Growing Up Geek

Growing up in Australia, most of my free time was spent hijacking the phone line: either talking to my girlfriend for hours, or talking to random strangers online for hours. Both got me nowhere romantically. This was before all this new fang-dangled stuff you kids have, like ADSL. And cursors. My parents even got me what they described as my 'own phone line', which consisted of a long phone cable so could haul the phone down the hallway to my bedroom. Though, the silver lining on such abysmal parenting was Dad being able to hook us to something known as "the internet" for free through his work at the local university. This was a good thing. Since we were just about the only family in our city to have the net at the time, it allowed me suddenly become cool and popular and to coin state of the art terms at school like 'surfing the net', 'website' and 'FRICK why is it taking so long!' In those days... well, the internet kinda sucked. Even our second supercharged, ultrafast modem with winged monkeys from the future was only 14.4K (you kids wouldn't understand) and still tied up the telephone line every time you wanted to use it. Downloading an HD movie back then would have taken about 5 years, which was fine I guess, since you'd need about 3 million Floppy Disks to store it on so swapping them in & out at that rate it'd take you 5 years just to watch the thing. Here's a picture of some for you young whipper-snappers who never lived through the floppy era. On second thought, that sounds like some kind of medical condition you get in your mid 50s. Let's go with 'Age of the Floppy Disk.' In the end, I guess the speed thing wasn't really such a big deal; all the pages were mostly gray and boring and had nothing but blue links and hectic GIFs on them. Who thought blue on grey would be easy to read anyway? Probably give you some kind of epileptic seizure. Looking back, it's good that real people took the internet away from the nerds and actually made something useful out of it like never-ending cat jokes and anything to do with the Kardashian family.

There weren't even search engines back then, since the guys that made Google were probably in kindergarten, their tiny bodies struggling under the weight of those huge heads. So rather than wait a couple of decades, we relied on magazines to lead us to the hidden internet gold. Of course, the net has now killed off most magazines, but back then I read "Internet Underground" which was obviously for hard-core hackers like myself with a name like that. I couldn't hack my way out of a bubble bath. The first site I ever visited was TV theme songs, which just about broke my internet fascination then and there, since clicking on things didn't actually DO anything. Until I realised you had to wait about 20 minutes just to get 30 seconds of poorly recorded audio from some fat guy's TV in his mum's basement. So the internet in general had a lot of growing to do. The greatest site of all was the X-Files episode guide, which meant I always knew what was coming up and pretended to have psychic abilities at school.

If the internet situation in Australia was bad, Bolivia was even worse. By situation I of course mean, none. My parents decided to become teachers in the Latin American nation and dragged us along for the ride. There was no internet there at all, although they had an internet stand at the International Fair held in the city, but unfortunately (...or was it?! --cue ominous music--) none of the staff knew how to use it. A classmate & I hunted all over the place for a floppy disk for $47 so we could download as much contraband as possible: stuff that required ingredients you probably couldn't buy back home for fear of being stuck in a jail cell, with a large man named francis. Francis didn't like you and believed your head looked better jammed in the toilet.

I actually miss the internet from the good ol' days. Everything seemed so much quieter. No videos, no animations, just nerds finding ways to talk to girls without actual human contact. And there was that certain underground vibe to it that you can't really ever get back, unless you literally are underground, in some Internet Café in Russia. And nothing online has really gotten any faster. Pages take the same time to load, just now, they're actually useful. If the videos, animations and advertisements don't give you a seizure.