We arrived in Oxford the same time - and like you I had email by the end of the first term, even though it was still something you had to apply for at that point rather than something everyone got automatically. Remember 1MB of quota? And the fact that sable had 1GB of memory? That seemed *enormous* at the time.
Our college computer room had a handful of Mac Classics which were networked to each other via appletalk, a 486 which belonged to the college bar which ran Windows 3.1 and Office (and later tended to get DooM installed on it periodically), and one 386 in the corner with a green screen monitor which used kermit to talk to the internet, and didn't run Windows. I learned of lynx and pine and ytalk and gopher and ftp and by early 1996 I'd encountered usenet where I met quite a lot of people who are still friends today! I used to get random other undergrads trying to talk to me in the middle of the night just because I was online and female.
I remember Netscape being new, and altavista being a great search engine, but yes, like you Google totally blew me away. I seem to have joined LJ in June 2002, and Facebook in October 2006.
It's weird living in the future, when people carry more computing power in their pockets than used to be available on a mainframe, and take it for granted. It's nice though.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-12-19 03:11 pm (UTC)Our college computer room had a handful of Mac Classics which were networked to each other via appletalk, a 486 which belonged to the college bar which ran Windows 3.1 and Office (and later tended to get DooM installed on it periodically), and one 386 in the corner with a green screen monitor which used kermit to talk to the internet, and didn't run Windows. I learned of lynx and pine and ytalk and gopher and ftp and by early 1996 I'd encountered usenet where I met quite a lot of people who are still friends today! I used to get random other undergrads trying to talk to me in the middle of the night just because I was online and female.
I remember Netscape being new, and altavista being a great search engine, but yes, like you Google totally blew me away. I seem to have joined LJ in June 2002, and Facebook in October 2006.
It's weird living in the future, when people carry more computing power in their pockets than used to be available on a mainframe, and take it for granted. It's nice though.