what was your first experience of the
internet
first experience of the internet doing
me any good
actually didn't
come
properly you know until 1984 with emo
and you're talking 1969 so in the
meantime it was that it was just for a
small select few i think i've had the
internet since i was a baby because my
dad was always into it we started with a
56k modem and so that took a long time
to connect a lot of beeps i used to be
able to hum it back exactly i don't
think i'd do it i could do it now um
no no
didn't you did you no no
it was 15 years before i saw any benefit
from that so-called breakthrough
yeah what was that benefit just it was
email so the first thing i remember was
in 1984 when i was a phd student at the
university of sheffield and we were
connected to the janet net for the first
time and we got access to email
so a group of
five or six of us gathered around the
terminal and sent an email to edinburgh
to andrew blake who was recently
the director of the touring institute
and we sent him an email that said hello
andrew
we then waited three days for it to
arrive and we had to keep bringing him
up to find out when it had got there but
it did get there i remember using old
computers that were next networked up in
my primary school they were like bbc
computers and we were doing some nomad
game
and that was networked at least whether
it was online i'm not sure i think
mostly it was web access and
i was building websites fairly young at
15 which was fun to do but um
yeah just slow loading noisy internets
as i remember one of my first memories i
guess is sitting in an internet cafe in
cambridge a number of years ago
with a
one of the first web browsers so
was it i won't say like netscape or
something like this and opening up the
web browser and actually seeing web
pages for like the first time
really um that was probably
my one of my first memories i this must
have been i'd 25
years ago so you know not a long time
ago but
yeah a while ago so i was
in university of technical university of
berlin
and we had yeah we had the first um
connection to arpanet or whatever it was
at the time
and um
so what i was doing yes i i was i was
subscribed to the uh to the anarchy
mailing list which was pretty pretty
interesting
so my dad worked at bt uh during the 90s
so he was involved with
like really helping roll the internet
out so it was quite cutting edge in our
house and i remember we had dial up and
having to
hang up the phone every time we wanted
to use the internet i used to drive my
mum's spare because she'd want us to get
off in case somebody called well one of
the first times i went online i started
reading frac which is a uh
an ascii only
digital magic magazine about how to
hack telephones in particular and and
how to get free onto the
onto the internet system and yeah i just
thought it was fantastic so for me i
think it was going around my friend
allen's house and uh going on bulletin
board systems to arrange games of doom
2. so that was probably what the early
90s 94 85 something like that
and then coming home and learning about
apple's e-world which was a whole new
world for you i was really excited
thought
it's going to be gooeys now isn't it
you're going to have like a picture of
your town and you go to your little
email area and it was not like that it
was really bad
or this whole
community of people who are trying to
understand this a system that was still
being developed and it was sort of like
an active race of people trying to
figure out how it works and how you can
subvert it it
was took forever because the telcos
vested interests got in the way they
wanted to run the world and they had to
be told firmly that it wasn't just them
so yes of course if you were to ask me
uh
how if it took that long to get to email
how long did it take from the 1969 to
get to the world wide web and browsers
everywhere well
1994
it took 25 years for it to get
beneficial enough that people could
casually visit other sites and see web
pages and stuff
quite amazing
i don't actually remember
the first time i got on the internet um
it probably would have been at school i
would think
um we did eventually get america online
but i think i would have seen it first
at school
i sort of remember search engines coming
out i remember you know the early days
of searching for things um
and sort of being excited by that uh
and also curious you know i remember
contributing to
the open directory something like that i
remember like about being like an
independent yahoo directory equivalent i
remember sort of adding sites to that
and sort of
you know playing my part in like you
know as a very young child contributing
to what i thought was going to be the
future of how people find things
yeah it was
a really long time ago when i was using
one of those all more than uh
28 kilobytes that took like two minutes
to connect and then my father was saying
what the hell is that noise that you
have when you take the phone um i think
it was like back in spain something
called terra.s that then collapsed at
some point uh i was pretty fun actually
