[rconti]

> I remember the first time I saw a URL address: http://www.something.something.something. "Ugh," I moaned. "A whole new language I have to learn? I was just getting the hang of Unix!" I immediately resigned myself to the fact that this might be the end of my days in cyberspace. The Net had become somewhat of a runaway locomotive and I was the woman running behind it, screaming for the conductor to please wait! Then suddenly it all came together. A Net guru friend told me about Lynx. "All you have to do," he said, "is type the word 'lynx' at your Unix prompt, and presto! You're into the Web." That weekend I spent about eight hours a day exploring. I quickly found out that you could access all your favorite telnet, FTP, and Gopher sites from the Web, as well as tons of resources you would never find anywhere else on the Net. My cyberlife had changed forever.

Fantastic.

[doctor_eval]

Ha, my experience was quite similar. I was a Unix nerd and a big fan of Gopher, and when the WWW came along I had much the same reaction as TFA. I remember lying on the floor of my apartment with my laptop - I think - and scrolling through lynx while I endured a bout of chickenpox, many years ago.

We eventually downloaded and built Mosaic for X-windows, and I still remember the look on my boss' face when we scrolled down in an article about Shoemaker–Levy and there was a photo of it hitting Jupiter. He nearly fell off his chair.

So, I suppose that means I've been on the Internet for at least 28 years... ugh.

[rconti]

I'm probably only a couple years behind you, as my first shell access was '94 but I had no way to do graphical stuff. Eventually I installed Slackware disksets in '95 and could run Mosaic under X, but needless to say, 4MB of RAM was not really sufficient to do anything.

Funny, on that page there's also a quip about "why does everybody feel like their homepage need to have a 100kb image to slow down page loads to a crawl?"