How Long Have You Been On The Internet?

One of the websites someone mentioned on Twitter was a service called Pipl.com, a people search for the web. I do like to periodically see what comes up when I Google myself but I was curious what would this people search find on me if I entered my name and country. Luckily it doesn’t really give out any information I would not want people to know, or did it?

When I plugged in my first and last name and left the default Country entered (CA) I got a large amount of information spat back out at me in a couple of seconds. Pipl.com performed a deep web search for whatever it could find that made reference to my name. Granted, everything that came back was not related to me but I did take up a lot of the ‘online’ references such as Blog posts, Websites and a more surprising find Newsgroup entries.

As you can see from the above photo it even crawled looking for photos that might reference “Tyler Ingram’. I was glad to see that it could not find reference to where I live, or email addresses in which to get in contact with me. If you want to get in touch with me you can use my Contact form, follow me on Twitter or if you really want to I can be found on Facebook.

So I mentioned something about newsgroups. Do people still use them? They sure do and Google has indexed the newsgroups from back in time when I was using them, which was back in 1995. I’ve technically been on the ‘net’ since 1992 but who’s counting anyway.

So what sort of things did I write back on newsgroups almost 15 years ago? Well let’s take a look at a couple.

This is one of the oldest references I could find of myself on the Internet to date. I used to use a free email service based in Vancouver called Freenet. They operated in a building on Dunsmir and I did give them a donation or two of money. Rise of the Dragon was also one of the games I had back on my Apple Macintosh LCIII. Yes I did own  a Mac and I miss them a lot. Perhaps one day I’ll own another.

This reference when I found it was like: Whoa, was I lonely or something? Some people might find that alt.teens.penpals might be a bit creepy to be on but back then I guess I wanted to find some online people to chat with. Ah yes, I too was bullied or made fun of for using a computer a bit much so I guess I wanted to find new people to talk to.

I read a few more of the messages I left in the various newsgroups and to read them again is a bit weird. I don’t remember physically writing them but when I did read them I was like.. oh I remember that, why did I say it like that?

The cool thing is that down the road say in 20, 30 or even 40 years, I will still be able to find these thanks to Google’s massive storage capacity. Who knows perhaps I will be able to find other references of me on the Internet long lost too.

How long have you been playing around on the Internet, and what is the oldest reference you’ve been able to find on yourself?