Born in 1990, I got my first computer when I was six; an IBM Aptiva. With Windows 95, 14MB RAM, 1.6GB hard disk and a 133MHz single core processor it was state of the art!
As a young child, playing games was such a luxury. Among my favourites were Theme Park, Caesar II, Cockroaches and the Lost Mind of Dr Brain.
When I was nine my friend Steven called me and told me how imperative it was that I come over immediately because he had "the web". Thinking he had caught a spider, I rushed over to assist him with his new pet. When I got there he opened up this (what at the time seemed alien) program called AOL UK and clicked "Sign In". What on earth was this weird noise coming out of his speakers?
Ah yes, the dial up connection. In the 90s we used to connect to the internet using our phone line just as we would today, but when you were on the internet your phone line was engaged and when you picked up the phone you heard this noise!
"Watch this" exclaimed Steven as he typed "Kids" into the address bar, ah yes AOL Keywords.
I needed to get this "web", my parents were to be bombarded with requests for the next year, and every time AOL advertisements came on TV their son became very agitated and excited.
Eventually they gave in. We purchased AOL in 2000.
Chat rooms were amazing, I could talk with people around the world from my bedroom, what on earth does "lol", "asl" and "brb" mean?
Routers weren't commonplace in the average home, we had a beast called a modem, and the ISP didn't provide you with one in those days like they do with routers today, you needed to purchase it yourself.
One website could take minutes to load on our connection but we loved it!
Napster was my generation's way of getting music and the music industry was ill-prepared for us. Songs took around half an hour to download but we didn't mind.
And when Napster died, no big deal; we'll just use Kazaa or Limewire. And when they died - Torrents.
Then, in 2002 everything changed. Advertisements started appearing for "Broadband" which was apparently "10x faster than dial up" and "allows you to still use your phone while surfing the net". "DAD!!! CAN WE GET BROADBAND... PLEASE!!!"
And, not much has changed since! Sure most of us have routers now and fast connections, but the fundamentals remain the same. Chat rooms have evolved into social media, "lol" and "brb" have survived but sadly "asl" passed away. Napster, Kazaa and Limewire were slowly hacked to death by the music industry and evolved into Spotify.
I will remember those days with fondly for the rest of my life.