Remember the internet? I don't mean that rabbit hole our culture has fallen down and where we all now spend our days as half-willing prisoners. I mean the big old wonderful, mysterious internet of our youth.
I can still remember the first time I even heard the word internet. It was at a Highland Games committee meeting in 1994 and someone brought along a sheet of paper with some jokes he had downloaded and printed from.... "the internet"! I played it cool and pretended that I knew what this internet thing was all about (apparently it had something to do with jokes) but on the inside I was dying to get home and find out more.
Fortunately I had a teenage son to explain it all to me - John being about 14 or 15 at the time. So to make a long story short we bought a computer and a modem, got a dial up account and after many endless hours of technical support we were finally connected to the world wide web. But the fun was yet to come, in those pioneer days you had to download something called a browser - Netscape Navigator being the popular choice at the time. It took many agonizing hours just to down load it, if you were lucky enough to snag a connection which I recall as being somewhat of a gamble in those days. And heaven help you if someone lifted the phone receiver and cut off your connection!
Once it was downloaded and configured - then what? We had no idea what to do. There was no Google, no YouTube, Facebook, Napster or even CBC. What fun! The majority of websites were text based and Netscape even came with an option to turn off images for faster browsing - imagine that.
But for the truly patient there were images out there worth downloading. In fact the first image I can recall downloading was none other than Jennifer Aniston (remember - it was 1994). I was showing the wonders of the internet to some male friends and I could think of no better way to get their attention. Photos loaded very slowly from the top of the screen to the bottom as we all stood there transfixed, slowly admiring her hair, then her forehead and by the time we got to her eyebrows the ice was starting to melt in our drinks. But we were hooked and we could only imagine what the future might hold...
Eventually we all discovered email, and who among us cannot remember the absolute thrill of receiving an email? We had speakers and a message that announced loudly and proudly "You've got mail!" and everyone came running. Most email messages in those days were in the form of jokes - jokes from the internet. A dancing baby! Run a program and your CD drive would open and close! At Christmas time Rudolph would fly around your screen or if you clicked on a certain link, why a beautiful woman would clean the inside of your monitor with her breasts! Ah - those were the days...
But all this wild fun has come to an end due to our fear of viruses - who sends prank files anymore? We are too busy Googling and blogging and updating our status on Facebook to be bothered. I am just as guilty as anyone but now and then it is nice to remember when the internet was a little less complicated and still full of mysteries. Of course we can't go back to those days nor would I want to, so just for fun, as a reminder of those simpler times - I think I'll finish up this blog and go check out Jennifer Aniston's eyebrows.
2 comments:
OMG I remember all of that. Well actually I was not privy to the cleaning breasts but I remember the dancing baby well and I have a vague recollection of Rudolf flying around my screen. It was way later than '94 though. Remember our first year of school? It would be 2000 for me. I got my first email account (Hotmail, ugh) and I thought I was the hippest thing around. I thought I was finally up to the same speed as my other friends. How stupid I was. And yes I even asked my new email friends to send me jokes. Not because I actually like jokes but because I wanted the thrill of knowing that someone wanted to email me. Getting the mail was way more fun than actually reading the mail. I can only imagine how stupid and tolerant my friends must have had to be once I started trying to talk the talk (the talk I had only just learned a day beforehand, LOL)
Now I'm the one offering to help most of my friends and I remember my early days of discovery with the Internet (usually spelled with a capital "I" nowadays. What's up with that?) very well.
This stroll down "memory" lane was "bytes" of fun. Thanks.
she has great eyebrows...
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