Stroll with me down memory lane

I was at Ryze.com tonight and someone asked when we first discovered the Internet.

Scrolling through the answers was interesting, with answers ranging from “6 months” to “a few years” even as far back as “1992″ – which is when I realized it was time to flex my nerd-a-licious muscles.

Because I’ve been online since 1988. I kid you not. My great-grandmother realized the new “computer thing” was not going to be a fad and she was determined that I would be the first kid in my High School class to have one.

Would you like to see a picture? I’d be happy to oblige.

Isn’t she pretty? That’s the Tandy 1000. We bought it at Radio Shack, and it was top of the line at the time. I swear I remember how that computer smelled when we took it out of the box. I loved that computer so much! When I got online, I was just amazed at what it meant to be elsewhere. Uncharted territory. Really, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more special than I did that day.

Not so shocking when you take that into account that I own an online business now, is it?

I spent the first two weeks playing Zork I and then was given a modem to go with my computer. 1200 baud. I don’t know a more lovely sound than a 1200 baud modem connecting to the internet. I’ve been looking for it as a ringtone for my cellular phone. Let me know if you know where to find one.

Once I was online I tried to find a BBS (now called a forum) to find out what strategies others were using for getting through the maze. Kids nowadays, they have it easy peasy – back in my day we had text based games. Try getting out of a maze when this is what it looks like:

go left
go forward
go left
go forward
go right

Just to have the program come back with:

You’re in a dark room, you see a grate above you with sunlight filtering through it.

And you realized you’d spent the last hour getting back to the beginning. Sometimes I’m amazed my Tandy 1000 lasted as long as it did. I considered taking a baseball bat to it on several occasions. Usually they all involved that same darn grate with sunlight coming through it *laugh*

Maybe sometime I’ll look for the picture of my first laptop. It weighed a bajillion pounds, had a handle, and was almost the size of a briefcase. It even had this weird yellow-ish sepia-ish colored screen (the screen was black, the stuff on it was sepia/yellow) – I played Zork 0 on that one. I’d already played Zork I, II, and III on the desktop.

When did you take the internet plunge? How did you feel when you connected? What was the first thing you wanted to do?

I look forward to hearing your “back in the day” computer stories!