It occurred to me that I've been using the internet for a little over 30 years now, since he early 90s. I was about 30 years old at the time so that give you an idea of my age.
The first contract that I had was with a service provider (ISP) called Interalpha in Southampton. If I remember correctly, all that I could access was email and usenet groups.
I used an MSDOS program called Net-Tamer with a dial-up modem. Wow, things sure have come on in leaps and bounds. Some years later I signed up with an ISP called Freeserve.
My first desktop computer was a second hand Goldstar 286 20MHz with MSDOS and Windows 3.0 although I think I upgraded it to Windows for workgroups 3.11. I think I also used a file manager called Xtree Gold but it really was a long time ago.
I originally bought the computer to use with the amateur radio packet system but the draw of the internet was too much to ignore.
A little later I upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 which was quite wizzy. It was marketed as a multimedia machine and came with Microsoft Encarta, a sort of digital encyclopedia
Much has changed since the days of Netscape Navigator and AltaVista and, I would say, for the better.Internet speeds increased with the introduction of survices such as ISDN or BT Home Highway but I couldn't afford such luxuries. I can still hear my U.S. Robotics modem dialling out to try and make a connection, 56K was quite fast at the time..
We got Broadband
Some years later we got Asymmetric digital subscriber line Broadband (ADSL) and that really was a great improvement on dial-up internet.
Fibre-optic cables, from the telephone exchanges to the local BT (Openreach) cabinet, were certainly a great benefit to people who lived in the countryside. I can't comment on cable TV companies such as NTL...
I still have fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) but am looking forward to fibre to the premises (FTTP). Note I believe the American English spelling if fiber..
Web design has also come on a long way and there are some amazing designers out there. Sadly, I'm not one of them!
Many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for all that you have done. Where would we all be without the World Wide Web.
In 30 years, the internet has changed hugely and many of use use it in our day to day life.
Published: 28 October 2026
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