First Internet Experience

Life was simple, and then the internet and it’s seemingly endless uses were invented. The internet has reshaped society as we know it today. Letters that came in the mail now come in the form of black letters on a screen that reads, Merry Christmas! Instead of going to the store to buy clothes and experience the atmosphere of a retail store, you now can go online and purchase items for the same price and receive them three days later in the mail. The world has literally flipped on its axis changing everything as we know it.
As a child, the outdoors was my domain. It was if me and nature were inseparable. I was the kid that would come in after playing in the mud hole dripping God knows what all over the carpet. I would clean up and go right back into the mud hole. My parents raised me as if I were George of the Jungle. I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what even a computer was, let alone the capabilities of the internet. A day not spent outdoors was almost seen as voodoo in my eyes. Finally, the day that every child loves, going to my grandparent’s house.
My grandfather was a truck driver, so when it came to dealing with anything that wasn’t on wheels, he couldn’t tell you a thing about it. My grandmother on the other hand was a secretary for the trucking company that my grandfather worked for, so she knew a great deal about computers and using the internet. My first encounter with the internet was when I was about 10 or 11 years old and was on a twelve-inch Macintosh screen. The size of the computer screen has always been a great helper of mine because I am blind as a bat. As I’m looking at this screen, I decided I would like to find some cheat codes for the best computer game ever invented, The Sims. At the time, Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox wasn’t invented; instead, I had to rely on Netscape Navigator. Netscape was pretty cool because it had the helm of a ship as part of its logo, and while waiting on the page to load, a shooting star would race across the top to the “N” that completed the logo. Before I was able to reach this part, I had to sit through what seemed like two minutes of torture.
Whoever invented dialup should literally shoot themselves twice in the head. It was a painful screech along with the sound of an unavailable TV channel that was shown by a white screen and a lot of black dots dancing all over the place, as if there were a million ants in your TV. Although today we have high-speed internet provided through cable that comes with no sound. I will always remember my first time using dialup. Finally, the screech along with the TV sound came to end, and here I was looking at a white screen with a blank bar at the top and a mini magnifying glass at the far right of the bar. My friend and fellow Sims player told me about a website that I could go to and find all the cheat codes I could ever dream of. I pulled out the little yellow sticky note that I had written the website on and began to type. After typing the “m” in “com” I pressed the enter key and waited impatiently for about 45 seconds. Finally, it was in front of me as my friend had promised and I was amazed.
It was if I had entered a foreign land. The entire computer had turned into gold, and I grew a pair of wings. I literally felt that life couldn’t possibly get any better than this. I could access all the cheat codes at the click of a button. Who had ever heard of such a thing? I used to think that I lived like the Flintstones, and anyone who had a computer with the internet was living like the Jetsons. My life changed that very day and I can’t complain. The world that we live in has been made around computers and especially the internet. I still have some of my old ways that are seen as a lost art today. Making a card for someone on Christmas holds much more value than an email that says Merry Christmas with Santa Clause mooning you with his rosy cheeks.
Attempting to summarize the way I felt at the time is a hard task. I went through a mix of emotions. At first I felt as Bush did in that technology is the future and that it would make life easier as we know it. On the other hand, I felt like Hawthorne, that it was voodoo in the sense that it was new and growing so fast. It was almost a drug in the sense that it is addicting. People would forget that you can pick up a phone and call someone rather than emailing them. My first encounter with the internet was simply amazing to sum up the entire experience in one word and that is because I could have all the money I wanted on The Sims now that I had the cheat code.