Dana Herlihey
I must have been in fourth or fifth grade the year my father connected our family computer to the internet. At that time I had been given a hand me down, black and white, Acer laptop. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever, even if I only used it for basic word processing and solitaire, it was my own personal laptop and that made it awesome. The Herlihey communal computer was a little more tricked out. I spent quite a bit of time playing CD Rom games with my older sister – we were particularly obsessed with DOOM – and learning about random items (such as the Nile) on Microsoft Encarta. I was standing in the doorway of the basement office where our lovely home computer lived, shifting anxiously from foot to foot as my dad and his friend tinkered about with the dial up connection. I was insanely curious to see what the internet was all about and could hardly contain my excitement. Perhaps out of his own enthusiasm, or anxiousness, my dad shooed me away as he and his unnamed friend continued tooling around; I sulked off as the dial up gargle sounded behind me.
Sometime that weekend – probably after hours of my incessant begging and pleading – my dad finally introduced me to the world wide web. I was the first of the four Herlihey children to log on. I don’t quite remember what my first experience online was like, though, I imagine it was a short lived tutorial with my father explaining how to connect and disconnect. Nonetheless, I spent that summer completely infatuated, running up and down the stairs to tell my parents about all the ‘super cool’ things I was able to do and find online.
Later that summer, while exploring, I made a discovery that proved to me the internet was absolutely limitless: I realized that if there was an image I liked on a web page, I could save it to my hard drive. Even better, I could save it to my very own 3.5″ floppy disk. But the icing on the cake was taking that disk upstairs to my black and white Acer laptop, and saving the image on ITS hard drive. And if my heart desired, that same image, which was on the floppy disk, which I had saved ON THE COMPUTER DOWNSTAIRS, and had found ON THE INTERNET, could be the background picture for MY LAPTOP. My mind was blown. I ran out to the backyard, completely out of breath, waving the navy blue floppy disk wildly about whilst trying to explain this miracle to my parents: “I can save the picture from the INTERNET on here, and then I can PUT IT ON MY LAPTOP UPSTAIRS!” They were only marginally impressed, but I had just discovered gold.
It’s been over 15 years since that summer. We no longer have to use the card catalog at the library or have to stay awake for hours hoping the radio will finally play that damn Foo Fighters song so you can add it to your mix tape. And my infatuation with the internet has grown into a long term, committed relationship; one that defines my livelihood, brings people into my life, and continues to feed my insatiable search for knowledge and meaning . Today, the ability to save and share pictures – not only across computers, but across various devices and networks – is a basic and natural process. And it’s not just pictures that we’re sharing. It’s information, it’s movies and music, its real time video. Of course if it’s not fast enough, and if the resolution isn’t clear enough, we get aggravated; dissatisfied with technology’s ability to please us and bend to our will. I suppose though, as we become less and less amazed by ‘better and faster’ and begin feeling increasingly entitled to IT developments, that there is something quite endearing – or perhaps humbling – in the reminder that at one point, technology’s advancement of the simplest, smallest task, was nothing short of a miracle.
From Napster, to Geocities, to ICQ – I’m curious to know what your favourite early internet memories are.
