Hello!
This is my experience with computers:
-1990 I first touched a computer. It used Windows 2.0. I dont know the spec it had. You navigated trough a 3 colored menu and selected programs with the function keys it only had like 10 apps to choose from. One simple word processor,and a simple paint app and some learning tools like a math program and a grammar tool. This computer costed around $7000 and because it was so expensive the school could not afford to buy enough of them to fill up a separate computer classroom. Instead one of those computers was placed in each class classroom from grade 4-6 a total of 9 class computers at a total cost of $63000. My school was one of the first schools in Sweden to buy computers. I must say they where extremely expensive considered what they where used for the kids used them to teach math and grammar and then we used them to play simple games like solitaire card games.
-1991 My best friend bought a Commondore C64 computer and we used it to play games my fave game was a car game with Eddie Murphy I think it was a Hollywood Cop game.
-1992 I started in Junior High School and it was a newly built Junior High School so our grade(7) was the oldest students and becase it was new it was one of the first schools in Sweden to have a dedicated computer class room. Unfortunatelly the Compaq computers was constantly beeing hacked by some computer knowledgable students so our access to them became strictly confinded to lesson time. They had Windows 3.11 and we used them for word processing,painting, card gaming and also for simple database tasks in Excel. This year my Cousin also got Amiga 500 for Christmas and we used to play games with it.
-1995 I started in High School and by now they had mandatory computer courses but still no Internet training since it was hardly used in Sweden yeat and it was hard to find a ISP.
-1996 My School got Internet access and I first surfed the web. The browser used was Mosaic a Crappy browser that crashed all the time. The best and dominating search engine was Infoseek(largest index) and Yahoo(best quality and easy to find stuff). My fave was Infoseek!. Most of the real world companys had not yeat found its way out on the Internet so it was still a very free anarkistic place with mostly personal web sites and virtualy no regulating laws not even distribution of child Porn had been outlawed in Sweden(it became Illegal in 1997). I used Internet mostly for mail(Hotmail which I still use),and fun surfing. In this very early history of the web people had a different user behaviour then they have now. Since the web was a very unexplored territory people really surfed the web and doing random searches just for fun and see what they would find
. Only a total of around 50000 websites existed. This year my best friend got his very first computer at home it was a Fujitsu Siemens and a 33.3Kbit/s Robotics modem it was a $3000 computer. It was very expensive to search the web back then in Sweden the cost was about $2 per hour.
-1997 My school swithed to another browser Netscape Navigator 2.0. It was slightly better by now the number of sites on the Internet had grown to around 100000 and some companys(beside the porn ones that where very early) started to discover the benefits of beeing on the web and gradualy over the years to come they started to regulate the web to a place that fitted their needs and due to their lobbying new laws came to be and the freedom of ordinary Internet users suffered from it. Later this years My School changed browser to netscape Communicator 2.0 a better version of Navigator with more built in functions such as a e-mail client. Netscape was still the king on the web!. A new better search engine was also borned WebCrawler that was the first one to beat Infoseek and it became my new fave search engine.
-1998 Internet Explorer started to take some market shares from Netscape due to the fact that it was free. The number of webpages had increased to around 2000000. I was still using Netscape though!. The new king amongst search engines was Altavista that was superiour and I started to use it. Google was founded but was still in its infancy. I designed my first website this year and I handcoded it in Angelfires webshell. This site was about an unusual topic that I for some strange reason is an expert on bodyheight and human growth. So if you have any questions about these subjects then I might be able to answer them. Due to its early nature it contains facts errors(I know more now) but it is still available on the web check it out:
http://www.angelfire.com/hi/agren/index.html
This year Napster was born(atleast I think so if I remember correctly)
-1999 Internet Explorer had won the battle and was now the new dominating browser!. Google started to offer some serious competition to Altavista!. This year I got my first home Computer an iMac DV Strawberry with a Powemac PC400MHz(the equvivalent to a Pentium 3 550MHz) processor 64Mb RAM,10GB ATA-66 5400RPM HD and a 66MHz systembus and a DVD player(the first consumer machine on the market with this function) and a 15" monitor. I payed $1500 for it. And it was a great computer with a great design that I still have and sometimes uses. I have upgraded it to 320MB RAM and a 41GIG IBM ATA-100 HD. It has a 56Kbit/s moem and I thought it was very fast to surf on compared to my friends 33.3Kbit/ Robotics modem!. The number of websites had grown to around 50000000. Gnutella started to grow as an alternative to Napster and LimeWire is now one of the oldest P2P client still in use
-2000 Google took over as the king search engine. The web had evolved to a very commecrial place and the so called fun surfing behaviour had almost died out and people had started to find their fave spots on the web and forums such as this started to become more and more popular. The web had evolved to a more community based experience. The number of pages had now grown to around 200000000(200 million). This year I got my first broadband connection a 512Kbit/s ADSL connection and it is the single largest revolution in my computer life as I started to use my computer twice as much and stayed online for 17 hours a day. The web became extremely fast compared to modem speed and P2P started to become actually usable.I started to use LimeWire for Gnutella and used it to download music.
-2001 Amount of webpages hit the 1 billion mark. more and more communitys started to grow up. More and more P2P options to the old Napster started to surface.
-2002 I got an even faster 2.5mbit/s broadband ADSL connection. Number of webpages hit the 2billion mark. Kazaa was the new dominating P2P client and Sharman Networks took over but I was still only using Gnutella and LimeWire since I was a Macintosh user and that was virtually the only p2p option for us Mac users.
-2003 Number of webpages hit the 3 billion mark. Life as P2P pirate started becoming dangerous since RIAA and their likes started to target individuals. Late this year I got my second computer the one that I am using now a Hp Pavilion A200.se with a Athlon XP2600+ processor and 80GB HD which I am happy with so far but will probably upgrade sometime this year(2004)
-2004 Number of webpages 3.3 billion. Late 2003 and early 2004 People and some P2P programmers are starting to take counter actions to protect their privacy against svine gestapo organisations like the RIAA.
-Future... Who knows what is to come but hopefully RIAA and their likes will not win the battle and hopefully we will be seeing fantastic speeds on the Internet in the future. I for sure would want a 10GB/s line for Christmas HEHE
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