Not being able to be on the phone and the internet at the same time. On home set-ups anyway. Does that mean pre-broadband.

Less of your cheek - I still use my original fsnet email address (which, Fraser explained, was the reason I had trouble joining this site)>

... don't you mean 'Freeserve' rather than 'Freeview' in the body of the text? That's what happens if you blog when right-minded people are still having their morning coffee.

Remember the days when a webpage loaded so slowly that you could go and make a coffee and half the screen would still be blank when you got back?

...that still has dial-up internet at home :-(

What about setting your clock radio to record the BBC broadcast of a computer programme (at 3 am)that you played on cassette and then took half a hour to load.
Or later on going online quickly and downloading a web page and then coming off line again to read it.
Or the days when web cams of motorway intersections or coffee pots where the hottest thing around.

around the start of the popular take up of the internet in around 1996/7 that it would mean you could get lots of stuff for free - culminating in the idea of Freeserve. There was all sorts of tat out there being given away causing companies to go bust.

Also the great idea that I think the pitiful Boo.com had of having shops where you could go and try on the clothes that they offered for sale but couldn't actually buy them. Oh no, for that you had to go back home and order them online and wait for them.

The internet also ruined nostalgia for me. Back in the early 90s looking back on old kids TV was to dip into a hazy, misty memory. Now you can get full episode listings for every episode of The Clangers and can prove to doubters in seconds that, no, there really were no characters with those names in Captain Pugwash.

I remember not only listening to Radio Luxembourg but also taping whole programmes. Like the Beatles Hour on Tuesdays if memory serves. Imagine the crackle and hiss from MW208 and I loved it !!

I remember not only listening to Radio Luxembourg but also taping whole programmes. Like the Beatles Hour on Tuesdays if memory serves. Imagine the crackle and hiss from MW208 and I loved it !!

Posted twice in error and can't delete.

I very well recall asking people for their company website addresses, and getting this reply:

"H T T P, all lower case, colon, forward slash forward slash, double-you double-you double-you, dot etc etc"

The moment you get used to new software, you un-learn the previous one very quickly (eg Word Perfect - F7 was print, or was it save, and that's it).

And same with a new web forum style, I find it impossible to recall how the previous Word one looked for example.

Even in 1990 when my first was born, ITV had only just started going through the night. BBC 1 & 2 used to go blank off around midnight. Even thrusting, edgy Channel 4 used to take a nap.

http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/tellyyears/november1990.htm

Take me back, take me way, way, way back
On Hyndford Street
Where you could come in at half-past eleven
and watch the second half of Skins on E4+1.
On long summer nights
As youtube played a clip of a teenager in a blonde wig,
lip-syncing to Toxic by Britney Spears
As we sent text messages in l33t speak back and forth across the Beechie river
In the quietness as we sank into a bored stupor
watching grainy, black and white footage
of contestants asleep on Big Brother 8
And voting on The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing
Sunny summer afternoons
on Rapidshare, downloading the new Rhiana album
that had leaked three months before its official release date
Watching double bills of Scrubs and Friends in the evenings
And meeting down by the Tesco Metro
Queuing up to audition for Big Brother
Going out to the Spice Girls reunion shows at the O2 arena on the bus
Registering to buy tickets for Glastonbury online
Logging onto myspace or facebook
In the days of celebrity culture
Nuts Magazine, The Jeremy Kyle Show
Tragic Life Stories, upstairs in the book department of WH Smiths,
Chantelle from Celebrity Big Brother
Sunday World of Warcraft sessions and in-between there was Second Life
And Red Aftershock, and ringtones and catchphrases from The Catherine Tate Show, and shivers up the back of the neck
And late at night playing Halo 3 on Xbox Live
And Ipod shuffle during the day
And skipping past every third track
Early mornings when contemplation was best
watching Smile TV with the sound turned down
And then The Hoobs and repeats of Friends and Will & Grace
And crawling into bed at nine or ten in the morning
on Hyndford Street, irritable and dissatisfied
caught in the grind of the here and now
And reading Heat or Hello! magazine
And "Jordan: A Whole New World " by Katie Price
And "Too Much, Too Young" by Kerry Katona
Over and over again
And the ringtones echoing late at night over Beechie River
And Never Mind The Buzzcocks being on at nine o'clock on Thursdays, and then some indie pop programme on E4 fronted by Alex Zane or Miquita Oliver
It was always one of those two
Can you feel the ennui?
On Hyndford Street
At half past eleven on long summer nights
As the Dave Channel screened back to back episodes of Mock The Week
And a taxi passing by the Beechie River
disrupted the digital TV signal
and made the screen go all blocky.

we'll get Georgie to vamp some chords, oi think we may have a sowng thar.