but that's the only uh search engine
that we had at the time and you couldn't
do much with it to be honest yeah but
that's quite
quite fun at the time we got an amazing
three kilobytes per second download you
know so that was maybe a
you know if you were downloading an mp3
that would be
you know quite a while it would take as
opposed to fractions of a second you had
the phone cable that i was dragging
through the whole house and you'd have
to ask the parents because it was like
oh there was still
i'm from luxembourg so we still had a
different currency and it cost like you
know five francs per minute to use the
internet and grandma couldn't call yes
the good old days i do remember that as
soon as i understood what the internet
was and how it worked i immediately
started trying to make my own website
um which i did
was terrible
uh
but that's my my my early memories of
the internet are
like trying to write html in all caps
in notepad
it was a simpler time i was thinking
last night about bulletin boards and the
fact that actually with social media
we're just going back to doing exactly
the same things now it's great you know
we're just posting stuff for people to
see it's the same stuff the first stuff
i remember i suppose
is listening to a modem dial up to
connect to web pages
not there were that many web pages then
but the ones that did exist seem to be
absolutely loaded with blinking flashing
banners saying under construction and
garish cyan fonts
as a nightmare first memory of using the
internet was in 1994
my brother just got back from university
and had found out about the internet and
so when we had to have it at home
and so we bought a 28 8 us robotics
modem for our acorn archimedes a3000
which was the family computer you
couldn't do much web browsing at the
time because the a3000 wasn't much good
at it
so i spent a lot of time on telnet chat
rooms so they were called talkers at the
time uh it was a bit like a bbs you
could log on and talk to people on in
kind of a terminal interface
um so i spent hours on that and then it
all came crashing down when after a
month of having that we got the phone
bill uh which was for about 150 pounds
basically all of me all for my dial-up
internet talking uh and from then on i
was limited to half an hour a day on the
internet when i started using the
internet i i was doing my
master's uh studies so
and it was back in my country of aryan
origin in in mexico in a city called
chihuahua like the dock felt pretty
exciting you know i guess that's
probably one of the reasons i went into
computer science is you kind of saw this
massive opportunity of
you know all this suddenly all this
stuff's available and there's things we
can do with it and yeah let's try and
avoid some of the more
visually unappealing fonts but
there's things we can do with the
internet right i've never got any better
at that by the way websites were a lot
simpler back then so i remember the
start of google it looked kind of the
same but you know different font and
stuff it was obviously not quite the
juggernaut it is now um and and then
just fun websites like hamsterdance.com
i don't know if you remember this no
um so animated uh gifts were a big thing
back in the uh late 90s uh i mean gifts
are coming back a bit actually but i
just want to say that you know we we
started this you know we are my
generation started the animated gif in a
big way uh so hamsterdam.com i went on
the way back machine the internet
archive and found it and this is
hamsterdance.com it had fun music yeah
it had lots of animated hamster gifs it
serves no purpose at all oh that's still
what the internet's for actually serving
very little purpose but you know back
then they took it to a different level
uh so yeah hamsterdance.com and other
animated gif related nonsense can we put
year on this roughly well this i'm
looking here at two thousand but i would
say 1999 2000 some for somewhere around
that we we you didn't start i mean
facebook didn't exist until 2004. so
this was before that
websites were if you look down websites
were mostly text hit counters at the
bottom of websites were a big deal right
we you know people wanted you to know
that a thousand people have been to
their website
yeah exactly it's just like that it's
just like that if you look the oldest
houston manager the messages about me is
that i had a motorbike accident
in
1980
something 81 or something 82 i don't
know
and
the first big embarrassment i i had for
a company i developed a passer generator
and common lisp and then somebody asked
the interest in the code and i was going
to send it to him
and then i sent it to the mailing list
and and
i wasn't supposed to do this and then he
he told me oh this uh your code is now
already in texas and where else and i
said
i just i just posted the code
which i've written for this company on
the on the internet so that was one of
my first embarrassments in misusing the
internet yeah
so i think the first time i really
remember going online was probably at
primary school um and we used to have
some math lessons in the computer room
where we get to play maths games
