My First Months in Cyberspace

My First Months in Cyberspace

October 21, 2025 at 04:40AM

In 1995, Phil Gyford was 23 years old, living in Bristol, and had given up on trying to be an illustrator. But he was interested in technology and a new thing called the internet, and after he got online, it changed his life. (“In fact I can see how people get completely absorbed by the Net,” he wrote in his diary on February 17 that year.) In this essay, Gyford recounts his immersion into cyberspace: using email and accessing the World Wide Web, chatting with people online (and then later IRL), his early brushes with Wired, and making a website.

I, too, discovered the internet in 1995, but I was eight years younger than Gyford and experienced just a slice of it at first within the closed network of America Online. Still, Gyford’s piece makes me nostalgic for the early internet and whisks me back to the San Francisco Bay Area in the ’90s. (I increasingly realize that being born and raised on the Peninsula gave me a front-row seat to all of this change.)

Reactions were probably split between amazement and bemusement. Now that we’re used to instant connection to anyone in the world for almost free – via video and voice, never mind text – it’s hard to recall that once this was hard to believe. If I logged in to IRC (Internet Relay Chat) or a telnet chat room I might ask someone who was connecting from the US to say hello to my friend. Hey Tim! they might type. Yes, those characters were really typed by someone in California, right now! A real person! Hard to believe.

But other times things didn’t work, or the friend was understandably underwhelmed by seeing black-and-white text scrolling up a computer screen, no matter where the typers were apparently located.

Read the story

from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/20/cyberspace-internet-1995/
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