This was my first mp3 player, given to me in late 1999. It's the Samsung Yepp E16, and it featured a grand total of 16MB of removable memory - enough for about five short pop songs. From memory, I think it retailed for the best part of a hundred quid.

I never used it.

Any of you go back that far? When you didn't have phone sockets? So to connect the modem you had to poke very thin coloured wires into the socket on the skirting board? And the speed (misnomer!) was I think around 1200/300 baud (whatever that was). But it established the idea so I wanted more.
Incidentally my alterego of adze thuggery arose when an early academic contribution went through a primitive spell checker and that's what it did to my name. Everyone else thought it suited so that's who I've been ever since.

excited by Tiscali announcing they were going to introduce an unmetered dial-up service (I even remember it making the lunchtime news). I also remember getting sent an mp3 by someone at the newly launched nme.com and it taking at least 20 minutes to download. My friend Rik was the first person I knew to have the internet at home. He had a 12k modem, pictures literally did download one line at a time. This was about 1995.

Getting my first walkman.

Unfortunately you also needed these in your pocket

Oh yes and a bag full of these

Oh, the Magnovox Odyssey console says moo!
and the Intellivision system says meow!
the Nintendo Enertainment System says roof!
and the Sega Master System says baaa!

I can actually remember a time when in order to make a phone call to someone while he or she was at work, YOU HAD TO RING THE BUILDING. Then a nice receptionist lady would put you through, and if the person you wanted to talk to was there, game on. If they were out at a three-bottle lunch, then tough titty. Then came answering machines, then mobiles, then email, then the dreaded text, and and and. Mind you, I once covered an entire Cannes Film Festival for Empire magazine pre-mobile. Happy days my friends.

BARNEY

of the time is interesting - articles about this new fangled internet business, e-mail, strange networks where you could meet weird people, and if I'm not mistaken, Word had an article on how wonderful iPods were a fair old while back. I also remember reading a piece on Windows 3.1, where the writer told us that using a mouse would take a while to get used to...

And let us not forget the quaint idea that instant fortunes where there for the making by any clown with a website that could be floated on the stock exchange.

...about the days when he ran an early magazine about the internet and he can remember reading the line "already there are hundreds of web sites...."

When I was at college in the mid-late 80s we were told that the library had a wonderful machine which could help us with our disertations. If you logged a request with the front desk they could search for and obtain academic papers on the same subject which you could collect if you called back just 24 hours later.

The internet has pretty much killed off the Charity Day Office Quiz, because everyone pays their £1 to enter and then looks all the answers up on Wikipedia - for the past few Comic Reliefs or Children In Needs, we've had an e-mail that basically says "thankyou to those who entered - everyone got all the answers correct, first name out of the hat is...".

The same goes for lyric quizzes - type the line into Google and within seconds you've found out what it is.

The "guess the album cover" quiz remains just as challenging though...

I always remember being in a Media Studies class in school in 1988 (aged 14). The text book we were using had a paragraph about innovations and it was heralding the advent of a new form of teletext that could hold over 4 million pages on information. It was called the Arpanet. I was so shocked with this that I purloined the book from the classroom cupboard and kept it. I've just checked it and it says just that!

On other internet related issues I was a regular attendee at those 'First Tuesday' thingys that went on in London for a few years and at the height of the dot com boom there were so many people attending on a monthly basis that they held one at Lords Cricket Ground. (quite nice actually) They got Bob Geldof to make a speech. Nobody paid a blind bit of notice to Bob's speech. There were about 3000 people all trying to strike deals for web businesses that really had no chance of ever turning a profit (selling ice cubes for home delivery? or barrels of oil sold over the internet?). At one stage I looked up and saw Bob staring out into the mass of bodies with the most perplexed look on his face. Then he just got off the stage and went on his merry way - and no one noticed.

I also remember being with a friend when he was buying his first modem. He went in to the shop and asked for a modem (a 14,4!) and the old geezer behind the counter said something along the lines of 'you want to use the internet? We all know why! (wink wink nudge nudge)'. Mortified!

