On the local village Facebook site where I live, there is something akin to a riot when one of the big internet providers for the area goes down for 30 minutes.

Everyone takes to their phones and posts messages about being so outraged they are immediately going to stop their direct debit, slating the normally reliable service and generally being unpleasant. You know what social media is like.

But it is a sign of the times that today we are so incredibly reliant on being able to do pretty much everything online that when our service dips out - albeit only for minutes - it is a right royal pain in the backside.

We rely on it for phone calls, work, TV, banking and so much more besides.

All of which is incredible when you consider it's really only been widely available to the likes of you and me for a little over 25 years.

Yet it doesn't seem that long ago - certainly to those of us of a certain vintage - that the internet we first met simply wasn't equipped to do what we take for granted now.

As I write this, I'm sat at a terminal with download speeds of close to one gigabit. If I need to research something, check the headlines, book flights, buy gifts, then I can do so without a moment's delay. Ditto accessing any number of TV shows or films, video games or music. I press a button and, hey presto, it's there. The world really is our oyster today.

But in the mid 1990s, when I forked out a fortune on my first home computer, the world wide web, as we called it back then, felt like a rather basic place.

If, for no other reason, than the way to connect to it was glacial compared to today. We didn't so much as 'surf' the web, than hobble along like the proverbial asthmatic ant.

My first modem sped along at speeds of 28.8 kilobytes per second. To put that in context, a 1Gb connection is many, many millions of percent faster. Cripes.

Not to mention the fact it was a costly process. You originally paid for a set number of hours each month and woe betide if you exceeded your allowance. Plus it used your phone line so if you were online and hadn't yet got a mobile, you were a bit stuck. It took a while for 'unlimited' services to come along before Freeserve (remember them?) came along and offered the internet for free that its use really took off. Albeit at a ludicrously slow online pace.

My over-riding memory is that accessing anything other than the most basic text-based website was a slow and arduous process. Anything with an image would take an age to download...each line slowly filling the screen.

Around 2000, I remember a colleague showing me, ahem, Napster (an early and famous - make that infamous - music file-sharing network). He was delighted if he left his connection on for several hours and by the end of it had downloaded one song. One song.

At work we had an ISDN line which seemed like swapping a bumpy country track for a motorway. Blasting away at 128kbs, it made talk of the 'information superhighway' a little more realistic. But only a little.

The promise was there - and the excitement levels mounted.

I remember working for a publishing company in London in 2000 which attracted huge investment from a couple of chaps (complete with turtleneck tops) who were living the high life in the so-called dot-com bubble when money was being hurled around willy-nilly and tech stock soared.

I can remember them taking us all into an office and putting catalogues in front of us full of speedboats and telling us in a few years we'd all have enough money to buy one. It was, it must be said, laughable, but I remember clearly thinking 'finally, I'm in on the ground floor of something that's going to make me rich!'.

Quelle surprise, the bubble burst a year or so later and most of us ended up being made redundant. Never did get that speedboat. Or become rich. A valuable lesson learned.

But the internet continued its relentless pace of progress...broadband came along and suddenly the potential mentioned all those years ago came true.

YouTube gave us videos on demand, Spotify more music than we could listen to in a lifetime.

Now we struggle to live without it. Everyone has become so totally reliant on it. But cope we surely can. We all used to.

And the next time your internet goes down for an hour or so you can experience just what life used to be like.