My First Encounter with the Internet (Circa 90s)

Today, I asked my class in PUBLISH to remember their first encounter with the Internet. Note that these students were born in the 90s, so I’m excited and curious to find out what was it like back then.

In my case, creating my first e-mail address on Hotmail (Dad, what is that?) was perhaps my first Internet experience. Using a dial-up modem to connect to the free web-based e-mail service, I was instantly hooked to the idea of me being able to send electronic mail (yes, that was what “e” meant) via this thing called the Internet. It was mind-blowing.

I remember when the Internet also shifted from being all text-based (i.e. BBS — as in bulletin board systems) to being what it is now — the web. Terms like, “I could surf the web,” and “E-mail me” became ingrained into our language. I was already into computers when I was in high school in the 80s. But I was doing programming. Thus, when the Internet came to be in the mid-90s, e-mail was our killer app! (My kids would be amazed to even find this out).

Then there was Yahoo!

After Hotmail, I quickly created by Yahoo! account (I still have the email address), using a weird name that was combined with a number. For some reason, Yahoo! didn’t allow us back then to have personalized e-mail addresses. Thus, you will find funny and ridiculous email addresses like beatiful_girl2019@yahoo.com or hunkydory_1996@yahoo.com. Yahoo! gave me a glimpse of what’s out there, as it provided a directory of the Internet.

Prior to having Yahoo! or the web, I had to memorize gopher sites, and be in e-mail newsgroups (a newsgroup is a group email where people can subscribe — very similar to a newsletter), where specialized information were found. I even bought a book about the Internet that listed the top websites to visit.

Then, Google came along…

YouTube as my playground

It wasn’t Google that got me hooked to searching stuff online. It was in Yahoo! that I got the hang of doing searches online. However, when Google happened, followed by G-mail, Google just took over my life. Following those innovations, YouTube came along and that was it — how-to videos, illegally uploaded video clips of movies, TV series, and whatever content you could think off (yes, those funny vids, too) just exploded in my screen.

I started to love YouTube to the point of me becoming one of the creators of original videos shot using my mobile phone. I uploaded videos of me playing some guitar tunes, but minus the head. It was a headless video of me, showing my guitar chops and my love for blues or rock-influenced, instrumental stuff from the likes of Joe Satriani and classic rock legends like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

That’s me playing one song from my guitar idols.

How I felt about the Internet back then…

The Internet was my playground. It freed me from being a mere consumer of content to becoming a publisher of content. Around the early 2000, I discovered blogging (which was once called web logging). I started creating my own blog, chronicling my life, my work, and my passion. I was lucky because I was also in the middle of all the developments in the Internet, as I was thrust into writing about technology for a computer trade publication, and later a news website.

I was hooked on e-mail when the Internet began. But when the Internet allowed me to self-publish, I was indebted to this medium. I started meeting and knowing peers who were also into blogging, and I even got to judge a blogging competition under the news category. On top of my journalism work which also started around the mid-90s, I was witnessing a revolution, which to this day is still changing the way we do things.

From being a communications project of scientists to being everyone’s daily habit, the Internet has unleashed so much creativity, that it’s impossible NOT to find stuff that will blow your mind.

That for me was my first encounter with Internet — and it all started with a funny e-mail address, which to this day, I still have.