Can anyone remember what people did as a time-wasting distraction from work before the internet? Seriously. I can't people people just sat there, diligently toiling away for the full alloted hours.

I remember the excitement of getting a fax machine in the office - you could even photocopy on it ! How much do they get used these days ? And in my first proper job we used disks which were about 7 inches square and bendy. We also used to produce printouts on huge printers which took long sheets of paper with perforated lines to tear them up, rather than individual sheets of A3/A4 paper. Someone mentioned Wordperfect - I had almost forgotten that existed - but in one workplace we used something called WordStar. And the fact that I learned to type on a big old manual typewriter. And I am only just approaching 42 but I'm making myself feel really old now....

Interestingly, I work at a University and I've been told that large numbers of the current intake of first years already knew one another before they even got to Uni because they'd been making friends and networking on Facebook.

Much as I'm enjoying all of this high-tech nostalgia, it's just dawned on me that when Word celebrates its 10th anniversary we'll probably be looking back on 'broadband', 'blogs' and 'Nicky Campbell' and wondering how the hell we ever put up with such things.

One night (quite a few years ago) "Presumed Innocent" was on telly - at one point, Harrison Ford goes into his office and sits at his computer and I found myself (rather sadly !) thinking "we've got one of them in our office" and then thinking that it was by far the most useless piece of kit we currently had. And yet, when the film was made, it was probably IBM's state of the art model.

I haven't watched "Wargames" in a while but I bet it's fascinating to look at now.

And Richard Pryor's ultimate computer from "Superman 3" that has to be housed in the Grand Canyon is probably now available as a laptop in your local branch of PC World (although it may not have a Kryptonite beam - that's probably available as a USB plug-in).

The technology/audio section was one area that I was guaranteed to skip over, but looking at back issues now and it is fascinating. The prices; the sizes; 'separates'; dual cassette decks; the mini-disc....

I miss the analogue tones of dial up (which are almost as gone as the pips in a phonebox as you jammed your 2 pence in the slot). That audible code gave me a sense of the linking in to something, casting a net as they clicked and whirred down the wires and through the boxes of Post Office telephone exchanges throughout the Green Line suburban areas all the way to London...not unlike the commentary of an old Public Information Film The other thing I miss about dial up is having a book handy to read while waiting for a web page to load. There's more: I'm getting mutinous with the iPod though, leafing thru racks of LPs you'd come across something and put it on (it kept happening with Moondog for some reason). This just doesn't happen scrolling on the iPod. And with records you had something you could hold, pore over even, which had a decent sized picture on it. How a band finished side one and started side two was always really important, instead of this severed artery of far too much continuous music that the CD and iPod afford us. It's all lost its structure y'see...

Upon starting my first job after university in 1990 at a networking hardware company, I was introduced to Usenet newsgroups, which even then (before browsers and html) offered a huge range of diversionary activity. Also discovered fan Email mailing lists and signed up for (amongst others) an R.E.M list. 2 months later I got a call from the head of IT to tell me that;

a) We paid for incoming Email/data by the kilobyte

and

b) I had the second highest incoming data bill in the whole company - second only to a guy whose JOB it was to download networking specifications

I got let off with a warning thankfully....

...whose name is made up of just two letters, you may have heard of them. Anyway, whilst cataloguing some products and tidying a display room one day, I came across some brochures for products of the future. The magazine was from 1979 and it had a mobile phone for sale. So, a mobile, with a retractable aerial (remember them?), no colour screen, one ringtone, no screen let alone colour screen, no text messaging service, a snip at... £1100!

Yes, you did read that price right the first time.

And my favourite line from the entire advert?

"Technology is so advanced that this mobile phone now only weighs the same as a large book..."

When I started work in 1986 we had a telex machine. I left in 1993 and can confirm that in that time we received precisely one telex. We actually passed this novelty round the office! Although to be fair it had come from Karachi, and was therefore reasonably exotic. Cutting edge! Still no idea how it worked or why it was there. This was an office that had been purpose built 80 odd years before and still had a system of sadly non-functioning 'speaking tubes' that ran between first and second floors - the idea being that you blew into a whistle, long since gone, to attract your secretary's attention on the floor below and then bellowed your instruction down the tube - bring up some coal for the fire etc. How much cooler than internal email is that? Is it possible to be nostalgic for a time before you were born?

some bizarre Telex-style machine that would send press releases to customers in Europe but charged you, phone-call style, for the privilege. I once forgot to disconnect over the weekend after one such episode, running a £900 bill for the company. (About a third of our weekly profit, apparently). My appraisal the following week was slightly subdued.

ps Any lapsed goths done the 'it were all Fields o'Nephilim round here in my day' gag yet?

the mobile brick came with a battery the size of a small briefcase, which had to be on constant charge.

there was such a thing as 'goths' back then?

