A mildly interesting summary of the history of the internet...

When did you first start using the internet? What was your first username? What interesting stories do you have about your internet usage.

I estimate that I strated my web addition in 1996, with my Compuserve account. Compuserve was later taken over by AOL which I used pretty much until I moved in with Catfish a couple of years ago. Despite everyone's opinion of AOL, I found it to be fast and reliable - I rarely had any downtime, unlike some of my friends and family who typically experienced incredibly slow access in the evenings and often lost it entirely on sunday afternoons.

I've used the moniker 'ddvmor' for my entire internet career. I was trying to contract my forname and surname into something short and memorable - everyone else I knew were (and often still are) using their full name or something silly like clevermonkeywantsabanana1986 and it took them half an hour to type it out correctly every time they wanted to go online, or access their e-mail or log into a forum. Anyway, dmor@compuserve was taken and so was everything else I tried and I ended up with ddvmor. I've had it so long its like a part of my name, now.

I'm not really sure what I used the internet for in the early years (apart from porn, I mean - remember when it took 2 minutes to load a rude picture?). I remember trying out chat rooms and thinking they were sh*t and I didn't really discover forums until much later. I took up internet shopping fairly early on. Amazon was a revelation!

So the first forum that I really got into was Utter Access which was in 2003. Here's my first post there! I actually used it for work for a while, before we created a monster thread in the general chat forum (by which I mean Bonniepirateanne, Sha76jam, NateO, Damo Daly (later known as Batman O'Leary after a night of drunken posting) and Andromeda - am I missing anyone? I'm pretty sure command_z was a UA user, but don't know whether there was any involvement in that infamous thread!), ramping up something like 900 posts in 2 days (I tried to find it but it's been archived off or summat) and getting a severe bollocking by the admins!

So in late 2003 (I think - I have no way to check the dates) I created an AOL group to continue the discussion outside UA, which we did and then in 2004 we migrated from that ghetto into the current activeboard format, which is basic but does the job just nicely and over the years has attracted and lost loads of users. Anyone remember Gotfalls? We don't have many regulars, but we tick over nicely.

I managed to resist MMORPGs for years, but eventually fell into City of Heroes - that must have been 2005/6 and lost a lot of hours in it, but did attract Copper, Lite, Short Santa and Haloburn to the JDBB, who posted regularly for a couple of a years. I enjoyed MMORPGing, but i don't think I could find time for it these days. The novelty has worn off!

And now I'm on facebook and twitter and I run the RMW Films website and this place and am a member of loads of other forums (of which this is the best! ).My favourite site is probably Weebls Stuff - I love getting an email from them notifying me of a new cartoon. Wikipedia and Youtube also rank very highly because they're fun to just browse and see where you end up. That's proper surfing!

So there you go. My own personal (and the JDBB's) internet history!