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.

[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.

[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.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I didn't have you pegged as a roleplayer... this is exactly the sort of stuff I was hoping for!

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Sound files from Get Smart on gopher.

[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.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Gopher! You get the geek prize.

[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.

[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....

[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...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I haven't indulged in years, but at school it was another story. Vampire was one of the reasons I bought my first trenchcoat!

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

No idea.

[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.

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).

[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 !

[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.

[randalf.livejournal.com]

Heh, scarily accurate ;) A lot of 24-point Times New Roman in various colours as well... :P

As for Bob's books, I think what did it for me was looking back at that 5th/6th book (whichever one I gave up on) and went through the following train of thought:

1. I have just forged through over x-hundred pages of this stuff. Again.

2. Nothing seems to have moved on since the last book.

3. Rand al' Thor isn't going mad - he's just an angsty Goth without the makeup.

4. Why do all these women want to shag him? Subtle author fantasy?

5. These women with the spooky powers are a whiny bunch aren't they?

6. Why is it taking so long for the Final Battle? And thus to:

7. These books will never end. These are this man's pension fund.

I decided at that point I wasn't all that fussed about them anymore. It's a shame really, since the original premise in the first couple of books was pretty good but if you take out the fluff, the actual story could have been wrapped up years ago.

[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...

[randalf.livejournal.com]

Jesus! I've just done a quick check on Amazon. The next book is due out in October 2005 and is the eleventh book in the series! The synopsis given suggests that this is not the last one either.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I always used to use Altavista, and I remember discovering Google and thinking it was The Best Thing Ever -- just because it was so clean and uncluttered and easy to use. That'd've been in late 1998 or maybe early 1999... I remember being asked in an interview for a libraryish job in 1999 what search engine I used, and saying "Google", and getting a surprised-and-pleased response. (Not that I got the job, mind.) So, not quite "I liked it before it was famous" but close! 8-)