To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, each member of the Wired.co.uk team is revisiting their very first memories of using it -- in this blog, that's Wired.co.uk's editor Nate Lanxon.
It's 1995. I've just typed "sex" into an internet chat room and thought I was about to be arrested for it. "There are people who watch what you say on here!" my friend Michael shouted, as my panicked fingers departed his father's computer keyboard and he ripped the modem cable out of the telephone socket. "You can't say
'sex' in a chat room!"
That moment was a life-changer and I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was eleven years old, on break from school during the summer holidays and Windows 95 had just been released that week. Michael was a school friend whose dad was building his own boat -- I think not because he needed one in Sheffield, but because he could. But a man who can afford to build his own ship could also afford a brand new PC with a dial-up modem and leave his son and acquaintances to use it all day.
I was elated -- it was my first time ever online. I'd heard of "the world wide web" and been intrigued by the premise, but it wasn't until I was able to type "sex" into a chat room and see the response that I realised I was engulfed with fascination.
I vividly remember that day because of how important it transpired to be. Discovering the web and imagining what I could do with it began to occupy every moment of every subsequent day. I spent most of my money on computer magazines despite not owning a machine myself. I began finding the PCs of friends boring because none of them could connect to the net.
It was that first web experience that prompted me to practically blackmail my parents into getting the family a PC. They did, and it was a really good one. I'd been teaching myself to code websites on school computers (and was regularly punished for ignoring my studies as a result), and ultimately began ditching whole days at school to teach myself how to build websites on my own machine. Ultimately I could develop full-size websites and (probably illegally, in retrospect) "borrowed" my grandma's credit card to buy my first domain name (I was about 15 so they wouldn't sell it to me). Today, the obsession is still the same -- but now it's my job.
As such, on the 25th anniversary of the web, I'm grateful to remember that first memory at Michael's house so well. As comical as it sounds, nervously typing "sex" into a chat room aged eleven probably changed my life.
More from Wired's Web at 25 series
- Tim Berners-Lee: the past, present and future
- Marc Andreessen: embed the internet
- Jimmy Wales: the developing world
- Mikko Hypponen: government surveillance
- Joi Ito: 'it's a living, evolving organism'
- Nigel Shadbolt: augmented intelligence
- Keren Elazari: biocomputing mechanisms
- Vint Cerf: internet of things
- Nick D'Aloisio: natural language
- Arianna Huffington: the net grows up
- 8 internet memes you forgot you shared
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
