In 1989, I was building a computer model of molecules in liquid, and I needed a letter from my thesis supervisor to go to the university library and have a librarian input a search for related papers.  This vaguely expressed computer link to other universities thing didn't even have a name, as far as I remember. The search took four and a half hours to run, and produced nothing at all.

I first used the internet, and sent my first email, via a laptop the size of a briefcase, in 1996, when I was living in Australia.  But it was incredibly slow (and expensive, because you still paid by the minute) and almost nobody else I knew had email anyway. Make that nobody. A single family where we kept in touch via the husbands' work email addresses.

But it looked cool, and it looked like the future, and, returning to the UK in 1997, I had a computer (with a fast processor and state-of-the-art 56kbps modem) and second phone line before I had a sofa.  Heavily pregnant, with a toddler, and having left my mums-based social network on the other side of the world, I found the chatrooms on a site called ivillage. It was the international mumsnet of its day, and the fantastic thing about it for me was that, no matter what time you were up, sleepless after dealing with the baby, there was always somebody to talk to.  Alongside that, I discovered icq, which seemed, at that early stage, to be the favoured distraction of postdoc researchers locked in a cellar with an autoclave.

I found Eurotrib via TBG, who I met via an online forum.  He made a couple of references to this site, and I looked in, but it..well...it looked a bit over my head, actually.  But the rest of the net was becoming frustratingly diluted with inanity and trolling and I kept coming back and eventually delurked...and if it's really obvious I'm out of my league, at least people have been kind enough not to say so... ;)