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

[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 ;-)