One small dial-up for man
Do you remember your first time? I can picture mine vividly, as if it were yesterday.
I was sitting at my desk in my study in Pittsburgh, having carefully followed all the instructions. It felt like a scene out of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." I didn't really know if we were going to make contact. I heard the chirpy dialing sounds, the beeps and then that melodious, sustained sound of static.
"I think we're on, honey," I yelled at my wife, who was in the other room. We were indeed online, at last, on what was then called the information superhighway.
Actually, it seemed more like an information cul-de-sac at first, with its low speed limit in that pre-broadband era. Within a few minutes, I ran out of things to do within the confines of the America Online community. I knew this was a momentous occasion ("one small dial-up for man
My only e-mail was a welcome from Steve Case -- no Viagra pitches to nix yet, no notices that great riches awaited me in Nigeria, if only I'd relay my bank account number.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Internet as a mass consumer phenomenon. In July 1995, Jeff Bezos started selling books online. Earlier that year, Stanford graduate students incorporated Yahoo, a directory for the unwieldy World Wide Web, and eBay was launched to create a marketplace for Pez dispensers.
Then on Aug. 9, 1995, half a century to the day that the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, the dot-com age was truly born with Netscape's initial public offering. The Internet browser's shares were priced at $28, but closed the day at $58.
Netscape had a meteoric rise and fall, but its importance cannot be overstated -- either as a financial watershed or as the vehicle that got computer users out of their private online culde-sacs (such as AOL or Prodigy) and freed them to browse or surf the actual Web.
The facts and dates in the above paragraphs all flow from a series of Google searches. If it seems like only yesterday that I first dialed in, I am not sure how I would have gone about writing this column the day before that yesterday, before the chirping and the static, before being online. I was in my late 20s then -- younger, faster -- but I couldn't have been very functional.
Take away the Internet now and I'd be a mess. Within the last week, I have booked travel, downloaded music, researched books, bought movie tickets, sought directions, corresponded with my mother, paid bills and gone to traffic school (a blinking red light that stopped blinking, if you must know) on the Web.
