the first time...

i've been talking about the internet (& pre-cursor) lately, so it's made me want to share with you about my first time...

i know i'll never forget it.

The Mr. & i were dating a coupla months. I'm pretty sure this was spring of '95.
back then, i discovered these basic search engines on the mainframe. one was "Gopher" & one was "Eric". if i'm not mistaken, there are still teachers' lesson plans on "Eric". Or, they were still there a few years ago.

i remember one night (i think pre-Mr.) i was "gophering" Australia. not that we ever used that term. before people used the internet for searching things, it was hard. you had to find an interest to research. why i came up with Australia, i'm not sure. nowadays, just type any random letter into google, and a dropdown appears for you. now it's so easy to go on a searching tangent! you could probably play on google & in wikipedia for days!

one day, The Mr. came over & was telling me about this thing called the internet. it was like "Gopher" but much easier to use. & it had all SORTS of information on it. he was trying to explain & said i could look up anything. again- i had no idea what to look up. so he suggested that i could even look up sarah mclachlan & find out about her. about her music, and her background and stuff. i think i was listening to her cd a lot at that time.

so we decided to go to the library & play around on this internet thing. what was it called? the world wide web.... all addresses began with http colon forward slash forward slash w w w. crazy how we couldn't forget that http:// crap!

we went to the computer lab. & he showed me how to open it up. type it in (i can't for the life of me remember even where our starting point was, to be honest. i mean, no yahoo or google that i recall. maybe we just typed it in the address bar? no idea!)

and he then explained that anything written in blue would make the little hand come up. and that's called a link. and you can press it and get even more information.

well, in spring of '95, sitting on the front row of the library's computer lab, i inadvertently clicked a link that said (now, i know you're gonna roll your eyes. but this was ninety-five, people!) mmm mmm good. IDIOT!
apparently, no, she did NOT, in fact do a spot for campbell's soup.

no, what i got was a line by line old fashioned slow to come on screen full sized picture of- well- some blonde nak3d chick. p0rn, y'all! my very first exposure to internet was of p0rn.

the worst part of it was that we pretty much knew that from the first 2 lines that were etching across the screen. but this was back in the day. sooooo slooooow and no way to prevent it.

oy vey.
makes me wonder-
did al gore invent that, too?