The early days of computing

I was just telling someone a story about the first time I really tried getting online. How a buddy and I say there with our Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve diskettes and dialed in with 2600 baud modem and sat there for like 15 minutes waiting for the first page of graphics to load up. This, of course, was before the world wide web, and pretty much the only thing you could do was post to a bulletin board/forum and send email. As no one we knew had a computer, email wasn't really an option.

But then I remembered that wasn't my first taste of the internet. About two years eariler I was talking to a guy who was telling me about this great thing coming called the internet and tried to explain to me how he could communicate, free of charge, with other college kids all over the country.

I remember telling him he was full of shit and quite possibly on crack...which in retrospect may have actually been true.

" Hang on," he said, " I'll show you" and then he proceeded to type at like 100,000 words per minute.....after a while he said, " here check this out, someone from Berkley is responding"

I walked over to the screen and patiently waited while a file downloaded then displayed, on the screen in full color, the image of a hot blonde getting teabagged.

" Wow" I thought to myself, " this internet thing has some real potential"

If only I had jumped on that train before it left the station.