On 30(-ish) Years Online

The wonderful piece I’m linking to below reminds me that I missed a golden opportunity this time last year when I failed to post a retrospective on my 30th anniversary of first getting online. Sadly, for some reason, it whizzed by without me realizing the significance of the moment. Which is a damn shame because you know I would have cooked up something really good to honor it.

So let’s do it for year 31! Well, a pared-down version, I guess.

My life online started sometime in September, 1994, after one of my roommates brought home a Mac Performa[1] he claimed was for his architecture classwork. He got a couple games that were typical of the era: not every good but useful for wasting time. We explored Apple’s online community, eWorld, a bit, but quickly lost interest. He let me install America Online and soon I was using the computer more than him.[2]

It took me a week or two of stumbling around to find message boards that matched my interests. Soon I was talking KU football with Jayhawks all over the country.[3] One fateful afternoon I ran upstairs and virtually screamed at Michigan fans after one of the greatest plays in college football history on a general college football board. When the college hoops season began, I learned how to battle fans from other schools, arguing about recruiting and games.[4] Thanks to the Italian soccer board, I was able to fall in love with Serie A after the Italian national team had captured my heart during the World Cup earlier that year. When Vitalogy was released later that fall, I dissected it with other Pearl Jam fans. And, of course, I was pestering my friends who had begun to scatter around the country to sign up for email so I could send them daily messages.

There’s no doubting what a massive impact discovering the internet had on my life. It opened up opportunities for an introvert like me to connect with people who had the same interests, or in some cases totally opposite interests, all over the world. No longer did I have to hope the library had outdated books about topics that caught my fancy. Now I could find dozens, eventually hundreds, of sources that were updated with the latest information in the sphere. I had always been a serial hobbyist. Quick and easy access to like minded folks allowed me to bounce around to even more topics that momentarily piqued my interest. There were probably dozens of very niche topics that I was a super expert on for a week to 10 days and then slipped from my mind forever when the next bright, shiny object popped up.

Being online then was so primitive in actual experience. It was almost exclusively a text-based journey, any graphics were very basic and loaded incredibly slowly. If you wanted to listen to music while you surfed, you better have a stereo or radio nearby, because you sure as hell couldn’t stream songs.

I think that simple structure was actually a good thing. You had to engage your imagination to flesh out ideas. The sitting and waiting while data loaded on your screen, line-by-line sometimes taking well over a minute, gave you time to anticipate and predict what was to come. Sometimes your guesses were quite wrong, which added drama to the delays. Like all early technological developments, you were entranced by the possibilities and potential if slightly letdown by the reality of what the Internet had to offer. Akin to being a kid on Christmas Eve without the payoff of Christmas morning.

In time the Internet got faster and more complex, and for a long time, better. I’m not sure exactly when the true zenith of the Internet was. The late Nineties, when music sharing was rampant and DSL/cable lines took downloading to a whole other level? The early 2000s, when blogs became a thing and it seemed like there were millions of cool people writing about and linking to other cool things? The Web 2.0 era, when things started to look truly amazing and sites like YouTube and Twitter changed how we interacted with media and people? Some might even say despite all the issues with the Internet today, from the endless ads to the gatekeeping by a handful of companies to governments telling us what we can and can not view to the general toxicity of any forum where people can talk about and to each other, the instant access to high quality media on nearly any device balances all of that out.

I would never want to go back to the Internet of 1994. It was slow and basic and, honestly, kind of boring. But like every new idea that takes hold, it had a magic to it that has disappeared as the technology it was built upon raced forward.

I took the easy route, using AOL as my (heavily restricted) portal to the Internet. Others, like the author of this piece, cobbled together the many tools needed to get online on their own. I switched to a private ISP in 1996, and by then you did not have to do the endless configuring that geeks had to do just a few years earlier. Naturally I dove in and learned how to tinker with this setting or that to customize my experience. But I never had to do that early trial-and-error just to get on. AOL was really a game-changer in opening the Internet to the average, non-technical person.

Compare all that to today, where, yes, you do need a handful of different applications to browse and check email and listen to music, etc., but you basically sign into your Google and/or Apple accounts and never worry about the settings again.

My first months in cyberspace