When did the internet arrive in your world?
I was working at radio station Hot100 Darwin in 1995 when my program director Mitch Braund sent this memo to the only person who had access to the internet in our building — the radio station engineer.
Next year, in 2020, the websites at the capital city radio stations around the Southern Cross Austereo network will be celebrating their 25th birthdays!
I’m starting to feel old…
I was at Brisbane radio station B105 (now Hit105) in 1999 when Austereo got serious about the internet.Mike Summers recruited ‘webmasters’ to take control of websites in each capital city. For Brisbane, he recruited Annah Lansdown.
I vividly recall a 1995 phone call with someone at the Daily Telegraph where I was asking them to send their newspaper to our radio station in Darwin, and the person said “we don’t send newspapers interstate anymore, instead you can go to our new website…”
Home internet didn’t arrive in my personal life until 1996 — that was when you had to dial a phone number on your landline phone to connect to the internet. From memory, I recall being connected to internet company Dragon Net — a deal organised by my boss at Sea FM, Peter Little.
In 1996, search engines like www.Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) and www.Google.com were still about 8 years away from mainstream use in Australia. (The founders of Google, Larry and Sergey, didn’t meet each other until 1998).
In the early days, navigating the internet was clunky. I remember having to write specific website addresses into the URL before hitting ‘enter.’