This was the bleedin'early 90s, squire! We only just got email before I left, and, then, almost hilariously, our Satan-worshipping (allegedly) IT boffin forgot to hand out the password to llog in for several months

1) The Wingding/Webding Anti Semitism claim (type NYC into a Word document, and than change the font to either of them settings)

2) The ''Shock your mates into a twitching, comatose pile of convulsing particles'' with ''Kiki''

3) Tubgirl Image Sharing (DISCLAIMER: Not for the faint hearted)

4) Dancing Baby (sent the disentranced into a spin...and than fucked off)

5) Angry German Kid

6) The rumor that the Coca-Cola serif is a condemnation of Islam when turned vertically.

I remember the thrill of logging on back in '99 for the first time, and discovering message boards. For a while it was a joy, and I seriously entertained thoughts that this was an overwhelming force for good and that borders could be broken down.

Now, sadly, the message boards are populated by the bigotted and ignorant fools that we had previously left mumbling in the corner of the pub and logged on to avoid. Thank heaven (or, more accurately, (Development) Hell) for sanctuaries such as this.

I was looking through some back issues and there was a picture of 1GB memory stick with a blurb that went something like:

Impress your friends with this huge amount of memory on your keyring...

Yours for only:

£119.99

Now pretty much given away for free with your cornflakes.

Have we all missed the whole point of this exercise?

I've been listening to music for nigh on 30 years and until about 3 weeks ago I had never heard "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson. Woah. Thanks.

Go roll that into your musings on dialups and rollups and iPod shuffles.

...was the Amstrad PCW 8512. If memory serves it was less than £300. I was one of the "early adopters". In the late-80s it was taken up by all the writers I knew, all of whom learned the hard way that it didn't have a hard drive. Therefore you had to insert one floppy to launch the software and then insert a "data disc" in order to be able to store what you'd written. Many's the night I spent talking down some poor benighted freelance from the ledge where they'd retreated after worrying that their entire week's work had been lost.

having to walk almost a mile to make a phone call because the three pay phones in our area had been dismantled by some kind souls!! I also remember a friend buying what I think was a Commodore 64 back in the 1980s. It came with a book that gave instructions on how to construct your own games, some of which were about 20 pages long! If you made a mistake on page 19 you had to start all over again!!

..."Input" magazine? early/mid 80s mag for owners of ZX81/Spectrum and involved typing in bucket-loads of script to get the computer to do some really naff graphic or movement that lasted about 1 second. Lots of "goto line 10" type commands.

Also, i had a ZX81 and remember loading games by cassette which took hours, seemingly, and were, inevitable, totally rubbish.

Fond memories also of the geeks in the school computer lab going crazy evey breaktime playing with Acorns, BBC Model Bs, C64s etc.

those old video recorders where the buttons actually stuck out from the machine, and you'd have to forcefully and with expert timing hold down both record and play to actually record anything?

Were connected to the VCR by a stout cable, thereby not being very remote.

I remember my Mum holding down 'record' and 'play' with great purpose and importance to record the Whistle Test Bruce Springsteen special back in about 1984 or 1985. It was one of her most treasured videos, so thanks to DH. Don't know where it is now.

Remember how in 2008...

Computers were still complicated and unreliable to the point where...
a) Outright replacement was an absolute necessity every 18 months
b) Performance sagged enormously within weeks (days, even) or ownership
c) Armies of so-called IT experts rushed to your door to wreck the thing some more

Also...

d) Whilst everybody owned a PC, no-one really understood how to operate one properly
e) Download times were primitive - An hour to get hold of a DVD was considered rocket speed
f) Spotty geeks with modems and off-shore ISPs earned fortuned from scarcely-believable phishing scams

And deleting unwanted postings on The Word Blog was still impossble...

From January 1989. Take a look..."You have mainframe power inside your Spectrum!"

ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/magazines/YourSinclair/Issue3...