Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-02-23 13:31:55 - Graham Ellis
I've now been online for 10 years - "into double figures" - (and computing for much longer). How things have changed over those ten years!
When I first got online, I was the European Technical Support Manager for a USA company known as Connectware - a part ot the AMP empire - that was looking to break into the high performance networking business using ATM technology, and also owned the RasterFlex and Vitec lines of high performance graphics board for use in Sun workstations. "The Internet" was to be this new-fangled way of communicating and my boss asked me to look into it as a better way than faxes and phone of communication with customers in some circumstances.
Based in Basingstoke, I signed the company up for an account with Demon - initially dialling in to a rack of modems in London, but improved soon thereafter when they added a POP ("point of presence") just up the road in Reading. In those early days, we spend up to half an hour at time dialling until we got through to make a connection, lines dropped frequently, and the main internet services ("killer apps" as they were known) were email and the newsgroups.
The Internet has opened up a whole new world for me - for both work and personally; great times in the past 10 years and long may they continue. Wouldn't have missed anyone or anything.