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Way before the internet became ubiquitous, it was known just to geeks, and those of us who knew geeks. It was called the "World Wide Web". This is a story of those heady 9600 baud days when AOL was only giving away 50 free hours and when Yahoo was just a white background and blue, underlined words.



Embarrassing Things, Part Four of Good Lord

In 1993, I worked for a marketing company in San Francisco. I was a low level database administrator, and while I knew my way about some software, I knew precious little about anything else.

My friend in the (1-person) IT department had installed a modem on his machine, and showed me around his favorite USENET groups. I requested that he put one on my machine too.

The next day I came in to my cube armed only with a three-and-a-half floppy disk of free AOL hours and crazy dreams of email addresses and friendly chat rooms. I was not disappointed: there on my desk was a mysterious grey box full of wires, LED wires and hope.

I immediately set out to sign up for AOL (because I could pick my own username, not like CompuServe's impersonal numbers. I spent the next several weeks stealing time to read Friends fanboards and the occasional email from similarly connected buddies.

Until, that is, my boss called me into his office to show me the phone bill. Apparently, I had chosen a dial up number in Santa Rosa which, while still in the 415 area code, was long distance.

Uh, whoops.