Hi everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. Today is Wednesday, meaning it’s time for post number eight in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge hosted by Long and Short Reviews. If you want to join in, you can find the topics for 2023 here, and if you’d like to know what others have had to say about today’s topic, click here.
Today’s topic is:
The First Website I Remember Visiting
I am an enormous fan of the internet and think the World Wide Web has taught me way more than I ever learned in school, which probably says more about the way I like to learn rather than the skills of my teachers.
Speaking of school, it was in primary school that I first got to witness what the internet could do.
I remember way back in the early 90s, my headteacher came into our classroom one afternoon, followed swiftly by two students pulling an Apple computer on a red metal trolley (I think it was a Macintosh Performa 575) – I distinctly remember the colourful stripy apple logo with a bite taken out of it.
We all gathered around the computer and gawped as the head teacher showed us how to use email; he was speaking live with someone in America, and I remember feeling like it was magic.
Then when I went to secondary school, some of our learning took place on computers; it was the first time I’d even heard of IT (Information Technology), and now I was studying it twice a week.
It was one of my favourite subjects, and in each lesson, as well as learning how to use computers, we also learned about the internet and how it can be used for all sorts of things.
For the first few weeks, we were reading from a textbook, having to learn about the machines before we were allowed to touch them or be let loose on the net.
When we finally were, though, we were all directed to the same website: www.askjeeves.com – remember that?
It was a search engine whose logo was a butler called Jeeves; the character was named after Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s valet in works of fiction by P. G. Wodehouse.
Jeeves was my go-to for all my knowledge-based needs; I remember visiting him regularly at school, and while many of the kids in my class were asking Jeeves childish questions like, “Jeeves, where were you born?” “Jeeves, what colour is red” and, of course, the classic yet tiresome, “Jeeves, are you gay?” I was asking him about the solar system and the Titanic (I was obsessed with this ship!).
In 2006 the website lost the Jeeves character and was rebranded as Ask.com.
By then, I hadn’t used Jeeves for a few years because I’d switched to Yahoo! and Google, but I remember feeling a little tinge of sadness. Jeeves had always been there, and now, the website feels a little lacklustre – even though it still works the same way it always has.
So, that’s the first website I remember visiting. I’m looking forward to reading about what all of yours were!
As always, thanks for stopping by!
Until next time,
George
© 2023 GLT
Categories: life, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge
GEORGE L THOMAS 
Jeeves was so much fun! I miss him, too.
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Oh man, I remember Jeeves!!
However, I also remember playing video games on a Commodore 64 (sixty-four whole kilobytes of ram!!). Of course, I also remember MS-DOS (used my first few years in a real job) and how we learned how to write code in BASIC in high school (where we also still had typing classes using an IBM Selectric typewriter). And now I feel old, lol…
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I felt old the other day when my nephew asked me if dial-up was a type of phone… 😵
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I remember Jeeves as well…. and I feel older than dirt. Fun fact, my first computer had two slots….. one for the operating system and one for each program. You could only work with one program at a time.
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I used Jeeves a lot too.
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Ask Jeeves was my first one too…though on a job, not at school.
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I remember going on Ask Jeeves at school too!
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I remember using Ask Jeeves at school too!
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That’s a really intriguing bit of nostalgia! I do remember AskJeeves, but I didn’t realize it had switched over to Ask.com.
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Ah yes, I remember Ask Jeeves! Ah, memories.
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I remember AskJeeves being advertised for on the radio! The gimmick was supposed to be that you could input queries in natural language, but I don’t remember that really working. I think I used it a couple of times, but Google was just starting to become known when I got online regularly in ’99 and 2000. It’s interesting that we’ve just gotten to where search engines infused with machine learning are giving us the ability to talk naturally to them.
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I know, I’m always impressed by the way google can make sense out of whatever question I was hastily trying to type. It always knows exactly what I mean. 😄
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