I can remember clearly the first time I ever used the internet. It was on my Commodore 64 – one of the earliest mass-market consumer PCs – and I had just received my shiny new whizz-bang modem. It was a beastly thing – one of those old-fashioned devices that you had to physically put the telephone receiver into like in the 1983 Hollywood film WarGames. After what took an age of bee-ooh-wee ssshrzzkkk dialling noises, I would finally be connected to what we might now think of as more like the British television-based Teletext information system than the modern Web. In fact, back then there was no such thing as the Web and in order to move between ‘sites’ in a world without internet routers you had to redial a new computer. Pages filled with monochromatic text and graphics made using carefully positioned letters were the order of the day. Download speeds were glacial, and often times you would be paying for long-distance calls if you wanted to connect to anything of interest. But it was from these humble roots that the Web began to take shape.
I was too young to really understand the significance of what I was participating in. Like the lead character in WarGames (played by a young Matthew Broderick), all I was really interested in at the time was to find cool games to play – though, perhaps fortunately, I didn’t have the skills to hack in to the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s mainframe and virtually nuke my hometown of Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY. No doubt some budding hackers there are still trying…
