It’s just a week before Christmas 1994. It’s cold, the rain not quite making it to snow. The wind cuts deep but you don’t care, you are rushing home with the disks clutched tightly in your palm, safely wrapped in a small plastic bag. Three floppies that are about to change your life forever.

In the front door and straight up the stairs, dinner can wait. You boot up the 486 dx 66 and pop the first disk in. The disks cost you £100.00 but that’s ok because there’s nothing more to pay for 12 months. Apart from the telephone charges that is.

Your ISP is not quite close enough to let you have local call rate but it will be worth it in the end, you might even save some money on long distance calls if this new I-phone thing works the way it should.

The software loads up and you start the program. Three hours later you have kicked and screamed your way through the torturous set-up procedure and are at last ready to use the dial up utility. You kick it off and listen to the funny sounds as the modem connects. That’s it. You are on-line for the first time.

Now what? You download a great picture of the moon, it takes an hour, even though you are downloading at the incredible rate of 1440Bps. Never mind, it looks great as your new screen background.

Then you find IRC on disk 2 and suddenly you are chatting to 50 or 60 others from all over the world. Every one of them has had to go through the same procedures as you have to get on-line. You feel an affinity with them all, it’s a special kind of club. It’s the Internet. Six hours later you remember the third disk.

You’ve never even heard of Internet Explorer. But there is this great program called Netscape, and you even got an email address. On disk 3 you find Eudora light. More setting up to do. Finally it's all doing just what it says on the can.

Problem is….there is no-one to email!

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