In the beginning when it all first came out, the internet, it was wild. I remember being in the army stationed in Germany, hearing officers say things like “do you have the internet, do you have email? Email it to me…” (In their limited network way)
They were hip, and I didn’t have a computer so I was running over the library on another post and signing up for theirs. They had internet. And urged by Wesley a childhood friend of mine, to get “hotmail” I did. That’s all there was. Imagine all those books, all that reading crumpling behind me.
In the beginning just a few had email… and you remembered their emails like your remember your childhood phone numbers. I use to print up every email and every reply because I thought it would someday go away, or worse, you would have to pay for it.
There weren’t really websites back then, I mean there was porn sites and picture sites, pictures of movies stars and porn chicks… but fuck… it was all coming together… soon there were sites out there that started really connecting people. That was around 1995-96 and it was getting better and this was what it must have felt to be alive in 60’s because we were a part of something new, something big, we were the cutting edge. Everything was happening so fast. The websites got better, people got connected dumb fucks that were older were getting internet, everyone was getting a computer, old people (30 plus) were chatting and cheating in dirty little cyber ways. But us, we were looking for free shit and let me tell you it was all free in the beginning.
It was the golden age of the internet before corporations grabbed a hold of it, and what a time to live in… most of it started when someone figured out how to music into digital formats, soon someone figured out how to share. These dollar song kids don’t know what we are talking about… they never spent two hours waiting for a free song, a free fucking song! We did. You would click download at night and wake up to six new tunes… and that lasted only a week… the internet got faster, music got spread like a virus, everything spread like a virus, we went out and got bigger and stronger faster computers to spread this virus… zeros and ones baby floating around out there to snatch a hold of, configure and listen to, jerk off to, talk to. It was everything that the 80’s stripped us of… we started living in a different world the one we woke up was one that we had to work in…
Ah you should have seen it…
Now looking at it now, looking back and looking at what it has become, it is all the same thing… we were told that we could go out there and be remembered for ever, post something, write something and it would live in cyber space… it is still out there, don’t get me wrong, it is just at the bottom of an ocean so deep much like the good books in the library behind my shoulders of youth that are still there as well. You just got to know where to find it.
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