Early Web Memories
These are the unedited notes of my earliest memories of getting online way back when. Consider this a work in progress, and expect the page to change over time.
1995
In 1995 we got our first Pentium PC at home. This was shortly after the worldwide launch of Windows 95. We set the pc up one Friday afternoon, and that was that. We still needed to get the Internet at home, and we didn’t have any games installed except those that came with Windows 95.
I stayed up the entire night, clicking through every directory, program and menu item I could. I soon had an excellent idea of what was what and spawned my interest in computers that would continue for the rest of my life.
It was only a short time before an older kid on our block came over and loaded a bunch of games onto the pc. Classic titles such as Dune II and SimCity 2000. I had played SimCity 2000 at friends’ houses before this. I was super stoked to have my own copy to play whenever possible. I also spent a lot of time playing Dune II, I really got into the story and played all 3 campaigns, but I never finished any of them. I remember getting so far with one faction and saving the game at a point where I lost forever in a loop of loading and dying. I never played again.
However, these two games led me to buy my first games on CD-ROM; theme park and command and conquer. This changed everything.
We still didn’t have the Internet at home, but some family friends did, and a few internet cafes had started opening up around town. It cost $20 for an hour of internet time at these places! Dad took me to an internet cafe once, and the first thing I searched for on the Internet back in 95 was X-Men. Searching my favourite characters at the time, cyclops, wolverine etc. I also looked at info on X-Men cards; 95 Fleer Ultra was the set I was collecting at the time.
When visiting family friends one time, I was able to use their computer to surf the web. This time I was entirely into the RTS game Command and Conquer and found a homepage with a link to a .bat file that allowed me to modify the units to be faster and have different weapons. I was able to take a copy home on a floppy disk 💾, wow!
I didn’t spend much time on the Internet back at the cafes, though. However, my brother and a couple of friends did spend a lot of time down there playing multiplayer command and conquer and warcraft II. so many fun times, creating rules to ensure that we could build up our bases and units before having a massive battle before our hour was up.
1996
During 96, dad brought home an external 28.8 kbps modem for dial-up Internet. It was huge and connected to the pc through a serial cable. He also had a couple of floppy disks 💾 to set up the Internet; yes, we installed the Internet from a floppy disk 💾. This installed the dial-up connection required to connect to the Internet through Xtra and included a copy of Netscape Navigator and Netscape chat. This opened up a whole new world to me…
to be continued
this page draws inspiration from teddie~!.
