a brand-new form of public humiliation

[devi]

Late last night in the pub I was waxing nostalgic to miss_newham about talkers and BBSs and all things telnet-based, and remembering a world where that was practically all there was to the internet. When I got to college in 1994 there was one single computer connected to the Web in the whole university. There were always massive queues at it, and when you finally got to use it, you'd sit there for half an hour waiting for a little picture of an envelope to download...

Anyway, in my half-drunk and achy state I blurted out that the first thing I ever looked up on the web was (oh god) Robert Jordan. Yes, the Wheel of Time fantasy author. (Oh god the shame.) And I was wondering if other people had similar embarrassments in their past, like that first record you bought that you never want people to find out about.

What was the first thing you (consciously, deliberately) searched for on the web? Set homepages that just popped up, like your college homepage, don't count. Go on, I've owned up, now it's your turn.

Comments

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Rules for playing Highlanders in the roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Ok, these weren't the first things I looked up, but I remember reading them online in, er, I'm going to say 1993 or 94 and not being all that terribly impressed, then again my memory of them is extremely hazy.

[publicansdecoy.livejournal.com]

Mansun fan sites, no doubt.

-x-

[elethe.livejournal.com]

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys

About a minute and a half later I discovered slash.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Sound files from Get Smart on gopher.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Gopher! You get the geek prize.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Hmm, vaugely unsurprisingly I'm pretty sure it was Discworld related stuff. I really was a terribly fanboy at that point in time.

[randalf.livejournal.com]

Ah, good old Bob! God help me, but I waded through about the first six books before I had to give them up. And people say J K Rowling needs a good editor...

How many books has he churned out in that series now - I lost count?

Web searches in the age of Spry Mosaic? I cannot in all honesty remember what I looked for although I *do* recall once in the Comp. Sci. computer room seeing a guy on the computer next to me browsing the PlayBoy website. It seemed to lack anything "saucy" in content and had the HTML style most usually seen these days on your average Geocities homepage.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I bet it had those rainbow-coloured horizontal rules. And a little yellow and black man saying 'under construction'...

RJ: I got to the start of Book 7 and just couldn't cram any more of his turgid prose into my poor brain. I don't know or care what the series is doing at the moment. Funny how you can love things so much and then become so indifferent to them.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Actually I know this!! It was a Japanese record label and then the first place to import vinyl killers! I'm such a smug hipster... and then it would have been Belle & Sebastian and Yo La Tengo sites.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Ye gods, did you spring from your mother's womb as an already fully-formed indie kid?

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

Argh. This is a subject of some embarrassment to me. Y'see, Google a few years back made their entire Usenet feed publicly searchable (formerly DejaNews, I think) which means you can find almost everything a young 17 year old al_fruitbat wrote when he arrived at college in 1994 and discovered this thing called JANET and the one computer that connected to teh Intarweb, and that one could argue with thousands (at the time) of other students from across the world via newsgroups devoted to Sci-Fi, Dune, Horror, Clive Barker, Acorn and ZX Spectrum computers and [shudder] Anne Rice, amongst others.

A few months later, I remember convincing the admin of the 'puter room network to install this new thing called NCSA Mosaic, which was a 'graphical gopher' program....

Fret not...

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

You can find 17-year-old huskyteer's Quantum Leap fanfic too.

[randalf.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was more of an ftp-er so I did spend some time randomly anonymously ftp-ing to other academic ftp sites and seeing what they had! Various random jpg's on the whole as I recall...

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

No idea.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Phew. I was worrying that I was going to be the only one who hadn't a clue.

I know the first search engine I used (lycos, when is was still at a .edu address), and I know I was using Lynx to read the results (which were usually 90% porn/irrelevant/both). All of which combined to convince me that you could never find what you wanted anyway.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

When I started using the internet, there was no 'search' per se.

But the first thing I really used it for besides receiving email was to read the usenet group alt.games.sf2. Which is where I learned how to pull off reliable dragon punches.

