My first months in cyberspace
October 23, 2025
In early 1995 I was 23 and living in a terraced house in Bristol with four friends, about 18 months after leaving university. I’d given up on trying to be an illustrator, had a bit of freelance work making models for Aardman Animations, and would soon be the only one of my friends not to have permanent work. I was increasingly interested in technology and this brand new thing: Internet.
Source: My first months in cyberspace (Phil Gyford’s website)
It was about a year or 18 months before this, set in 1995, that I first got online in any modern sense.
At university back in the 1980s, we’d had access to email and bulletin boards, but it was in the early 1990s that, like the writer, I first connected to the web.
We had remarkably similar computers and probably very similar experiences as well. I recall Adam Engst’s book and how you bought it as much because you could get access to Mac TCP rather than having to pay for it.
The observation.
Since getting a modem at the start of the month, and hooking up to the Internet, I’ve spent about an hour every evening actually online (which I guess is costing me about £1 a night), and much of the days and early evenings fiddling about with things. It’s so complicated. All the hype never mentioned that
Definitely rings true over three decades later. It was expensive and it was complicated, but relative to anything else related to computing, it probably wasn’t any more complicated or any more expensive. Things were just like that back then.
Whether for a bit of reminiscence of the early days of the web, or to get a sense of what the web was like before you used it and perhaps before you were even born, I highly recommend this lovely reflexion.
