I was born just around the time that computers were beginning to become widespread in the western world, but were still a largely uncommon and esoteric thing for most households. My Mom and Dad decided before I was born that I would be a "computer master" and thus was immersed in them from the moment I came home from the hospital. A bit of the ol' attention deficit kept my interest mostly confined to videogames to the consternation of my Dad, though.
That's all another story for another time. But it does set the stage for the winter of 1995, when my Dad installed our very first internet connection and got it working during a California rainstorm that felt like it raged for weeks on end (which I am told is more of an uncommon novelty these days). I'd seen some of the commercials, though I wasn't sure what America Online was supposed to be. I was still in elementary school and I was sitting in front of the TV playing on the Sega Channel (yet another story right there). Pretty sure I was playing Warrior of Rome II, a strategy game, and not having any idea of what I was doing.
My Dad had tried to explain a little bit of the internet to me in the days before. He'd acquired an (oddly schmancy) 56k modem, and had spent a couple evenings around the computer, piles of wires all around him. He himself wasn't a natural computer person, even though he possessed abundant technical skill with them. It was all earned through the struggle of hitting the books again and again and beating his head against the wall of a wandering brain. Back in those days we didn't know anything about ADHD, and so my Dad was of the opinion that his brain was simply "naturally lazy" and that he had to push himself to finish anything worth doing. And he had quite a bit of success that way in things he was familiar with, but learning new skills was always a great challenge for him. And so there he was struggling that night, pushing himself to keep up with the 20th century when he was rewarded with a heavenly chorus of the connecting signals screaming through the modem. And it was capped off with a voice exclaiming "Welcome! You've got mail!"
He was too tired to celebrate. He sat back in his chair, letting the elation take him and beckoning me over to see his triumph. It was not something I was able to appreciate. But little did I know that this would be my first glance into a wider world.
I don't really know if I understood that this single program on our computer put us in contact with other real people in the world. When I was younger I just could not really conceptualize other people existing on the other side of my computer screen, but my Dad insisted that this was the big new revolutionary thing. He would often start bedazzling me with wonderful tales of what the future held: little computers you could keep in your pocket, that would let you speak to anyone anywhere, read the news, play your games. It made me so excited for the future in a way only a later teenage me could smother by deciding that is must've been a load of impossible dreams spawned from corporate propaganda overselling its new product.
In the meantime however, the internet did open up a new world of games. Dozens of games available for free on AOL's listings, most of them shareware demos. Games that were much more complicated than I had ever seen before, point and click adventure games, indie RPGs, real-time strategy games. I became obsessed with Warcraft and Exile and whatever else I could get my hands on, but my very favorite was Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMORPG, based on Dungeons and Dragons (of which I had a couple books). My Dad had acquired some deal that allowed me to play for roughly 30 hours a month, and so on the weekends I would play into the long hours of the night, and would slowly realize that the other people playing were themselves real people. And that I was substantially younger than them. Of course back in those days we didn't ever offer or ask for personal information to people over the internet, even if we knew them quite well.
Eventually my exploration of the internet led me into fandom spaces for my favorite things: Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Star Wars. And it just seemed so amazing that so many people had their own little personal pages about the stuff they liked so much. Back in those days it seemed like everyone had their own webpage for their own little obsessions.
My Dad encouraged me to start my own, but I just generally couldn't concentrate enough to learn how to use HTML. I couldn't wrap my head around how coding worked to present something on the screen, even though he did his best to help me make a crude rudimentary Shadowrun fanpage. I think he was a bit disappointed in my inability to focus on things that didn't interest me, and I felt pretty bad about my lack of motivation to learn it.
I tried now and again over the years to give it a shot. I think back often to his predictions of a wirelessly interconnected super computer in every pocket just about every time I use my phone. I wish he could see this page now, he'd be impressed with what I've learned, simple as it may be. I hope he knows I always remembered how he did things for us, and what he tried to teach me. But mostly I hope he knows I think of him every time I see a screen.