Embarassing ? I don't think so, but then I generally embrace all geek culture as positive !

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Reliable dragon punches? Do tell!

[j4.livejournal.com]

On the web, or on the internet? First things I searched for on the internet were probably shareware games for the Mac on ftp sites (somewhere called 'sunsite' something or other used to be a good place to find stuff, but I can't remember what it was & google isn't helping patch up my shaky memory) in the very early 1990s.

I'm ashamed to say that I honestly don't remember the first time I used the web. But then I don't remember it being a big event; it just sort of crept in, as something that was a bit like Gopher ... I had a bit of a non-standard relationship with the whole home computing revolution type thing, though.

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

Definitely sunsite! I remember that, cos I was downloading Acorn shareware! I seem to remember that it had a preferential relationship with .ac.uk domains though. Google knows about somewhere called sunsite.ic.ac.uk, which sounds familiar...

[oneofthose.livejournal.com]

My first ever contact with the net was in 1996. dickon_edwards took me to an internet cafe and showed me Diana Ross's website. We emailed it saying we'd written a song for her to sing. She never replied.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Please may I use "he took me to an internet cafe and showed me Diana Ross's website" as one of the lyrics in my next song? Despite from the fact I can't figure out a way to make it scan I'm sure Gurls Aloud would take it.

[snowballjane.livejournal.com]

Also 1994, and I can't remember the search terms but it was this site (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/labyrinth-home.html) I found. And I was so smug, because I do recall that I was searching for early lit stuff because my scientist chums were standing behind me telling me the internet was useless for my subject.

[saffronra.livejournal.com]

Blake's 7 on AltaVista in the mid 90s... Like Elethe, this lead to my discovery of slash about a minute and a half later. All went downhill from there.

[triskellian]

When I came up to university in 1995, I leapt straight into email, newsgroups and chat, and was using telnet (to Mono, of course) soon afterwards. A bit later, I spent a while wandering around what then existed of the web and concluded that there was nothing interesting on it, or if there was, I couldn't find it.

Sometime in 1997 I started trying to convince my then-employer that we needed a website, so the web had obviously crept up on me in the intervening time, but I can't remember any of my early use of it. Which is probably a good thing ;-)

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

I'm such a boring sod. My first use of the internet in 1994 was to ytalk and email other people at the uni (we actually had heaps of terminals - 4-5 computer rooms from memory on the campus itself, and a room full of windows machines at our accomodation. That'll happen when your university helps develop the tcp-ip protocol, not that I knew that at the time). My second use was to log onto a MUD, and my third use was to use Lynx to look up some stuff for my psychology degree.

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

On consideration, I think it was a quiz about Scandinavian pop music which was on the University of Hull's Department of Scandinavian Studies website. I just went to see if I could find you a link, but I'd forgotten for a minute that they'd CLOSED MY DEPARTMENT DOWN. Grrrrowl.

hah

[geeveecatullus.livejournal.com]

I tried to find something for my dad back in 1996 or so
Addresses of some places.

[darklily.livejournal.com]

Foxes. As in the small red furry creatures. Which we did eventually find amid the pornography...

[elethe.livejournal.com]

I didn't get to use the internet until October 1999, though. And it took me some weeks to work out how to use email.

[primavera.livejournal.com]

Comic strips. Also "Babylon 5," and frogs.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

The first search I did was in a now-long-defunct cybercafe in Temple Bar, and was on "Dungeons & Dragons".

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kent/]

I genuinely can't remember. It might well have been roleplaying related. It might even have been for porn. Remember that kids, when you had to search if you wanted porn on tha Intarweb?

I guess my first internet search must have been well over ten years ago now, but I'd have thought it would have been a sufficiently seminal experience that I'd remember anyway.

[sshi.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what my first web search was (probably something animation related, cos that job was the first place I got web access), but I do remember reading what I think was the first 'are blue dragon riders gay?' flame-war on alt.fan.pern in about 1992. Didn't figure out how to post at the time, thankfully...