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

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

I'd got over the science-fiction stage before I left high school and by 6th form I was ph34rs0m3ly nindie. Actually it was an uncomfortable Manics-fan endphase -> considerably more nindie than YEW phase. I might still be in it. I dunno.

Also I have always had zero interest in role-playing, which I suppose helps!

[mooism.livejournal.com]

It used to be src.doc.ic.ac.uk.

!

[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.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

I remember being introduced to Yahoo in, oh, 1995 probably, and wasting time looking through all the various categories they had. Medical imaging, slices through a human body, something like that.

But Yahoo wasn’t a search engine back then. The first proper search engine I used was Altavista.

[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.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Reliable dragon punches? Do tell!

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Is it some kind of... flashing role-playing game?!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

No, but weapon concealment codes run P(ocket), J(acket), T(renchcoat). So if you wanted to cause any real damage, a trenchcoat was de rigeur.

[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 ;-)

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

yes - mac software/shareware - I'd save the files to floppy and take them home to my SE30 (with external 640x480 colour screen - it was great). Perhaps I should have a 9" bw mac out full of games at the party?

The other thing about the internet that I now still relish is bands - intsead of hoping you'd see some support band listed as playing again somewhere, you copuld come home from a gig, look them up, find a website & mailing list... I think I spent serious amounts of time at work going through www.ubl.com, the 'ultimate band list' site. It appears to be still going, kind of.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Hey, hey, listen to this. Are you saying you were trying to conceal a big weapon, Alex, are you? Hahahaha, hahahaa!

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

I remember asking for good websites on IRC and being told about ubl!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

[Using the keypad notation - look at the numeric keypad on your pooter.]

There are three tricks to doing a reliable DP. Most beginners get all three wrong, but more experienced players who fail are likely messing up point 3 only. Always practice with 'jab' punches, because you want to be able to spot easily when you've pressed the button at the wrong moment. Also, have your character face left until you're moderately good at them, because left-facing DP is easier for most people.

* The move may be advertised as 421J, but really it's 21J, because it's easy to hold the stick at 1 without needing the right timing.

* If you mentally envisage the move as involving a change of stick direction from 1-2 to 2-1, you will screw it up more, because you will focus on "hitting" the 2 and overshoot or undershoot. Instead, think of it as being a single short drag of the stick round the outside edge of the ring to point 1. The starting point of the drag will then come quite naturally. The endpoint is fairly easy too because diagonals are easy to find - give the stick a hard and very positive pull at the end. Ideally, the position of the back of your hand should be such that position 1 is the most 'comfortable' anyway, so you naturally slide into it. If in doubt, overshoot, because then you'll get a fireball, which will at least tell you what's wrong !

* The thing to focus on consciously is the timing of the button press. People who mess up dragon punches always assume they're messing up the controller move when really they're getting the button timing wrong. You can practice the button timing using Guile/Charlie sonic booms or Blanka's ball, because it's simultaneous.

If you still have trouble, one useful exercise is to practice not doing fireballs ! Start the stick at 2 and roll it rapidly forward, hitting Jab. If you get a fireball, you've overshot ! Once you can do this reliably and not get a fireball, start the stick at 4 and then do it and you'll get a dragon punch.

Once you get over 75% or so reliability, try doing 214J~21J ! If done correctly, this will give you a fast fireball into dragon punch sequence. Using the above technique it feels horrible when you get it wrong, but feels very natural when you get it right because even though the movement is almost continuous, there's a psychological pause at the end of the fireball part.

For all you Zero-3 players, 214J~21J is more importantly used for two of Guy's supercombis. (Who, me, biassed ?!)

[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...

[stiofan.livejournal.com]

That was a long time ago now, it was probably something music related but I wouldn't swear to it. I'd be surprised if it turned up anything I was after at the time as well.