Growing Up Dot Com

Date: July 21 2010 Filed in: ,

I must have been in fourth or fifth grade the year my father connected our family computer to the internet. At that time I had been given a hand me down, black and white, Acer laptop. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever, even if I only used it for basic word processing and solitaire, it was my own personal laptop and that made it awesome. The Herlihey communal computer was a little more tricked out. I spent quite a bit of time playing CD Rom games with my older sister – we were particularly obsessed with DOOM – and learning about random items (such as the Nile) on Microsoft Encarta. I was standing in the doorway of the basement office where our lovely home computer lived, shifting anxiously from foot to foot as my dad and his friend tinkered about with the dial up connection. I was insanely curious to see what the internet was all about and could hardly contain my excitement. Perhaps out of his own enthusiasm, or anxiousness, my dad shooed me away as he and his unnamed friend continued tooling around; I sulked off as the dial up gargle sounded behind me.

Sometime that weekend – probably after hours of my incessant begging and pleading – my dad finally introduced me to the world wide web. I was the first of the four Herlihey children to log on. I don’t quite remember what my first experience online was like, though, I imagine it was a short lived tutorial with my father explaining how to connect and disconnect. Nonetheless, I spent that summer completely infatuated, running up and down the stairs to tell my parents about all the ‘super cool’ things I was able to do and find online.

Later that summer, while exploring, I made a discovery that proved to me the internet was absolutely limitless: I realized that if there was an image I liked on a web page, I could save it to my hard drive. Even better, I could save it to my very own 3.5″ floppy disk. But the icing on the cake was taking that disk upstairs to my black and white Acer laptop, and saving the image on ITS hard drive. And if my heart desired, that same image, which was on the floppy disk, which I had saved ON THE COMPUTER DOWNSTAIRS, and had found ON THE INTERNET, could be the background picture for MY LAPTOP. My mind was blown. I ran out to the pool area, completely out of breath, waving the navy blue floppy disk wildly about whilst trying to explain this miracle to my parents: “I can save the picture from the INTERNET on here, and then I can PUT IT ON MY LAPTOP UPSTAIRS!” They were only marginally impressed, but I had just discovered gold.

It’s been over 15 years since that summer. We no longer have to use the card catalog at the library or have to stay awake for hours hoping the radio will finally play that damn Foo Fighters song so you can add it to your mix tape. And my infatuation with the internet has grown into a long term, committed relationship; one that defines my livelihood, brings people into my life, and continues to feed my insatiable search for knowledge and meaning . Today, the ability to save and share pictures – not only across computers, but across various devices and networks – is a basic and natural process. And it’s not just pictures that we’re sharing. It’s information, it’s movies and music, its real time video. Of course if it’s not fast enough, and if the resolution isn’t clear enough, we get aggravated; dissatisfied with technology’s ability to please us and bend to our will.  I suppose though, as we become less and less amazed by ‘better and faster’ and begin feeling increasingly entitled to IT developments, that there is something quite endearing – or perhaps humbling – in the reminder that at one point, technology’s advancement of the simplest, smallest task, was nothing short of a miracle.

From Napster, to Geocities, to ICQ – I’m curious to know what your favourite early internet memories are.

10 Comments »

  1. Comment by N — July 21, 2010 @ 2:02 pm

    You’ve got mail on AOL in 1993!

  2. Comment by Greg — July 21, 2010 @ 3:19 pm

    Playing ‘Duke Nukem 3D’ multi-player over a modem connection in 1996.

  3. Comment by Callie — July 21, 2010 @ 4:33 pm

    Buying a book in 1993 that I’d long wanted from the UK, having to then get off the net and send a fax with my credit card details. I still have the book, which has traveled all the way from Africa to North America to Europe and back to North America again.

  4. Comment by Neha — July 22, 2010 @ 4:59 am

    Wow, you are way ahead of me, my earliest favourite memory was when the mouse was released. We used to have this DOS computer where you had to type commands all the time (oh autoexec.bat). And then arrived the mouse and windows 3.1, so impressive. Duke Nukem in 3D.

  5. Comment by Caitlin — July 22, 2010 @ 8:15 am

    I’m dating myself but my first memory was logging on to the harvard BBS with my class to submit our creative writing back when everything was still dos based.

    For the more modern web, I remember chatting on WBS, which was a text based chat, pre java, that auto refreshed for updates. I thought it was so amazing to meet friends from all over into the same things as me!

    /old lady

  6. Comment by Dana — July 22, 2010 @ 8:24 am

    i love all these stories. i remember upgrading from the track ball to the mouse, oh man, so much more efficient.

    and learning web ‘design’ (using term loosely here) through my first geocities site. i thought it was so rad.

  7. Comment by Steph — July 22, 2010 @ 9:39 am

    Some great memories here!
    I remember a classmate in elementary school showing me how to make an email account (with hotmail!) and I sent her my first email to test it out. I also remember looking for photos of my favourite boy and girl bands and printing them off. And anxiously waiting for concert tickets to be released on Ticketmaster, refreshing the page 1000x until they went on sale (you had to be quick, not so easy with dial up).
    I remember my first web ‘design’ as well. It had a blue background with animated stars. I’m sure there were more animated GIFs in there as well, like the classic email icon and let’s not forget that dreadful scrolling text.

  8. Comment by Kristina — July 22, 2010 @ 9:48 am

    talking to Steph about the boys we liked on ICQ!

  9. Comment by Aaron — July 22, 2010 @ 11:00 am

    Oh man, my very first internet memory was using it at school in the 5th grade “technology club” to download Seinfeld episode summaries – text only interface at that point. I also remember spending many hours “designing” my first website in HotDog, complete with illegible background patterns and multicolored type. And my first e-mail address was a free one from Juno.

  10. Comment by Greg — July 22, 2010 @ 1:04 pm

    Back in approx. 1996 we upgraded the family computer HD to 540MB. That was an amazing amount of memory at the time. The funniest part is I remember the salesperson talking about the recent release of a 1GB HD model. It was unheard of at the time (and crazy expensive). He made it sound like it was meant for NASA or something haha.

Leave a comment