Cybercrime 1996: The Day the Internet Came to Tenison's School

It is 1996. Girls are powerful, cows are mad, and Take That have split, leaving a gaping hole in the hearts of the nation and necessitating the setting up of a government helpline. Lest we forget.

And somewhere in the depths of Croydon, a class of Year 7 kids are ushered into the school computer room for a Special Lesson™. Holy fuck, here comes the Internet.

Damn straight, kids, from now on we are LIVING IN THE FUTURE. After a boring talk that seemed to last a lifetime, a fleet of mid-90s 12-year-olds were let loose on the World Wide Web. The only rule: don’t try to email anyone. It was a simpler time.

So there it was, laid out before me: the Information Superhighway. Where would I travel on this road, little weirdling that I was? What was the most subversive, the most outré, the most downright badass thing I could do? Well goshdarn it if I didn’t jump on Webcrawler and search for the White House.

WebCrawler circa '96, courtesy of the Web Design Museum

I clicked on the link with a shaking hand. The page materialised before me. I looked furtively around. I closed the window quickly. Because you see, I thought…

I thought…

I genuinely thought I’d hacked into the computer system of the goddamn White House. Little Daydream Bubbles in her Year 7 I.T. class in a Church of England school in Croydon was somehow a hacking savant. Had The Matrix come out yet I would have been fucking Neo. But it was 1996 and I was 12, so my only frame of reference was That Genius Girl out of The Demon Headmaster.

If you need help with this modern monster they call the internet, why not pick up this 'Easy Internet Guide': a piece of marvellously defunct media, now available to buy at my Etsy store!