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Remembering our dial-up roots
- By Kimball Bennion
- Trail Staff Writer
- I have a younger sibling who will be turning 13 this week. The weird thing about it is I remember very well the day she was born. Someone I remember as a baby is now a teenager, and that kind of boggles my mind. Yet, as I begin to think about it even more, another disturbing thought comes to me. I’m pretty sure that my little sister and those of her generation do not remember an existence without the Internet.
If my memory serves me correct, I remember the Internet getting big around 1995 or so. This means that my little sister was about 2 when we all started to discover words like “e-mail,” “Web site,” “surfing the net” and “Bill Gates.” These kids today don’t know how good they have it.
The time has already come when kids look at the Internet like we once looked at the VCR– a commonplace appliance that we wouldn’t imagine life without. I also remember hearing stories about black and white televisions from my parents and grandparents.- Following in this tradition, I’m honored to one day be able to tell future generations of the nightmarish days of the dial-up age. I’ve got a whole batch saved up for my own grandchildren.
Some of these may include, “Back in my day we didn’t have any MySpace. If we wanted to make our own space, we had to use Angelfire! There were no easy-to-find URLs either. If we had our own site, the address was five miles long and only your closest friends even knew it existed. We couldn’t post songs or videos for people to see. We had the dancing baby and we liked it.”
“We didn’t have any of this Hotmail or Gmail junk. Nowadays you go on a Web site, give them a name and a password and you’re e-mailing in seconds. Not us. We had AOL and that was it! You bought yourself a CD and waited hours to download the software. Spam filters? Not a chance! If that voice said ‘You’ve got mail’ then you had mail, and best be checking it.”
“We couldn’t go online and talk on the phone at the same time. Say your brother’s surfing the net and you wanted to call your buddies. You pick up the phone and it sounds like someone’s torturing a goat on the other line. But did you hear us complain? No siree!”
“You go on your fancy iTunes and download a song in 10 seconds. When I was your age we didn’t even have MP3. If you wanted to listen to your favorite music, you listened to the MIDI file! There weren’t any words and it made everything sound like elevator music, but I’ll be danged if those weren’t some good tunes.”
“Oh we had the right mouse button alright, but we didn’t know what it was for. You had click and you had double-click, but there was no right-clicking. One button is all you needed!”
And I would continue on like that as my wide-eyed little ones contemplate the hardships I had to go through. I would inevitably include walking up-hill through six feet of snow to buy floppy disks, the Great Pop-up Crisis of ’98 and so on.
Mark my words, that’s how we’ll all be. The older we become, the harder it will be to imagine such primitive conditions. So as more and more of our young ones become familiarized with this high-speed DSL world we live in, let us never forget the dial-up trials we passed through to get to where we are today.
- Trail Staff Writer