generation that worked with them and saw the modem and the message system very early. Early eighties perhaps.

Here's something funny though in 1993. I had what I thought was a virus on my computer that had made trees out of everything. I was calling up the helpline and the guy was so nice but he said 'listen, I'd like to do this from here but I'll need you to hook up the modem on the back.' and I said 'what modem?' and he said there was one built in. my baby was asleep on the big bed and I knew the only viable phone outlet was about seven feet away and I needed a cable. The guy was talking me through it, but I knew if the baby woke up, I'd have to deal with him. I ended up telling the guy to try and I'd let it ring through. We hung up the phone. I rushed into the closet, got some wires, pulled the computer out just right without unplugging it, found the modem, then carefully pulled a king size bed just right, rigged it all up then, let the guy ring through. We used the split screen function to fix the problem and it wasn't a virus.
The baby slept through the whole process.

I used e mail at work in 1994 or so then, while using the computer from home with the library catalog, my assistant thought it would be funny to send me a banner...and I flipped out. I didn't know that using the university system from home could be seen by those at the lab.

In 1996, I began using AOL from France. It was kind of a closed circuit in many ways, but they had the most responsive customer service in those days, and in fact, I ended up wiring several neighbors' houses when the time came. When broadband came, I was soooo happy. The French phone service was very costly to run for the net.

What an interesting thread!

I don't remember the day or month, but I first went online in 1998. At first, a friend and I would go to a cyber café and read about different tv shows and things like that. Later that year we got internet connection at home and I got my first e-mail address. At first it was dial-up, then when broadband was available we switched to that.

It's amazing to think how much the Internet has advanced over the years, and how it'll keep moving forward.

I think it was around 1998 or thereabouts. I believe I was using AOL 5.

We started off with the BBC model B years ago, but didn't have a PC till my husband lost his job, and spent some of his redundancy money on a PC with all the trimmings, plus internet connection.

That would have been some time during the spring or summer of 1992.

At the time, I wasn't very interested. Now I feel lost without it.

Edited to add: are we talking about being online at home, or anywhere? I started working with computers in about 1983, and my husband a year or so later. It was home dial-up that had to wait nearly ten years.

Back in the early 90s I had a dial-up modem at work to access a BB for a word processing programme, MultiMate. That's all I did with it; the novelty lasted a few months .. didn't use the internet again at work until late 99 or early 2000.

We bought a dial-up modem at home in June 99, and I joined Bigpond for $29.95 p/mth (I've still got that email address). Migrated to cable in January 2000, and then to ADSL when we moved in March 2002 as cable wasn't available. At home we're using ADSL2+ for $69.95 p/mth with a 50gb download limit.

I stumbled across FT in July 99 then left it until Dec 99, when I joined the forums .. and I've been here ever since!

It was sometime in the late 1980's. It was dial up service at first and we could only go online after 11 pm as no one would call that late.

My first pc was a old model that the government offices were selling cheap and I got two for less that a hundred dollars.

It was a year later that we got cable internet and I haven't looked back since.

I use to spend twelve to fifteen hrs on here and I use to spend hours looking up books and doing the first FT quiz.

And as most of my close friends are in different time zones being a night Owl works well.

I use to spend hours and hours doing the quizzes at FT.

I try and upgrade my PC every few yrs to try and keep up to the technology.

I think it was the early 80s, I started playing a game online called Global Thermonuclear War, turns out it wasn't a game at all and..oh wait that was a movie.
I reckon it was about 1995 for me, but we had primitive phone connections around 1985 when I worked in a local library.

I think it was 1999-2000.At that time i was only have email check on website.