A rather strange experience I had yesterday was in York. Myself and Alex happened to walk through a part of York that I haven't been past in a long time. In this area I took the photo below:

This building (now empty) used to be an Internet Cafe in 1996 (10 years ago) and was the place I first used the Internet. It is weird to think back to that day and look at where we are now. Back then the Internet was a bit specialist and if you had access at home, then you were really someone. If I remember correctly, the web browser was Netscape 3 and was installed on their two machines. They also had some really old version of Realplayer installed, which let you view video at a mighty video size of about 100x100 pixels over the phone line. That may not seem like much now, but for then it was an exciting experience and the start of something that would change the way we consume media forever.

It is interesting to see how the web has changed from now to then. At that point the web was a bit of a niche and people tended to stick together in communities, particularly in the days of Usenet, where you got to know the posters as people. This all seemed to go away at the turn of the millennium when the web became popular, but slowly we seem to be reclaiming this community again with the blogging culture of late. I'm not sure if it's the same as before, I'm not sure if it should be.

I remember almost getting thrown out on my second trip as I had gone into Dixons and bought a 20 pack of floppy disks to save pages to and read them at home. The manager wasn't pleased and we had a disagreement about my putting a possible virus onto their machines. From a blank floppy disk! I was stubborn then and still am now, so I made my case. He then said that I may end up with a virus on my own machine from transferring the files from their systems to mine. I said I would take the risk. But alas, the building is now closed and the Internet cafe was probably gone a long time ago.