Happy Birthday, Internet.
"On New Year’s Day 1983, while the rest of the world slept off a night of partying, a small group of computer experts in the U.S. found themselves hard at work, taking deep breaths with fingers crossed."What was I doing? Let's see, in 1983 I was 18. Still in high school. I probably heard about this at the time but I was pretty much a stoner (which explained why I was still in high school at 18) so I would have made fun of the person who informed me of this little tidbit of info. I don't remember them making a big deal about it in school. I guess Al Gore was keeping a low profile. (idiot)
Was pretty much a non-issue anyway because in my neck of the woods, we didn't get internet until the mid 90's. I remember using
BBS systems first, then dial-up services for years.
However, I was a geek early on. I remember my brother getting a computer when he started his business. As soon as I saw it, I couldn't keep my hands off it. It was an
Amiga 500 (or possibly a
1000 or
2000). It had no hard drive, you loaded the ROM and the operating system. And you had to save everything on floppy disk before you shut it down, or you lost everything.
Believe it or not, I spent hours playing
text adventure games. I know, it sounds lame, but at the time, it was addictive.
Try them for yourself. Mine were not this fancy, imagine all of that on a black dos screen. I had to actually type 'move north' or 'look east' or 'drop knife' all while trying not to fuck up the map (which I had to create myself) so I didn't get lost. And once I learned to do basic programming, forget about it. If your a geek, and of a certain age, you have created random bouncing ball or '
Hello World!'.
Anyway, I hope you find this trip down memory lane informative. How far back in internet history do you go?
