Today marks 25 years since I first got the Internet at home. Do not ask how I remember this date, just accept that I do. My brain actually does remember things sometimes, including frankly pointless things like this. I had been on the wonderful world of the WWW before this (at the computer lab at UNSW) though I don’t recall exactly when, but it was sometime in 1994. IMDB was still the Cardiff Internet Movie Database at that time.
Anyway, the Internet came home on Saturday evening July 25th 1998. Old school friend Adrian set it up for me with a modem he’d, er, borrowed from work and life changed forever, sometimes for the better too. At that time I was still running my Windows 95 machine which had come with MSN pre-installed, as Windows 95 did, so I had an ISP built in all along. Easiest to just use what was already available. Also, preposterously expensive, cos, well, MSN’s dial-up chose to route its call through some long-distance regional line rather than one in Sydney, and we didn’t realise this until a phone bill for seven hundred dollars came in a fortnight or so later. That was nearly the end of the Internet in this house…
So a complaint was duly filed with MSN though we stuck with them and just made sure the number it called was local. However, after they kept trying to switch back to the long-distance number, we dropped them and went with an actual ISP based in here in Sydney. As a sign of just how different things were back then, my initial plan with them was, if I recall rightly, thirty dollars a month for 100Mb of downloads (the aforementioned “borrowed” modem was a 14.4kbps model too). Yes, one hundred MEGAbytes. More than that cost extra though I forget how much the rate was. And I rarely exceeded that, weirdly enough; these days I can go through 100Mb in minutes with what the Internet is like now, but back then about 3Mb a day was more than enough most days. And I wasn’t online the entire day like I am now. That 100Mb soon went up to 500Mb and then unlimited for the same cost (and the modem upgraded to 56kbps!) as things rapidly improved.
It was a different world back then, getting harder to remember what it was like as the years go by… Google only came into being a couple of months after I first went online at home, there was a whole panoply of search engines, hardly anyone knew who Elon Musk was, Usenet was still a thing and Facebook wasn’t, instant messengers were what passed for social media, even the ads weren’t quite as egregious as they would soon become… I kind of regret that world’s passing in some respects, for all its many undeniable issues I don’t think it was as psychotic as it often is these days.
I don’t think I have anything else to say cos most of us know the way things have gone since then, I don’t know if I even needed to say this. But 25 years is still quite a milestone so I thought it should be marked somehow. Like I said, though, just don’t ask me how I remember the date 25 years later when I barely remember things that happened a few days ago…
