Happy Birthday Internet! (In Ireland anyway...)

Agent Smith

As Facebook – just a baby at eight – hurtles towards one of the most momentous IPOs in tech industry history, it almost went unobserved today that the internet as we know it in Ireland, at least, is 20 years old today.
Ireland's first ISP Ireland On-Line was formed out of Barry Flanagan's house in Galway on 15 May 1992. Flanagan, as he outlines in his blog, had no working capital except his credit card and nine months worth of dreams.
He recalls: "The aim was as simple as the name suggests - I wanted to put Ireland online. To bring the World to Ireland, and Ireland to the World.
“The Internet was as yet unheard of except within the hallowed halls of academia, but I was convinced that this global network had the potential to transform this country, and would ultimately affect every aspect of our lives and businesses, and allow a new generation of Irish to remain in Ireland yet enjoy the benefits of a global economy and opportunity," Flanagan said.
He says the Ireland of 1992 was vastly different from the place it is in 2012. "Looking back 20 years later, I am amazed at how much of what I predicted and imagined has come to pass. We live in an Ireland today which, although beset by some short-term setbacks, has been transformed in terms of our ability to transcend our borders and small population. Our opportunities are global, and our reach infinite."
When Flanagan began Ireland On-line he had the honour of leading and shaping an entirely new industry. The only rule was: there were no rules.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/27207-the-internet-in-ireland-is

So when were you hooked up? I remember the date we got it into our house, 14/09/2001 - Just after the World trade centre attacks

Agent Smith

tallus

1999 eircom dial up... Oh the heady 5KB per second mp3 downloads bring back (bad) memories.

galwayrush

I remember it taking over an hour to download a 3 minute song..

Balmed Out

Set up an email address in 95/96 with my wang 386 sx.

I remember the alta vista search engine and some Irish pub chat room and thats about all

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

dont remember when we got it in the house... was early enough as mam already had a computer/modem for work stuff so getting the IOL cd was all we needed


I remember the first time I tried the internet was on a st patricks day in a tiny net cafe in dublin. I had a little "guide to the internet" book and I tried to look up X-files stuff.
was awesome.

Robxxx7

What we have Internet !! When did that happen

danniemcq

20...

I don't feel so bad w*nking over it now

galwayrush

danniemcq wrote: »

20...

I don't feel so bad w*nking over it now

Diall up ****??
Suppose it did last longer.

rubberdiddies

First hooked up in August 1996 with club internet and a borrowed 14.4k modem. I thought it was the dogs b****x at the time. The sound of the dial up, eventually connecting after 6 attempts, the 5 mins to load up a grainy picture and the £100+ phone bills that my parents were none too pleased about.

Had my first website up and running in October that year and all. I was such a nerd.

Good times

TeresaDarling

I first got the internet in 1998 I was pregnant and on bed rest, I had great fun playing on it for hours every day on Eircom dial up, then we got the bill £550, it was nearly as much as the mortgage, my husband banned me from using it

I was one of the first to get broadband, it took about 18 hours to download and install, everything was left to download overnight, the first broadband was quicker, it only took 1 minutes to load a page instead of 3 but regularly lept back to dial up when you were not looking and another mad phone bill

TeresaDarling

That reminds me when clearwire came out, no ethernet cables but it took 3 of you 1 to watch pc signal, 1 to hold box up to the window and 1 to shout through the house

When you finally found the best reception in the corner of a window, out came the nails, sellotape and string

Sky King

galwayrush wrote: »

Diall up ****??
Suppose it did last longer.

C'MON! LOAD DAMN YOU! LOAD!

I think I can see a bit of nip...

danniemcq

Sky King wrote: »

C'MON! LOAD DAMN YOU! LOAD!

I think I can see a bit of nip...

and just as you splurge you realise that its the guys....

Cee-Jay-Cee

March 1998 my dad bought a computer and set it up for the internet. I had no real interest in it at first and i'd say it was a few months before i bothered with it and even then it was only to have a quick look at something and then leave it. My dad however was well into it and spent a few hours each night thrawling through ebay for bargains (that was when ebay was used by private sellers and there was genuine stuff to be found and not like now when its over run by commercial sellers) I think i got broadband in around 2002/2003 and TBH didnt notice a whole lot of difference over dial up as i was using Onspeed with dial-up which sped up the connection considerably.

1892 150 150

danniemcq

on topic though i believe it was around 92 so must have been right at the start... It was around the Donegal v Dublin all ireland final anyway and i remember loading the NASA webpage and Yahoo.

and a gallery some of yous might find cool

http://thechive.com/2012/01/24/when-websites-were-young-20-photos

smash

Got it connected in 96 I think. Ah the hours spent trying to download a single photo and the joy of saving it on a floppy disc so I wouldn't have to wait next time.

