[Lancaster] [Fwd: Re: Twitter]

[Ken Walton]

2009/2/22 Martyn Welch <martyn at welchs.me.uk>

> Maybe. Though by the 1995/1996 time frame the Internet was already
> beginning become a "widely" used consumer service here in the UK - I
> know this because it was approximately August of 1996 that I first got
> on the internet (or at least AOL's chat rooms, yes I was young and naive).
>

I think I might just have beaten you on that :-) In 1994, my then partner
and I were asked to write a book (a role-playing game supplement) for an
American company -- the only proviso being that we had to have email access.
Steve Jackson Games were a fairly new company who had seen the potential in
electronic communications and publishing, and were already skipping the
paper manuscript phase of publishing, and working with writers regardless of
geography. We got ourselves a PC (£625, I seem to remember for a 16Mhz
machine!) running Novell-DOS, and with Demon's internet software (£10+VAT a
month for unlimited access), we were soon not only using email, but making
friends in various groups on Usenet. The world wide web was out there, but
only just, and wasn't something we were that fussed about. We were the only
people we knew locally with internet access, and we felt really cutting edge
when the Shoemaker-Levy comet hit Jupiter in the summer of 1994 and we could
download the photos via ftp as they came in from the Hubble Space
Telescope.  We were definitely ahead of the "widely used consumer service"
phase, but must count as some of the earliest telecommuters! :-)

-- 
Ken Walton
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