The first time I ever used the internet was at a computer class back in the fall of 1996. This was when it was starting to reach the mainstream and it was all very fascinating. Not that I did anything interesting with this new technology though. The teacher for computer class was really a home and consumer science (I think that’s what the subject is called, it’s the class where you mainly cook) teacher who knew nothing about computers. She taught us how to create a Hotmail, search for things on Altavista and how to use chat rooms. That meant that computer class mostly was spent chatting with random guys in the Aftonbladet.se chat. Chat rooms were very different back then. Now I’d never set my virtual foot in the Aftonbladet chat because for the past ten years or so it’s mainly been a place where people hook up for cyber sex. It wasn’t like that in 1996 though. During all those hours I spent there as a kid I never saw anything inappropriate. Weird to think of isn’t it?

For two years I only used the internet in school but then in the fall of 1998 this new technology finally made it to my home. My dad bought a new computer (A modern one with Windows 1998, WHOA!) and connected it to the internet. Oh the arguments we had over this wonderful thing. Because back then we used a 56K dial up phone modem which made surfing a lot rather expensive. I ended up being allowed to use the internet one hour a day but of course I broke that rule frequently. Problem was connecting to the internet without anyone noticing was rather tricky back then. First of all while online the phone didn’t work, a rather obvious giveaway that something wasn’t right. Then there was the noise… You must remember the god awful noise those old modems made while connecting. With that sound ringing through the house the only time breaking the one hour a day rule was possible was when my parents weren’t at home or while they were sleeping. Of course my dad figured out that I did just that so he started removing the wire to the modem and hid it. I remember one time when my family was away for the night and I was looking forward to surfing for hours, only to discover that the wire to the modem was nowhere to be seen! The disappointment! Of course the times I did manage to break the one hour rule it was always discovered in the end anyway, because of a ever higher phone bill.

When we got a faster and cheaper internet (yay broadband) there was another problem. We still had a computer from 1998 with Windows 1998 and a total hard drive space of 24 GB. Originally the computer had only one hard drive of 4 GB but we bought another one after a couple of years. Imagine six people using a computer with a total hard drive space of 24 GB. We weren’t allowed to download anything. Partly because of the lack of space and partly because my parents thought everything contained viruses back then. Of course we (mostly me) did anyway. Not that downloading a few songs mattered really because that computer filled up very quickly just because we were so many people using it. A few weeks after reformatting it, it was back to taking a good five minutes to start. Another problem was that using more than two programs at a time often made it crash from working over it’s capacity. Now imagine that’s the computer I used and shared with five other people (oh my, the fights over computer time we’ve had through the years!) until early 2005 when I bought my first very own computer. My family held on to the one they bought in 1998 until 2008. By then I referred to it as the “stone age machine”.

So guys, when did you first use the internet? Got any interesting anecdotes of the early days of the online world?

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