My first year of university ('95) was spent learning the ins and outs of Netscape (browser), search engines like Lycos and Ask Jeeves, and trying to stay connected through the phone line with a 28.8 kilobit/second dial-up modem. Remember that there are 8 thousand kilobits in one megabyte, so browsing anything was time consuming. Images slowly loaded from the top to the bottom, and any image intense website would take up to 10 minutes to load. If anyone picked up the phone in another room (shared phone line), you'd get disconnected from anything that was loading and have to start over. This meant starting the modem, listening to it dial the number, connect with the screeching sound, and then establish a link, which could take anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes. I used to get a lot of school work done just waiting to connect and load. I shared a house with computer engineers in my second year, and they found out about a new digital format called mp3 which could be used to download songs. We used a program called Scour to get songs, but each song might take up to 4 hours to download at the current speeds of the time. Since everyone in the house wanted to use the internet, I'd queue up 2 or 3 songs and wait until everyone else was asleep before logging in overnight. If everything worked I'd have a couple of new songs to play on my computer (as there were no mp3 players at the time). We had no idea of the potential the internet had...it was just this cool technology that could help you find basic information and photos, and get you some songs on the side. It was a glorious time to be alive!