I’ve been on the net since 1993. Back in those days, the net was largely unknown to the general population, and it was populated mostly by people at universities and some military facilities. It was not easy to use. And therein lay the beauty of it.
You see, everyone on the net in those days had to have a certain bare minimum of tech savvy and/or intelligence. You didn’t have to be a genius, but you did have to be able to figure things out and think for yourself, or you’d be hopelessly lost and you’d never manage to do much other than maybe get into your email (which almost certainly had to be accessed via a Unix shell using Elm or PINE).
And then AOL came along and then some bizarre product called “Internet in a Box” and the Dotcoms started to appear and oh, well, the little haven of reasonably intelligent people was gone and our inboxes were full of spam (yes, I remember the days when spam was pretty much non-existent) and Usenet went to hell in a handbasket, overrun by drooling idiots…
Okay, that’s probably not quite the way it went, but back in my day, we had real, intelligent discussions on the internet, and we liked it! We thought a 14.4KBaud modem was fast! We were grateful! We didn’t have any of this fancy PPP connections, oh, no, if we were lucky, we had SLIP. But you kids today, with your fancy ADSL and other high bandwidth connections and your Web Two Point Oh and your Facebook and your MySpace… HAH! Back in my day we had text .sigs with ASCII art in ‘em and we were happy! Ecstatic!
Whippersnappers!
And stay off my lawn!
