Several years back before the hey days of AOL, Compuserve & Prodigy. I was an Elementary School student who was fortunate enough to have a computer in our classroom. The first computer I ever came in contact with was a Commodore 64. The teacher at the time used it as a motivational tool, allowing students whom finished their assignments fastest to spend a few minutes tinkering around with this device. Needless to say, I did my best to excel in this class and made several rounds to the computer. My interest only grew exponentially as I began Junior High School and finally convinced my parents that I did not want a Super Nintendo but would rather have a Pentium 486 computer. Back then 9600 baud modems were the newest thing on the market. It was the successor of the 2600 baud modems which were significantly slower in connection speed. The internet at that time consisted of a few electronic bulletin board systems. Often too complicated for my youth to realize its full potential. It was the breeding grounds for trading information via text files/documents and some devastatingly large applications(8mb literally took hours to load).
Then came along the World Wide Web, There were only 3 choices for Internet Service Providers at the time. I experimented with Compuserve which many netizens aptly renamed “Compu$erve” due to its ridiculously high costs. Prodigy was often too technical when it came to browsing the web, having to circumvent several menus to only view text versions of web pages. AOL was semi affordable at the time and I became a member. I used it to surf the web(funny enough, back then the amount of websites out there were just big enough to fill a phone book and I actually have a copy of the internet directory back then). Sometime half way into the life cycle of my membership with AOL a major boom happened. The users tripled and all across America(at the very least), people were getting computers in their homes and chat rooms became the rage. Needless to say, I became a heavy user and would often encounter hardware and software issues not to mention constant upgrades. My interest in computers took another turn when I decided to take up course on computer assembly(as a PC technician). I soon became an assistant to a computer shop and found my interest to grow even more. I got my A+ Certification early on in high school and wanted to further pursue this interest. All the while, playing around with home made websites using broken bits and pieces of HTML.
I’m sure this entry can really go on and on until I fill an entire book, so I’ll just end it with a closing statement. The web was much simpler in those days…
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