Today’s poll is again without voting. Similar to the recent case of the first mobile phones, we will remember when and under what circumstances we first accessed the Internet. For the older ones, it was certainly at school or at work, the younger ones already grew up with the Internet at home. How was it for you?
Marek of Luton
It was in 1993. A classmate from elementary school, currently studying at the Czech Technical University, dragged me into a classroom in Dejvice with Unix terminals connected to the Internet. I still remember from that day ftp.uwp.edu, login anonymous and the path pub/music/lyrics where you could download the lyrics. Back then, it was basically impossible to get hold of them any other way, and suddenly I had the complete Beatles, Pink Floyd on diskettes… I finally found out what they were singing about.
Through another acquaintance, I only got to the same resource at the MUNI Faculty of Informatics after a long time. At that time, it was possible to send it directly to the central printer with almost no restrictions, and I had a large package of tractor paper. Or was the printer at CTU? I don’t know anymore. Only in the following years did the Internet reach my school, I remember the big computers with Sun terminals.
Filip Kůzel
At the gymnasium in the Informatics and computer technology subject classes. I don’t remember anything about the content, but I remember very vividly the first practical use. During breaks, I went to the classroom to send SMS via the free SMS gateway of mobile operators and thus save 2.90 CZK. The connectivity was so bad that sometimes I didn’t make it in 10 minutes 🙂
Lukas Václavík
The second level of elementary school, I think the year was 1998. At that time freemail from Seznam had just started, so I set up my first mailbox. I also registered ICQ with a six-digit number. I lost both of them later and today I don’t even remember the addresses. If I only get online once a week, that communication isn’t worth much. 🙂 So I downloaded images and MP3s on the Internet and then packaged and copied them onto floppy disks.
We had internet at home for a while sometime in 2000, but the expensive dial-up connection lasted about a month before my parents banned it. But back then I had other interests and used to go to the Internet sometimes in cafes and the library. I went through high school without a permanent connection. It wasn’t until 2006, when I went to college and started earning regularly, that I arranged a connection from a local provider. Wi-Fi with a speed of 512 kb/s for five kilos.
Petr Urban
It is difficult for me to pinpoint the exact point, the first time I saw the Internet with my own eyes was on my grandmother’s work computer. Apparently. But I didn’t work with him, it was really just a fleeting contact and I didn’t understand what the internet could be good for, which was proportional to my young age and needs.
At our home, the first computer with a dial-up connection was purchased later, and that was when I mainly discovered the Windows environment and the basic principles of working with a computer. In addition, the connection was expensive, so it was de facto reserved for parents. Over time, we switched to local Wi-Fi, which was noticeably faster and had unlimited data, and there I began to discover the beauty of the web, communicate via ICQ, etc.
No one could tear me away from the Internet. I quickly understood its advantages and saw at least some of its advantages. But in order to fulfill the assignment, my first contact was really just a meeting and without a deeper understanding, considering the age and the shortness of the experience.
Jakub Cizek
We first encountered the Internet at home quite early – sometime in the first half of the 90s. It was not yet the World Wide Web as we know it today, but a prehistoric BBSky in a DOS text interface. I was 11-12 at the time, my older brother (the only real kid in our family) took care of the computer, so even though I had my first email years before all my friends and schoolmates, the only person I could to send a message, he was my brother again.
BBS Sandbox (bbs.sandbox.cz)
Therefore, I discovered the true potential of the Internet only at the end of the millennium, when the speed of the dial-up connection jumped to a dizzying 56 kilobits per second and Internet Explorer could download at least a hundred embarrassing images with a resolution of 800 × 600 pixels overnight. One month I went overboard and had to pay my phone bill out of my pocket money.
Tomáš Holčík
I think I first encountered the Internet at the turn of 1994/1995 at the then Computer Press. Only two computers in the director’s office had connections, instead of graphic websites, text mode for e-mail and Gopher or FTP services sputtered. At home, I preferred to connect to BBS, where I downloaded the first games, pictures and music files (today the MOD extension is almost forgotten, but MP3 was not yet).
Back then, like today, development with AI was not expected to take years, but weeks or days, which is why we soon had fixed lines with permanently running modems from our homes to the company, which was already connected to the Internet. During 1995, the public’s hunger for the Internet was forced to explode fully with the autumn arrival of Windows 95, respectively its Plus package (which quickly became a standard part of the system) adding support for TCP/IP and Internet Explorer.
