Picking up from my y13s being endeared by my old-lady-internet-enthusiasm last week - Ten Granny Internet Stories
1. Going to Avalon hostplay with R and being really bemused by these people that would travel to the house of a man who slept on a shelf, just to play a game they had to pay to play. I did have an Avalon account for about five minutes at one point. I didn't get it.
2. Circa 1995, having a phone conversation with a man who had a dream about internet shopping malls - places that you would go to buy things from shops like Boots, and you'd have them all in one place. I thought I might be able to use my nascent HTML skills to work with him (I had essentially learned most of it from a programme called Hotdog, if memory serves). Oh this sounds hilarious now, given what internet shopping has become. Absolutely wild. Making websites used to be so simple. I think I sent him my work on a floppy disk.
3. Reading endless stories of someone called Victor, online, in the computer lab at Hatfield where my boyfriend was at uni. They were questionable and sometimes obscene. I have looked for them again but the internet is too big now.
4. The 100 point purity test for non-virgins. This was the nerdy version of More magazine for 90s girls.
5. Said Hatfield boyfriend and I shared a domain at Demon. It was tinyred. So our email address (I feel there was just one, I can't remember if we had our own...I have a folder of printed emails I could look in but I just can't read those emails right now, not enough time has passed for it not to be awkward yet) ... our email address was xxxx@tinyred.demon.co.uk
I have just bitten the bullet and looked, we did have our own email addresses. This makes me feel better. I was hoping that, even back in those days, I wasn't a person who shared an email address with their boyfriend.
I was a person who printed out their emails, though.
6. The notion of modem speed. The first modem I used was 2400 which was slow even by the standards of the day, when everyone was on at least 14.4k and the richest nerds had 28.8k. Then the 56.6k came out and that was the fastest of the fastest. I didn't really need speed as all I used it for was chatting to people, but I was still a bit jealous. The first I heard of wired internet was when R was going to get it in 1999 and the thought of having a connection that did not tie up the phone line, that was always on and that didn't cost half my monthly salary in phone bills was just dreamy.
7. Related to that - computers that were simple enough that even I could take them apart and fix them. Somewhere on my old blog is the story of when I had a problem getting online that I thought was being caused by the modem. All my nerd friends said it was not. R wanted to reinstall Windows for me. This sounded drastic and horrible so I just unscrewed my machine, pulled out the modem and put in the old one I (for some reason) just had lying around the house. It solved the problem.
Now I don't even know if I have a modem. There's a huge thing that looks like an upside down tarantula with a purple belly and a wire goes to my machine. If Mr Z ever dies suddenly, I am going to be in trouble.
8. Ah yes - the old blog. The OG. Written in Notepad and later some similar programme called something like Notepad Plus; all the html tags included to make the background and writing different shades of purple and keep the paragraphing in place and make the font big when I was shouting. Painstakingly uploaded via....I can't even remember what it was I used to upload it. FTP? Then noticing mistakes and having to edit and reupload. Endless words and the very occasional scanned picture that you had to click through to view, I am unsure why I wasn't putting pictures in in-line to start with. Perhaps I didn't know how.
Now I've had the blog on Blogger since 2007 and I don't know what I would do if Blogger went away. My blog has been around for more than half my life. I'd probably manage, but would I keep putting it up online? I think doing all the writing on it for decades has taught me a lot about my writing style and how I like to communicate. I don't much care for the way I wrote in the early days now but that was a product of the fact I spent hours chatting on BBSs and then ICQ, there were no emojis and the idea of communicating by gif....well. What was a gif?
Blogs are now old media. But when I started, they weren't even really a thing. How have I been alive for this long?
9. My first experience with Amazon, in the summer of 2000. I wanted to buy a couple of CDs - Coldplay's Parachutes and the Magnolia soundtrack - to take with me when I moved to Vegas. It seemed very futuristic that I would place an order online and then the CDs just arrived in the post. It turns out I has a bit late to the Amazon party as it had already been around for a year or two by then. This might be the same for internet banking - I always thought I must have been one of the first people to get online banking from Natwest, because I pushed really hard for it so I could check my bank balance when I moved to the US, and my user name was [mybirthday]0016 - I always wondered whether I was the 16th user, or the 16th user with my birthday. Probably the latter.
(This just made me go and look at these statistics which are really interesting! So probably 1500-2000 people in Britain with the same birthday as me.)
10. This is the oldest I have ever been now - I just really miss that the internet used to be about connecting with people. Tapping away on a bulletin board, playing trivia and tetrinet against people, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Trillian, blogs - writing, reading and commenting, long chatty emails, email exchanges across half a dozen people like a groupchat, forums, even early Facebook. All about talking to real people, for the purpose of talking to other people. I think social media has killed that - or rather, the monetisation of it has; the algorithms that push the negative comments higher, the financial gain that comes from going viral and all that creates. It was quite golden before all that came along. I was a pretty shy person with a tight circle of friends and little confidence to go out and make new ones, and the internet was a game-changer for me - for no other reason than I used it. I didn't even have to try.
Normally I don't go in much for sad-eyes nostalgia, the past is just that; but now I have reached my great age, I find that I can feel a sense of loss for something that evolved in my lifetime and has evolved right out of existence again, before my very eyes. Boo.
Not that I've got time for it anymore though, I suppose.
That seemed to get to 10 quite quickly, and I haven't even mentioned Napster, early experiments with email (involved something called nodes but I can't remember much more than that), how we searched before Google and browsed before Internet Explorer and posted videos before YouTube, the first MP3 player...I wonder if I can think of enough for another 10. Maybe looking through those printed out emails would give me some inspiration, but I'm not sure I can do it.