very educational online
um
[Applause]
[Music]
forgot about that
um i remember
asking my dad like multiple times how do
i spell google um
i can never remember and
before google i remember sort of typing
in howtoprogram.com and other things.com
in the hope that it would find
you know something interesting but but
actually website's loaded nice and
quickly even on a 56k modem because
there's really only about five images
and some text on here so you know maybe
it wasn't so bad
i think all my friends at primary school
had email addresses by the final year
and we'd be emailing each other after
school
i lived in a house with 11 guys 11
students and
for quite a long time and i built our
own
server that allowed everybody to
you know use the internet through it and
and actually we first used a coaxial
cable it was an end-to-end cable
but then at some point we moved to
ethernet
but i was amazed how at that time
all passwords were just sent on plain
text because i wrote the server i could
drop all the packets and i could sniff
all the passwords and you know and
people didn't believe me that that that
was done and i just showed one of my one
of my student friends like look is that
your password he said damn yeah i got it
what sort of era is this is we in the
90s so so i started going online in 1995
so that was very early so it was things
like gopher and telnet and and arcane
library methods there there was no
internet search yet at that time we had
aol in our house and we were
it was that annoying noise was dialing
in and get like three stages across and
a little aol person would move along and
then um
yeah and then every web page would be
like
loading
got a bit of a picture that's yeah that
seems to be my early memories i think
when i first started using the internet
we didn't use the web that much the
atari wasn't up to it particularly
before i got actual tcp connectivity one
of the things we did was we emailed
people and i can remember that i was a
big fan of babylon 5. still am and at
that time the writer joe michael
straczynski had his email address public
and i remember emailing him with
questions about
things in the show and he would respond
so that was great you sort of emailing
the people who are creating things well
my first memories of going online i was
in a student house in the early 90s and
a friend of mine bought a 14 400 modem
and
he had somehow come up well discovered
some phone numbers for bbs's bulletin
board systems i think it was bulletin
board system anyway bbs is where you
could go onto
a bulletin board and leave posts or read
things or download things from them and
this bbs would allow them you to have a
certain amount of internet time through
their system so that was my first memory
of going online we sent a few emails we
looked at a few things and i suppose it
went from there fifty years of the
internet this week phil what's your
memories of the internet unfortunately
i'm now nearly 52 and my memory is much
depleted and deteriorated compared to
what it used to be i can't really
remember it's it's ridiculous i can't
remember sending a first email um i
certainly i was at university between
1985 1990 for undergraduate degree and i
certainly remember mucking around with
the mainframes from looking around with
the waxes and and playing around but i
can't remember sending an email what i
can vividly remember however is going to
a synchrotron which is a particle
accelerator we condensed matter
physicists aren't so much interested in
the particles we're interested in the
light those particles give off and that
was in a place called daresbury which is
uh pretty well equidistant between
liverpool and manchester right in the
middle of liverpool and manchester and i
remember going there to do an experiment
and sending an excited email back saying
you won't believe it they've got a
browser here and you can actually see
images on it it downloads images and
puts it without any sort of ftp stuff
and that's my overriding memory getting
so excited of a browser it was netscape
or not script as i used to call it um
that brought up the images and i
remember sort of
that type of thing
that's my overriding memory and of
course dial up but everybody says dial
up i'm sure
i had an amiga computer right this is
like an amiga
500 or 1200 i can't remember and i
remember spending hours downloading the
uh
debian 2.0 distribution from the
internet
uh this is probably you know it's
probably like 50 60 megabytes or
something like that hours and hours
downloading it so i can install it
because i'd heard about this linux thing
i was interested in it and so i i so i
was
downloading these packages and packages
and like gradually sort of installing it
on my on my amiga and that's sort of one
of the earliest things i remember i also
remember again sort of going on download
demos so you know people would write
these kind of demos for the amiga
pushing the hardware to the limit and
you know this is like two or three
megabytes
and you know it's like hours of
downloading just to kind of watch this
demo because you used to have to get
