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

[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.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Oh, the fun of trying to convince admins that you needed the Web, Usenet groups etc for academic purposes! I got rec.arts.sf.written on the newsfeed by claiming my next essay was about sci-fi (it was about dystopias and utopias, so not a *total* lie).