Not that old but feeling it
My mate at Uni had a computer as he was studying 'Computer Science'. After getting tired of playing Doom on it, we decided to stick the whole setup on a dining trolley and wheel it into the kitchen, as there was only one phone in the building and it was internal only. He had worked out that using the newly purchased £250 'modem', we could dial into his department's computers and from there, out on to the internet.

In the dead of night, shitting ourselves because it was strictly forbidden, we slowly pushed the whole lot into the kitchen. He plugged it in and then began typing away like Ferris Bueller in War Games. A few attempts later, and it said something like 'Hello' in binary.

He ran a program called 'Telnet' which connected us to 'Janet' and the magic of the internet was before us.

Basically, there was a load of green text. We could look at which books were in all the University libraries across the world and a few other boring bits of crap.

We never did it again until months later he announced the arrival of a new program called 'Mosaic'. This heralded the potential of images through the internet and more importantly, porn. It hadn't been spoken about, but we knew what we were looking for.

We installed the browser, wheeled the trolley back into the kitchen, with the massive PC and logged in.

It worked first time and we went to 'Search', probably Altavista or the one with the dog. This time, all we found was the NASA website, the FBI 10 most wanted page and a site about how to make bombs. Still shit basically.

It probably took another 10 years after that to stream a 30 second porn movie without buffering and the internet was finally able to reach it's true potential.
(jimbobaggins, Sat 24 Mar 2012, 21:05, Reply)