that stuff from public domain disks so
you'd send some money through the post
and say i want these disks and you'd get
these disks back in the post and so
being able to do that
via the internet was a kind of
completely different experience but you
know obviously it took a really really
long time i remember emailing a friend
who was in australia on a gap year
and they were on a university system
over there assuming that we'd be doing
backwards and forward emails so they
this email popped up and they sent a
reply and thought we'd be back on it but
we didn't go along online again for a
couple of days so
um yeah it was
it was definitely in its infancy
that sort of system for us as consumers
at home even though the internet was
obviously whatever it already was 20
years old or whatever it was already i
also remember actually with going back
to the amiga again spending hours trying
to configure
uh something called ami ttp which is
like a ttp stack
for the amiga um and it was really you
know i had no experience of using these
sorts of uh bit software like you know
networking software so i was spending
hours trying to configure it just to get
online and i completely failed and i
think we ended up buying some kind of
some other tcp stack software first time
i saw the internet
was when i was at work
and they brought in this computer and
plugged their modem in and went this is
a great new thing the internet we went
to the search thing and it brought back
hardly any results because there was
nothing on there so we kind of went come
back to us when there's actually things
on there a couple of years after that i
got an email address and started it was
actually a good communication tool and
things started appearing on the web and
it started actually being practical then
so but until then we'd use janet at
university but it wasn't didn't really
have internet connectivity all you could
do was talk to
students and academics so my first
memory of the internet is this ability
to see text images
from you know other places on earth i
wasn't there but i could read what other
people were saying and thinking that was
fantastic first electronic
communications through the
chat
uh programs at the time if i recall
correctly there was something called i
rc shot to be honest i don't get it i
can but yeah so i don't remember the
chat
thin
programs that will allow you to you know
talk to people that you haven't met
before and that was
strange but very interesting feeling
really the first things i can remember
which can't be the first things but it's
like um
using irc
uh using things like the undernet
and using ftp servers this type of thing
and i remember we did very early on we
did an oecd project that looked at
the use of digital technology and the
internet for education so we started
communicating and chatting via irc chat
rooms etc we were in the mass building
which is what we are today and
we didn't actually have a connection to
the outside world but psychology did
so you could connect across to
psychology's computer and dial up london
log into one of london's nodes and then
you could use the internet
very very slow and of course it was
going across satellite
so you connect to i don't know there
weren't very many sites but there were a
few places you could pick up software so
you'd log into those
but because it was going over a
satellite you typed like letter a
and it would take about three seconds
for the a to come back and
so
you start typing and then you get very
confused halfway through and have to
delete it all and this is all painfully
slow but we thought it was wonderful at
the time first time i used it
for my own
benefit was
trying to contact
alan guth in in
he was at mit he still is
one of the most famous cosmologists
alive
came up with the idea of inflation and i
wanted to visit the us i was a i was at
imperial
and we used to have to
go
up a corridor there was the only
computers where there were three three
computers up at the end of the corridor
and we'd have to go to this really dark
room
and the computers were
green little symbols going across them
that was the
font style
and you'd type in your message
and very and then send it and you'd hear
it go ping and each of the destinations
it was it was as if it was being carried
each line was pinging pinging pinging
and then eventually it pinged allen.guth
at mit
and it said message received and i
thought oh wow this is the first time
and then you have to wait about a day or
two days and then i kept going back and
got nothing and then
one day he said yeah come along come on
bro so i went over to her with the us
i saw alan guth i saw chandrasekhar
who won the nobel prize
so i i raised a tour i went to chicago i
went to mit i went to berkeley
and it was great
the internet the internet rules our
lives
another lecturer called hugh smith
and he had contacts with ucl and so we
got into this sort of internet and
arpanet and
early connections to that and i started
working on
email software to try and make sense of
all this stuff that was going on get rid
of all these exclamation marks