What was it like when the internet first came to us?
The first Internet connection in the Czechoslovak Federal Republic was established in 1992. Since then, the Czechs started to get a taste for technological innovation. In the beginning, they connected to the Internet mostly via fixed lines and dial-up connections.
In the archives of Czech Television, there are reports from the 1990s by news reporters at the time, who spoke of the developing Internet in roughly the following terms: 'The Internet consists of millions of computers connected by a spider web of cables. The Internet is growing so fast that we will be able to connect to it as easily as we can tune in to television now. All we need to connect to the Internet system is a computer, a modem connection to the telephone network, and a connection to an Internet company."
Internet connections used to be billed by the minute, and you always had to decide whether you wanted to make a phone call or surf the Internet right now. Both at the same time was usually not an option. This was because the connection was established by a modem that turned the phone line into a data line. Those who remember may still recall the unforgettable "whistling" sound that accompanied the connection process, which sounded as if you had travelled to another galaxy.
In the 1990s, there wasn't that much available on the Internet. Also, its appearance was much different. Join us in recalling the design of some of the sites from the 1990s, which you can find in the gallery. Who of you can remember the first time you set up an e-mail account or visited the once popular chat rooms or the dating site Líbímseti?
The gateway to the world of the Internet was (and still is) for many users the Seznam portal. Ivo Lukačovič, then a 22-year-old apprentice at the Czech Technical University, created his own search page so that Czechs could search for data from Czech sources in a more relevant way and not have to visit foreign search engines, such as AltaVista or Yahoo. These were impractical for Czechs because they worked with huge databases with a global scope.
Today, many of us cannot imagine life without the Internet. Connection speeds are calculated in huge numbers, and in the beginning it was only a ridiculous 19.2 kilobits per second. So you'd be downloading one small image in about half an hour. Today, not only households are connected, but also all companies and government institutions, which without the Internet would be completely cut off from the world and their work would be severely limited.
