[SOUND]
This is the way information travels across the internet today.
There are three different conversions, from analog to digital signals between your Internet service provider, your telephone company, and your computer.
my first internet was taking a black rotary phone, getting my acoustic coupler, having the thing hooked up to my Tandy 1000 desktop computer.
You dial the phone on your rotary phone, then you plug the handset into the acoustic coupler And then you had like this little all text menu which is where people got together and read messages and left messages.
Key takeaway here, I"m really old.
When the internet was brought to my house, it was this strange notion of well you can look at a thing that you like.
But it's a new way to look at it.
I think I had like one of those clamshell, tangerine MacBooks and you could plug the internet in.
And it was early enough, you're like, hm, okay, I can connect to the internet.
How am I gonna use this?
I remember my dad getting AOL.
And sitting me down and explaining that this was something you pay for by the minute.
And so we could only go on it in short amounts of time.
If you have spent any time online you know how painfully slow it could be waiting for graphics and audio and video to download.
Yeah, back then you had to negotiate between talking on the phone time and using the phone to call your local access provider time.
The Internet came over the phone line and you pay the monthly fee for it, just like anything else.
Man, logging on.
That's right, it took forever and the, [SOUND] [SOUND]
[SOUND] [LAUGH]
The fact that you were basically the first people online, you could tell like, this isn't very fast.
And I'll just be sitting there like, looking it like a blank white screen and.
That was when I first started I was like why is it taking so long?
There was gated times of like hey this is internet time but also we need to call your grandparents, so.
What?
Get off the internet.
And that lasted for a really long time.
God help you if your mom picked up the phone.
Because then it's all over and you've got to start again.
Because we had one phone line in the beginning.
And Mom would pick up and you hear that [SOUND] and you're like, Mom, no!
I'm kicked off.
I was in the middle of an AOL chat room game!
[LAUGH]
Think of the information highway as a real highway for a moment.
Audio, video, and other Information is broken up into little packets like cars then sent along different lanes and highways to be assembled at the other end.
The internet for us, especially the beginning of the web browsing era of the internet, was so amazing.
So one of the first things I ever did on the internet was look up Sailor Moon.
I would just look up Sailor Moon pictures and images.
Then I would print them whole, like print the web pages, then And I would put them in binders.
And then in a three hole punch binder or in sleeves, and I would just look and flip through them.
And that was pretty much all I did.
[LAUGH]
A big part of my early internet days was sound bites from movies.
You would just download them.
You'd download a 15 second audio clip.
And you'd finally get it and it would just like Chris Farley singing like.
That guy in the little coat.
And that's it.
And you, and you'd be like thank you humanity.
We've done it.
[LAUGH] We got this.
I look up the status of my friends on-line.
We could [LAUGH] it sounds so dirty.
[LAUGH]
You could finger people.
Whoa!
Whoa, I know!
It's crazy!
[LAUGH]
So you would just type in, finger
And then their log in names and it would tell you whether they are online
because they denied your fingering?
no you knew they were there, you knew they were there and you were like ha ha I fingered you
I know there's noway to respond to this
I think I was like 12 years old so I think I mostly hang out in chat rooms talking to others
12 year olds or people pretending to be like 14 or 15 years old.
I would find these mysterious things called things about phishing, with a P-H.
And I'd just poke around and see what people were talking about, and they would be like, ASL, how old are you?
And I'm like well I'm 13 and Well, you don't even know what phishing is.
I do to, it's a band.
I totally know what it is.
The bigger the file you want.
The more cars or packets you force onto that road and everything ends up travelling on what's known as the Internet's backbone.
The super high speed network that connects all the other networks.
I remember somebody, we were sitting in like a
In a class.
I remember there were a couple of kids in front of me and they were laughing and giggling and I remember they were just typing in naked people.
I do not know what came up, I mean that the internet was so slow back then that they probably did not see anything.>> We definitely had moments were there would be a stray A message in the background that I forgot to close and it was like, why are your friends cursing?
What is that?
Yeah, man.
This is who you're hanging out with?
The terror of leaving a window open on accident.
Yeah, no good.
When I just recently went to visit my parents, I found old AOL CDs.
They kept them.
[LAUGH] They kept their AOL CDs.
It's crazy.
I mean this is one of the older ones.
It's AOL 9.0 Optimized and Bless my parents hearts that they felt they may need this and they kept it, [LAUGH].
