once upon a time, the internet wasn't huge. back then, the experience of going online was different then it is now.
I still can remember my heart's pounding when the modem was connecting to the internet (something like "dingdong dingdong tıssssss" at the end).
oh, and we didn't have broadband, so had to have an educational excuse to justify the renewal of the monthly subscription each time. the excuse was hard to find. teachers were perfectly satisfied with handwritten amateur homeworks and people could live fine without more information than the encycopedia provided. so we lagged, in monthly durations, and waited until the next time we heard that weird connection sound.
and when we were finally online, what to do next was a complete mystery. I remember the frustration so well. as my hand reached the keyboard I could feel the power to conquer the world at my fingertips but I was stuck at the question HOW. back then, yahoo was "the homepage", mirc was the social network, floppy disks ruled, and you couldn't go much further. there was almost no content! the crumbles were scattered. search was insufficient, there was no google.
there were no benchmarks as to what could be done online. no norms, no guidance, no structure. only floating clumsy webpages that were not linked to each other.
I remember searching for random words, and keeping handwritten notes of websites I liked among the results, so that I had some place to visit next time I was online. hardcopy website directories that newspapers gave out were priceless. some people -that figured out how- were buying domains like mad...
despite being exposed to very different cultures during my childhood, the world exposing itself to me was and requesting me to do the same was highly disturbing. with the two-way information flow, once distant actors on TV screen were suddenly able to see and judge me.
probably due to this unconcealed state, I remember taking my first online interactions very-very seriously as a child: the first forums I joined, the first people I started chatting regularly, the first rock groups I discovered... the waves of the www was still uninhabited, so whatever you did was new. you had the first mover advantage and the first mover desolation.
the virtual world, the alternative to reality was created and only my generation was excited about it.
not long ago, the internet was a newborn, taking baby steps towards the giant it has become.
