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Growing With The Internet

© Maureen Fleury

I remember getting my first computer in 1990. It was the leading edge, a 386 with a 40-mg hard drive and 4mb RAM. Had no sound card, CD-ROM drive or modem. Not many games had sound and if they did, it was a muffled robot-like voice. By 1991, I took the plunge bought a sound card. A couple of years later, the Internet emerged. I bought a 9600-baud modem. The Internet was relatively unknown so a lot of people used bulletin boards. Those were the days when users dialed the numbers directly and ISPs were few. I got my first account with an ISP and would sit at my computer waiting for hours to get connected. On the Internet at that time, you could send/receive email, look at newsgroups (all 400 of them) take part in discussion forums and surf to web sites that had plain pictures (no animation, no java script). I would patiently wait till these blurry pictures slowly turned into crisp images.

Over the years, I upgraded my equipment. I had a new 486 DX33 motherboard installed in my 386 and bought an external CD-ROM drive and an external 14.4 modem! Games were starting to be issued on CD-ROM instead of a series of diskettes. I was armed and ready for the Internet. I remember a friend named Carl sending me an email and at the bottom he said that his ICQ number was xxxxx. I had to email him back and ask what the heck was ICQ? He gave me the URL and I installed it. I would get extremely excited when I saw the alert that he was online and we could send these messages back and forth on real time. Around that time, there was the introduction of integrating email & news into the browsers. That was a big step. I remember changing ISPs and having to download a separate program for email and a newsgroup reader.

I then bought a 486 DX100 with a built in 14.4 modem and CD-ROM drive and the clutter on my desk of external parts disappeared. With my new computer, I got all these great games where you would travel through corridors and the walls would get huge as you approached them. Carl told me about a neat program where you could talk to each other while online. What? A voice coming through my speaker and all I needed to get was a microphone! So, I went to the store and bought a mic and downloaded Netmeeting. I grabbed the headphones from my Walkman and I was in business. Almost every Sunday afternoon we’d talk to each other. The transmission was very choppy and after 10 or 20 minutes, the computer would freeze up. Just too much data building up.

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