I love the Internet. But I also hate the Internet. That could be the entire series finished, in ten words. But honestly, there’s a lot more to it than just that over-simplification, and I feel like mine is a perspective that many of you might be sharing right now. So it makes sense to provide some context as to how I (or we) got here, starting with my very first interaction with the ‘net.
Warning: Incoming stream of consciousness that may trigger nostalgic vibes, joy, befuddlement and/or heartache.
The earliest days
It’s 1996. For the last little while I’ve been hearing an increasing buzz about this thing that has to do with connected computers or something. It’s a place you can chat with people, look up information, play games and more. I’m not sure exactly what it’s officially called, as it seems to go by many different names, including The ‘Net, The Internet, The World Wide Web, Cyber-something-or-other and The Information Superhighway. All I know is that it’s where more and more people are doing computer things and having a blast. The richer, cooler and more tech-savvy kids at school are already using it, and you better believe that the peer pressure is real.
One day when I’m sitting around doing eleven year-old things (likely playing my Sega MegaDrive, reading comic books or making uncoordinated attempts at painting Warhammer 40K minis) my mum walks into my room brandishing a CD and says something like, “if you take the rubbish out, you can use the Internet”.
You’ve never seen a chubby boy move so fast.
In fact, I distinctly remember throwing the door open and jumping from the top landing of our front-door area, and in a single bound, clearing a flight of nine stairs whilst holding a medium size garbage bag in one hand and the railing in the other. On the way back up I scaled those stairs at least three at a time.
Tangent: It’s important to note here that this could have been an even more memorable story, one in which I fell down those steps and ended up paralysed, or worse. See, the house I’m describing wasn’t fancy by any means – don’t let the staircase fool you. It was one of those cookie-cuter government-built houses designed to help the average Australian share in the dream of affording their own home. It was one of many that were mass-produced in the late 70s, maybe early 80s, and was as simple as it gets. You can still see some of these homes if you venture into the outer suburbs. A telltale sign is that most have a horizontal slab of concrete near the front door with circular cutouts that made for a fun climb as a kid, but these days most of them have been torn down to make way for newer houses and apartments.
Even though our house was modest, we grew up on a large plot of land (especially rare, in fact, considering our proximity to the city), and I’d spend countless hours playing in the backyard with our many dogs, weaving between the trees (a ‘forest’) and playing on the school-sized monkey bars that appeared one day during my childhood. Many years later I drove by and saw that almost all the houses in our court, also government-built, had been replaced with McMansions. And in place of our own stood at least three, double-story houses.
Update: I took a break from writing this and headed up north for a hike in the sun and to do some reading. On the drive back I realised I was only a few KM’s from my childhood home, and with this piece fresh in my mind I decided to swing by to take a look. To my surprise, there’s still about 30-40% of those government-built homes still standing across the immediate neighbourhood, many appearing frozen in time, whilst others have at least had a fresh coat of paint since 1996.
Though they were government-constructed, these ‘stock’ houses were built to last. My childhood home felt like it could survive a nuclear strike, with thick, concrete, sound-proof walls that were cold to the touch, and the whole thing sat up on wooden stilts, hence the stairs. You could get under the house, but it wasn’t like a traditional basement. More like a dirt and cobweb infested wasteland, enclosed by some wooden slats and accessible by a half-sized, single-bolted door. The stairs were, again, made of concrete and my mother (or the previous owner) had covered them in some sort of very fine, micro-pebble-like material, possibly for grip, or just for decoration. The texture was sandy-coloured, almost speckled, and had worn away as people trekked up and downs, coming loose underfoot very easily. She’d patch it up from time to time, but I can barely remember a period when those stairs were not in need of repair, either overdue for a patch-up, or requiring replacement of the thin, metal ‘grips’ that were affixed to the lip of each step, which would also come loose with wear.
I say all of this because traversing those stairs was a gamble, even at the best of times. And here’s me deciding to leap from the top step down to the bottom, with both my hands occupied, too. It’s at this point that I should mention something important; coordination didn’t come until later for me, and I’d suffer a fair amount of broken bones and damaged ligaments that persisted into my late teens. My temporary investment in the side-railing was also a high-stakes affair, as it could easily be wiggled from side to side without much force. There’s an alternate universe where in my over-zealous pursuit of the Internet, I suffer the same injury as my mother did years earlier; a broken back.
But, I digress.
