The Internet is Born

I don’t know where you’re from gentle reader, but where I grew up the internet wasn’t a big thing until 1997-ish. I remember when a neighbor boy (my first boyfriend, turned out to be gay. Yay!) got the internet. We all went over to his house and watched as he logged into AOL. That beautiful cracking noise and then-poof!- you’ve got mail! You could do all sorts of things on the internet back then. You could visit the White House webpage (or the porn one because you put .com and not .gov), go to a chat room, talk on AIM- the world was your oyster! I knew from that moment my whole world would be different. I went home with a new mission. One, I was going to procure a computer and two, I was going to have the internet!

You may be thinking, “bitch why were you so poor you didn’t have a computer?” the answer is simple, and twofold. I was really poor (I got reduced lunch at school and since I didn’t eat school food all my friends fought over who got to use my number to get 97 cent pizza that day) and computers weren’t as common back then, whore, stop judging! Anyway, I collected hundreds of floppy disks promising me endless amounts of free AOL internet minutes that I was going to take full advantage of as soon as I got a computer. That Christmas, I totally got a computer. This computer had a great program on it called Windows 95 and also AOL 2.0. I signed up and it turns out I didn’t need all those free minutes because it was easier to pay by the month. Those fucking disks were useless. Who cares! I had internet! I was free to do as I pleased! I could go to any site I wanted! What did I do? I did what every self respecting child did- I went to chat rooms intended for 20 somethings, made up an identity and made friends. I was under the impression that since these people seemed to like me that I was much cooler and more mature than the other kids my age. It never entered my mind that the people in these rooms could also be lying and be either kids my own age or pedophiles. Either way it was good harmless fun and I learned a lot about acronyms and the age/sex/location of several thousand people.

Fast forward about eight years and while an undergraduate in college a friend of mine whom I was hoping would be more than a friend (spoiler alert! Never happened) got a job installing wireless internet into people’s homes. Only rich people had wireless internet and being the tech unsavvy lady I was I couldn’t grasp the concept of wireless. In my mind there had to be a wire somewhere. Internet can’t just appear out of nowhere and he wasn’t explaining anything about the router. I was exasperated by the fact that there were no wires but somehow to internet needed installing. If internet could just come from thin air why had I spent so many years waiting around for the AOL guy to run across three pictures only to get booted off when someone called the house?! It turns out I’m a moron. Other things I’m a moron about:

Car phones

Bluetooth

MP3s

Liquid eyeliner

Math

Black holes

If anyone can explain any of the above it would be a real help (especially the car phones, I’m thinking of getting one.)