Balmed Out

There was no yahoo in 92.

danniemcq

Balmed Out wrote: »

There was no yahoo in 92.

maybe i remember yahoo from later... (94 according to google)

it was 20 years ago and there has been a lot of drinking since! I remember seeing the directory listing before search engines so i guess that would have been before yahoo. Trying to piece together family life timeline to figure it out!

Ledger

Sometime around March 1999. Eircom dial-up on Windows 98. I remember bringing the computer home in the car.

8 year old me was nearly crushed to death by loads of MASSIVE boxes in the back seat. It's amazing how big they were back then. The boxes were bigger than I was....


Ah memories.

bren2002

2fm.ie I think was one of the first Irish sites I visited.

I remember Indigo launching in the mid 90s.

Tipsy McSwagger

CJC999 wrote: »

March 1998 my dad bought a computer and set it up for the internet. I had no real interest in it at first and i'd say it was a few months before i bothered with it and even then it was only to have a quick look at something and then leave it. My dad however was well into it and spent a few hours each night thrawling through ebay for bargains (that was when ebay was used by private sellers and there was genuine stuff to be found and not like now when its over run by commercial sellers) I think i got broadband in around 2002/2003 and TBH didnt notice a whole lot of difference over dial up as i was using Onspeed with dial-up which sped up the connection considerably.

Of course he did;)

breffni666

Come to Cavan guys. Might as well still be on dial-up for all the advancement made down here. Joke service. I'd hate to be in business and rely on broadband. Terrible terrible down here. its a numbers game, if you've the population you've the broadband, if not tough!

Gyalist

I guess that I was one of the early adopters as I went online with IOL around September 1992. I actually still use my old IOL email address.

Does anyone remember what programs were on the installation floppy?

starbelgrade

I didn't bother with it in the office until 2007 and only installed it at home a couple of years ago.

Sky King

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Music to my ears.

(Not really)

Run_to_da_hills

Got it in 1996 US Robotics 28k Modem with Ireland on line using a 486 DX 2 66 platform.

Speed was ridiculously slow and expensive as browsing was dial up time based hence spent more time playing Doom 2.

Balmed Out

It used to be so slow but do you remember how you'ld search for something and itd come back with 10 relevant hits rather then 12 million with the one you want on page four behind all bigger sites with better advertising budgets?

Duggy747

I must've had a million hours worth of "free" dial-up CD's which came from magazines.

Pity the majority of them were English and therefore useless.

Seachmall

First website I remember visiting was a Pokemon one in 2000 or 2001, you could create your own Pokemon or some shit.

Long live the 'net.

danniemcq

Gyalist wrote: »

I guess that I was one of the early adopters as I went online with IOL around September 1992. I actually still use my old IOL email address.

Does anyone remember what programs were on the installation floppy?

can't remember what they were but i remember lots of them and that fecking whirring noise.

i think i still have some porn on some back at home... i wonder would i be able to get a floppy drive somewhere and get it connected.

see how innocent my fap folder was back then compared to now

Jesus Shaves

1998, i paid the princely sum of 3000 pounds for a fujitsu computermabob
Got Eircom internetz, First bill was over £600

Kev_2012

Stiffler2

I remember waiting for a single image to load. It could take 20 mins. Once that 20 mins was up it was time to masterbate.

Jesus Shaves

breffni666 wrote: »

Come to Cavan guys. Might as well still be on dial-up for all the advancement made down here. Joke service. I'd hate to be in business and rely on broadband. Terrible terrible down here. its a numbers game, if you've the population you've the broadband, if not tough!

people are just too scabby to pay for it

Had a part-time job in a video rental store for a few months back in 96. The owner asked me what I thought of these internet cafes and what I thought of him expanding the shop into one. Me being far more interested in in him shutting up and allowing me to continue watching free movies dismissed it out of hand. "Jaysus don't bother with that rubbish" I said, "we'll never get a tap of work done around here if you start doing that"

Was about four years later I got one of those boxes that wired your television directly to your phone socket (for the life of me I can't remember what they were called as the entire network was since disabled - "Unison" maybe?) Got a computer the following year though still with dial-up, and went wireless around 2006 I think though even then it wasn't particularly fast compared to today.

danniemcq

I remember when Napster came out around 99 and downloading a song in 25 mins

then i tried downloading Bohemian Rhapsody got about 96% complete and then got cut off so it got to "anywhere the wind blows" at the end and stopped half way through blow and cut the chimey bit at the end

DeVore

24 years ago in sept. I had an account on a PDP 11 called SalmonD in Maths in tcd. We had a modem connected to it and would dialup from home into it. It could only take one user at a time so everyone complained if you stayed on all night playing Nethack.

