The year was 1999. Few of my classmates had PCs at home. I heard all day about the games they played and things they and their parents were up to on the Internet. I’ve never had a PC at home, and neither did any of my close friends or relatives. However I’ve played with the old DOS machines and later the brand spanking new Windows 98 PCs in the school’s computer lab. I was religiously reading any computer magazine I could lay my hands on. As a habit, I always popped into the local computer repair shop after school. They rarely had a working computer around, and when they did it was almost always a relic from the late 80s with monochrome screens and dusty old keyboards.
After months of pestering and earning good grades at school, my dad finally relented and agreed to buy me my first computer. It was a no-name beige tower PC, with a 333MHz Intel Celeron processor (as we were too poor to afford a Pentium processor) with a whole 32 Megabytes of RAM and a 4 Gigabyte hard disk drive. Accompanying that was a bulky, bulbous 14” CRT monitor, a beige keyboard and mouse and the standard issue tinny stereo speakers.
I can still clearly remember how excited I was to finally have a PC for my own. I remember the buzz of the CRT monitor when I first turned it on, and even how it smelt. I didn’t even mind that I didn’t had internet access at home (had to wait another year for that). Just having a PC for myself to play with, and to talk about at school, was so unbelievably exciting. Safe to say that my little self had never felt that happy before.
Modern computers comes with all the hardware that are needed to connect to the internet, we don’t even give it a second thought – connect to the internet, that’s what they do. Even the £10 Raspberry Pi’s have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi! This was, however, not always the case.
My first PC didn’t had a modem built-in. It wasn’t assumed that we would want to connect to the internet. If we wanted to, then we’d had to buy a modem card, open up the CPU tower and install it. That’s what I did a year after I got my first PC. For some reason, I wanted to use email even more than I wanted to browse the internet.
I remember the sunny weekend morning when I waited for the bus with my friend – who knew more about computers than me – on the way to buy a modem card. We were discussing what would be the best email address to get! The domains of choice were either Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com – no Gmail in those days, kiddos. I settled on Yahoo.com although I cannot remember what user name I choose. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been something that I would choose to use now.
We shopped around, bought a cheap-ish 56k dial up internal modem card and headed back home by the early afternoon. We also bought a pre-paid ‘internet card’ (more on this later) a telephone line extension lead and a splitter box, so we can run a phone extension from where the land phone was to my bedroom where the computer was. Luckily, it didn’t took much effort to install the modem card in the tower. We had to find an empty slot in the motherboard, remove the metal bracket from the back of the computer case and screw the card in place. Then we installed the drivers using the CD that came with the box. We hastily ran the phone extension cable from my room to the living room (which I later tidied up by nailing it to the wall with small white wire clips) and plugged it into the modem.
We had one more thing to do before we could get on the ‘information super-highway’! Remember the internet card I told about? That was the contract-free, easy way of getting on the internet. It was cheap to buy form most internet cafes, computer shops and even some news stands. Scratching the back of the card would reveal a user name and a password, and it was good for a whole two hours of internet access. Those days, we weren’t connected to the internet all the time, so a 120 minutes were enough for a couple of weeks. So I scratched my very first internet card, opened the dial-up connection wizard, typed in the phone number, the user name and the password and pressed ‘connect’. I remember it didn’t work the first time, but after fiddling with the phone extension cable for a while, we were finally hearing the racket of the dial-up modem and – Voila! – connected to the Internet!
The dial-up sound, of course, wasn’t nostalgic then. It was the cutting edge (well, at least to the poor me who’s parents couldn’t afford anything faster). However I can tell you that, then as well as now, the dial-up sound gets me excited, because in those days getting on the internet after getting back from school was something that we eagerly look forward to.
First thing I did was, guided by my more experienced friend, navigated to Yahoo.com and registered for myself an email account. Not long after, I fired up a few emails to my cousin brother’s friends who were living abroad – and they emailed me back a few days after. What more I did on the internet? A lot, and I’ll leave them for future stories.
Like I mentioned before (in my previous story, it’s somewhere around here) I first got on the internet using a 56k dial-up modem using a pre-paid internet scratch card. And from the year 2000 till 2007-ish that’s how I got on the internet, at least when I was at home. Now, coming to think about it in hind sight, I wonder how I survived! But my internet needs, and probably most people’s internet needs for that matter, were quite different then.
So, the pre-paid internet scratch card only included the internet fee – it did not include the call fee. Every minute I was on the internet, the phone would get billed as well. During day time, the calls were billed by the minute, but after 9.00 pm the call charges were lower, and also it was billed every 3 minutes. It it was much cheaper to go on-line late night.
Most of the time, the connection was slow and unreliable. Downloading a large file (large at the time, i.e. several megabytes!) was risky business. The bandwidth was so low that, while a file is being downloaded, I wouldn’t dare browse anything else on the internet. At the start of a download, the estimated time would sometimes read something like “3 days 15 hours left..” but as the transfer picks up speed it will be something like “21 minutes left..”. Remember the ‘unreliable’ bit I mentioned before? A file would download for, say,19 minutes, eating into the scratch card’s minutes as well as racking up call charges, and then for some reason the internet connection will drop, or the file would mysteriously stop transferring! I’ll then have to start it all over again. Which got both annoying and expensive pretty soon. The solution? A download manager. Everyone used one those days, and as I remember I used a software called ‘GetRight’. It’s still around, but now most people don’t need one (or probably haven’t even heard about one) as all modern browsers enable us to resume a download if it gets interrupted.
To save on internet and call charges, something I used to do was to kind of pre-plan what I wanted to browse. As soon as the dial-up connection starts, I would go to the web site I wanted to browse, and then Ctrl+Click all the links I wanted to read. As an example, in early 2000s I had a craze about PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, the precursor to Smart phones.) I would go to palm.com and click on products and then Ctrl+Click on the devices I wanted to read about. I wouldn’t read them at the time, but I would open all of them in different windows – the tabbed browsing wasn’t invented yet so it was windows everywhere on the 800x600 screen! Probably I’d also go to a news website and Ctrl+Click on articles I want to read. Then finally open up the email program, I think it was Outlook Express, and check if there are any new email, and send out any email I have saved in the out box. All within probably two minutes, and then disconnect the dial-up connection.
I would then take my time to leisurely read through all the articles and product pages that are open, knowing that I wont get charged any more! If I want to read something later I would save the page as a ‘web archive’ i.e. a single file with all the text and images. Most web pages those days were less complex and had static content, which made them perfect for saving for later reading. Finally I would go and read any new emails, and draft replies and save in the out box.
All of the internet browsing was exclusively done on the good old Internet Explorer! I was naive and wasn’t aware of all the antitrust practises Microsoft were up-to. It was many years later that I switched to Chrome. At the beginning, it was a breath of fresh air and was much more user friendly – but now we know what a shitty monster Chrome, and Google, become over the years. I’m writing these stories now on a Linux laptop using LibreOffice Writer, with a few Firefox tabs open to help me remember things, to be published in Neocities – a platform to bring back the olden days of the internet! How things have changed!