How exactly was a CD-ROM going to provide me with access to the Internet? Well, that way it worked in those early days was that to get online you’d have to purchase ‘hours’ of internet access, either piecemeal or as part of a monthly plan. Yes, you read that correctly – hours. As it would happen, Australia was an afterthought when it came to the world-wide telecommunications network. This was due in part to our telecommunications infrastructure being either woefully outdated, or simply non-existent, impacting us both locally and in our efforts to link up to the world-wide internet ‘backbone’ (the series of core links that facilitated internetworking between nations). Combine these factors, and you end up with Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) who would only doll out a rather meagre amount of access per month, likely due to the high costs they were incurring because of the poor state of our telecoms stack. If I recall correctly, it was along the lines of 40 hours for $40AUD, or something like that. I’m sure there were plans for more, or less hours, and I even remember buying some sort of ‘booster pack’ at a news agency with my pocket money to squeeze out a bit more time that month. This timed access approach is something that the telco’s would do years later when the mobile internet became a thing here. You’d buy monthly ‘data packs’ that might cost you $2-$5, which afforded you unlimited access to a ‘topic’ (news, sports, comedy, etc), that you could browse on your phone’s 2 inch screen via the telco’s custom built web portal, whilst all other data outside of that would cost you per megabyte over your tiny monthly allowance (we’re talking 10MB here folks).
Back to the setup. There was obviously a modem in the mix, but my young mind didn’t yet comprehend what that was, or how it worked, aside from the fact that it needed to be plugged in and turned on. Oh, and that we had to be off of the phone when using it, as it would otherwise mess up the line and prevent a stable connection. More on that in a future installment.
I can’t recall if I helped my mother with the initial setup, or if I just watched as she completed it all herself. Over the years I’d forge a reputable career in IT, becoming the de facto ‘computer person’ (AKA: unpaid tech support) among friends and family, a role that I’m sure many of you who are reading this are all too familiar with. But back then I hadn’t yet shrugged off the reputation of ‘inquisitive child who does more harm than good with his bloody tinkering’, so I likely didn’t do much of it, if any. I earned that rep at the expense of several radios, headphones and other pieces of electronic equipment that I’d opened up with a screwdriver to ‘see how they worked’, without the foggiest idea of how to put them together again. This includes my mother’s parked car, and the internal wiring I decided to sever when she left me sitting unattended in it just a few years earlier. What can I say – Bond and MacGyver left a big impression on me. Fun fact: This happened on the corner of ‘James’ Parade. Coincidence? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
But back to the story at hand.
With the admin finalised, the rubbish taken out and my spine intact, the promise of ‘getting on the internet’ was finally about to be realised.
Beyond concrete walls
One of us likely pressed a ‘connect’ button on what was a Windows95 Network Connection applet. Maybe it was her, maybe she let me enjoy the fun of clicking the button to start that first internet session. Either way, it would be the first of countless times that I’d engage in that wonderful pre-show that let you know you were about to jump on the information superhighway.
It started with the audio of a telephone dial tone that unexpectedly arrived from your computer’s speakers (or ‘sound blasters’ as we called them back then). This was followed by the audio of numbers being dialed. Then a flurry of long and short flourishes that sounded like a cross between the electronic blips from an original GameBoy and a series of shrill, chiptune-like guitar solo’s. Then there was a high note that lingered for a while, before some alternating high and low notes, and finally a few blasts of hissing audio that increased in pitch and loudness, which, toward the end, began to resemble an error tone. It was that last part that always had you on the edge of your seat, not sure if you’d actually achieve a successful connection, or if it would fail this time.
I learned that if held down the spacebar it would quicken the little animation of the moving dots that travelled between the cartoon depiction of a globe and what was supposed to resemble our computer. In my mind it also made the connection ritual move along faster… but it probably did nothing, and was likely just a bug in the software.
What it sounded like to jump on the 'net over your phone line, back in the 90s.
And after that short, eclectic performance… you’d be connected to the Internet.
Needless to say I was instantly transfixed. Mesmerised even.
I felt like I could go anywhere, and do anything. Well, that is to say, anything within the confines of our 28kbps modem, 14inch screen and computer with a whopping 2MB of RAM. So, in retrospect, that ‘anything’ was actually limited to reading text, viewing pictures and maybe streaming some very low-quality multimedia. And as an avid reader, a general knowledge junkie, trivia buff and someone who loved to get lost in fictional universes, you can bet that I was in heaven.
In the next installment I’m going to continue the nostalgia trip, detailing what my early experiences were online. At this stage, I was still very smitten with the technology, still full of amazement at what this whole thing was, and feeling like the opportunities were only limited by the crude tech we hand on hand.
My journey had only just begun.