It's so ingrained into our daily lives today that it's amazing to think the internet was used by less than a tenth of the UK population as recently as 1997.
Indeed, such was the relentless rise in connectivity in the years that followed, this figure had risen to more than a third by 2001 and now stands at more than 95 per cent.
As such, many people under 30 won't even remember the world without the internet and the idea of it being something you just occasionally used on a PC in the spare room will be completely alien to the eternally-connected smartphone generation.
Billions of people across the world now use the internet every day - and probably couldn’t live without it.
Going back to the beginning, it was only 30 years ago, in March 1992, that the UK’s first commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) launched. At that time, the internet was still seen as largely a novelty for techies, and few people understood it or thought they needed it.
Broadband came to the UK in 2000 which saw usage skyrocket over the next few years, but many households still used dial-up connections well beyond that. In fact, while the Internet had existed in some form for a lot longer, it wasn’t until the World Wide Web launched and ISPs provided a service to connect to it, that it became possible to get home access.
Whether the aforementioned term 'dial-up' means nothing to you, or brings back almost-certainly rose-tinted memories of the cripplingly-slugging, phone-engaging connections, there's still something magical about looking back at the early years of one the most game-changing inventions in human history.
The only thing we'd seen before that was in any way similar was Prestel, an interactive information service (not unlike Ceefax) operated by the Post Office that launched in 1979 before fizzling away in the early '90s. But the World Wide Web was a much grander beast.
Richard Tang, founder and chairman of Zen Internet, said: “The effects the Internet has had on our society are incalculable. We have a world of knowledge, entertainment and convenience at our fingertips, and that’s not to mention the many businesses and innovation the Internet has helped foster.
"With so much reliance on the Internet today, it’s hard to imagine there was once a view that it would ultimately amount to nothing. In fact, 96 per cent of UK households now have access, and while internet fads come and go, it’s fair to say it's unlikely we’ll be going back to using a CD on the front of a magazine to get online anytime soon."
Here, Richard looks back on an era when we might have had a pager in our pocket instead of a smartphone and recalls some of the main things you’ll remember if you used the internet in the 1990s ...
Distinctive dial-up tones
A far cry from today’s video streaming, online gaming and Zoom calls, early internet access was provided by dial-up modems that made alien-like sounds as they established a connection. At a time when the online world was largely silent – mostly because anything bigger than text and small images took far too long to download - it is the distinctive chirps and whistles of your modem completing a connection that many of us may remember and probably do not miss.
Blockbuster Video
Downloading a film in the 90s would typically take about a month, so physical media dominated. Blockbuster video stores were doing good business, with over 500 stores across the UK at their peak. How many of us spent a Friday evening scouring the shelves for something to watch, only to end up paying late fees because we forgot about a VHS left at home somewhere?
Fax vs email
Around that time of course came email, something we are using in a very similar form even today. Like with the internet more broadly, this had existed in other formats for some time before it was popularised for consumers, with the first email message thought to have been sent in 1971. There was a lot of scepticism, and some had to be convinced of the benefits of email over sending a fax, writing a letter or making a phone call.
By the 1980s and 90s, it became popular across business, government, and academic environments, before achieving mainstream status by the 2000s. An email account became something included with your home internet access, helping kick start the period of, depending on your generation, those embarrassing first attempts at usernames and email addresses that seemed fun or cool at the time.
A CD to get online
Many computers didn’t even come with the software needed to get online. Internet providers had to supply new customers with a CD containing this instead. It's strange to think how many of us might have first got online thanks to a CD or even a floppy disk that came for free in the post or we found on the front of a computer magazine.
The early social media
Early internet users will remember using search engines like Alta Vista or WebCrawler, which dominated before Google launched in 1998. Many spent their time on forums, or Internet Relay Chat (IRC) interacting with others – they could be called the earliest forms of social media.
Before social media monopolised communication, for those of us who were younger connecting to the internet felt like a magical place where the constraints of the real world no longer applied. Brightly coloured, loud website designs, GIFs and animated cursors dominated, with services like Geocities and Myspace emeing to give users the ability to create their own personalised corners of the Web. These were the forerunners of today’s online communities and the basis of social media sites.
Music goes digital
As internet speeds and bandwidth increased, digital audio became more feasible. The early 2000s brought the launch of things like the iPod in 2001, followed by the iTunes Store in 2003. Offering songs for 99p suddenly meant many of us were ditching our CDs and buying new music online, all thanks to our steadily more capable connections. You may remember how much time you spent adding your physical music collection to iTunes, or waiting for your newly acquired songs to copy to your iPod before you left the house. Next came video streaming, online gaming and eventually, the always-on, multi-device world we all experience today.
1p per minute
Spending time online back then took commitment. Loading times were glacial by modern standards, and there was no chance of being connected consistently all day. Because dial-up used the phone line, time spent online typically cost 1p per minute for a local rate call. Perhaps you remember the household tensions caused by someone being connected, and no one else being able to use the phone at the same time.
