Memorable Internet Moments
From my first encounter with the online world on my uncle's 286 using Prodigy back in 1993 to this very moment on my tricked-out MacBook Air with all the bells and whistles, I’ve experienced quite a few memorable moments involving the Internet.
I can still remember the thrill I felt the first time I accessed a local, on-demand weather report from an online service. Prior to that, you had to catch the radio at a specific time or wait for the local news at 6 PM to get a weather forecast. The idea that you could now access this information whenever you wanted was a real paradigm shift. In my everyday life, I’ve never been that celebrity-obsessed. I’m not the type to stand in line to meet William Shatner at Comic-Con. However, online, I can’t help but revel in the few times I’ve interacted with famous people. One of my first memorable encounters was with Tom Clancy, the author of the Jack Ryan books, Red Storm Rising, and The Hunt for Red October. I was in an AOL chat room when he popped in and chatted with fans for quite a while. I thought it was amazing at the time, and that feeling has never faded.
Before Twitter was ruined by the South African Nazi, it was a platform where you could actually engage with people in politics and journalism. I once reached out to John Dickerson of CBS for help with an issue I was having with his audiobook, and he responded. John Siracusa, a well-known podcaster and writer, has given me multiple thumbs-ups and even retweeted me. I even had a discussion one night about cycling and hiking with Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager. It’s a small world, indeed!
I was working at a small rural elementary school on September 11, 2001, when the news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon broke. I remember feeling incredibly frustrated trying to find a website for news updates. I couldn’t connect to CNN or the New York Times. Eventually, I gave up and tuned into my car radio, where I heard an NPR anchor arguing with a reporter that there was no way the first tower had actually collapsed. How many times have I been online to see a famous person's death announced? Even as I write this, I just saw the notification about baseball player Pete Rose.
Some of the technological advancements over the years have been mind-blowing. When the ability to instantly teleconference with my coworkers became available, it felt like something out of The Jetsons. It truly was the kind of stuff that seemed straight out of science fiction. I never imagined you could buy anything you wanted from your keyboard. I remember when we thought of Amazon as just a bookstore.
Of course, those of us of a certain age didn’t always pay for what we got online. When Napster arrived on the scene, I took full advantage of it to download the Rolling Stones’ Top 500 Albums of All Time. I still have the Excel spreadsheet I used to keep track of what I needed in my quest. Even before that, I remember getting my first CD drive and copying a 10-second clip of a song by The Police onto my hard drive. I deleted it almost immediately because it was so large, and that hard drive was only 140 MB.
Some of my other favorite memories involve subscribing to coverage of the Tour de France every July when I was a big pro cycling fan. I worked in empty schools during the summer, and I would find the iMac with the biggest screen and keep the day’s stage running as I worked.
The transition from dial-up to broadband was life-changing as well. I wanted to download everything! In the past, it was always so difficult to get large files because someone would need to use the phone, or there would be a power glitch or something. With broadband, I could get whatever I wanted in seconds. I laugh at myself now when I think about what I once considered "slow" Internet, especially when I remember watching a single JPEG load one line at a time on a 2400 bps modem.
Reflecting on this journey through the online world, I’m grateful for the connections, experiences, and memories I've experienced in ways I never could have imagined. Here’s to embracing technology and all the memories it helps to create.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