Before that was FIDONET... Mr Flanaghan played a big part in bringing the internet into homes but he's skipping a lot of the giants who's shoulders he stood on there.

Bummer1234

My first time on the internet was heading on and getting the numbers to key in for ringtones for my nokia 3210.

Beast of a phone!!

BrianD3

I first used in it 1996 in university. Only a handful of the student computers had it. Both the connection and the PCs themselves was slow and unreliable. They were 386s and 486s. Even on the university network (surely faster than dialup?) images took a long time to load and when they did they'd often come up as crappy 16 colour images. From talking to my mates who went to various colleges it was a similar story elsewhere.

I got the internet at home in 1998 using a brand new PC (a Pentium II 350 Mhz) and modem and things were a lot better. Although I did have to restrict my usage to off peak time to keep the bills down. IIRC you were charged per 15 minutes or part thereof so if you were on for 15 minutes adn 1 sec you got charged for 30 minutes.

Vicxas

Got eircom dial up in 1998 and it was awful. 11p a minute to go online!

Then we got broadband in 2004. A heady 2MB!







I hate eircom.....

ibarelycare

We got the internet in 1996. I signed up to the chatroom Paddynet and used to pretend I was a veterinary student and part-time model called Chloe. I was 11 and my chat name was "catgirl" wtf?! Pedo's dream right there!

Auvers

around 1995 using the Netscape browser, Internet Explorer didn't even exist

I think it was 15 pounds a month just to connect to an ISP and then phone charges on top of that

so being a lowly student, I went to the local library and watched the Assistant type in their password and then used their account when the library closed for the night :cool:

kfallon

ibarelycare wrote: »

We got the internet in 1996. I signed up to the chatroom Paddynet and used to pretend I was a veterinary student and part-time model called Chloe. I was 11 and my chat name was "catgirl" wtf?! Pedo's dream right there!

You said you'd come round and see to my cat, I waited and waited til he finally passed away

R.I.P. Tiddles

:pac:

kildare.17hmr

Stiffler2 wrote: »

I remember waiting for a single image to load. It could take 20 mins. Once that 20 mins was up it was time to masterbate.

Haha i remember sutting around a school computer in 1998 one lunchtime waiting on a picture to load up with the other lads from my class, we never did get to see the whole thing, it took that long to upload the bell rang

Kevwoody

Back in 1999 when I was 15 and working part time I saved up and bought a pc and got my a seperate phone line into my room complete with Internet, thought I was the dogs bollocks!

All went well until one day I got fed up waiting on some porn to download so I started fiddling with it (the pc )

Long story short there was a switch on the back with 110v - 220v , it was on 220 so thinking it might speed things up I flicked it, puff off smoke as the pc imploded inside and every light in the house went out.

I was stumbling about in the dark trying to pull up my jocks as the old man came in shouting what the **** did u do now?!!

Thank **** for iPhones nowadays!

seamus

I don't really know the dates. I think it would have been 98/99 when I first started using it properly.

I think what's weirdest is that I don't remember discovering what the internet was, it seemed to just "be there" and be normal, however I do remember my first exposure to the internet. And that was babysitting for a neighbour with a couple of mates. The neighbour had a home office so he could telecommute (he was a journalist) with internet. We looked up porn, predictably. Think I was 14 or 15, so that's around 1997. Then I went to Jersey on a holiday and used a web cafe. I didn't look up porn

A friend then got the NoLimits package in his house in 98/99 and practically every time we were there, the computer was on and we were surfing. Just general nonsense, chatrooms and the like.
We then got hooked up at home, but it was still the per-minute stuff and we had to run a cable down the hall into the socket on the wall so it was really only for an hour or so the odd night, checking mails, trying to download songs on Napster, chatrooms, etc.

When I moved out of home I was in college, and where I worked through college had an unfiltered 2MB line. So I didn't need or want to pay for internet in my own place till about 2004.

Jogathon

1997 - and I still use my email address from then. Recently some IT guys I was dealing with commented that my email address must be ancient! No hyphens or underscores, just my name @yahoo.co.uk (before yahoo.ie existed!)

Good times using Eircom dial up around 2000. Taking 5 minutes to load up a picture of Anna Kournikova and fap like crazy.

Funglegunk

I wrecked my family's phone bill playing Team Fortress and Counter-Strike in 1999/2000. I also tried to pretend I was a DJ from Liverpool on Yahoo chat, my ruse was seen through fairly quickly. Also, who remembers Neoplanet?