When I was your age I had to walk FIFTEEN MILES to laugh at computer stuff—and on a Saturday afternoon when my minutes ran out on NetZero, and I couldn’t think of any new, original Juno email addresses, but I absolutely had to download the latest Limp Bizkit single from Napster, the library was my only solace. Sure, they watched me like a hawk, I only got an hour, and their poorly maintained installation of Windows ME made Netscape lock up every 4 minutes, but dammit, I had to get that song somehow.
“What are you doing?!” the Librarian barks, looking over my shoulder.
I attempt to quickly close the LimeWire installation program but it is too late. She has seen me. The fire in her eyes burning, all the while she’s thinking, “Why don’t you shoplift music from a record store like a normal person?”
“You can’t install programs on this computer!” she snaps. “That’s against library policy!”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’ll just put it back how it was…” I wiggle the mouse, waiting for the computer to unfreeze, “As soon as it stops freezing, I’ll fix it.”
She frowns and walks away. Later I can hear her chatting with another librarian, “I don’t even know how to turn the damn thing on and these kids come in here and they know everything about it and the world wide net. Back in my day, if you wanted to learn something you read a book!”
_______
I come from a generation who grew up in a time when computers suddenly became affordable and this newfangled thing called “the net” appeared and no one really knew what it was, but we all knew we wanted it. Computers couldn’t fit in your pocket back then. There weren’t laptops as thin as a pencil. There was no Wi-Fi. There was no cellular data. No, our computers came in gigantic metal boxes, everything connected with cords, and getting on the Internet involved a phone line and an esoteric box with blinking lights that made horrible screeching sounds as it attempted to make a digital handshake with your ISP.
This is a generation whose dads finally buckled down and spent $800 bucks on their first 300Mhz Pentium computer and 15 inch CRT monitor so the family could have the Internet, but really so they could look at pixelated GIFs of porn when everyone else was asleep. We had dot-matrix printers that took paper on a “roll” with holes on the side to feed it through. Our first semblances of a tablet were the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton—two shitty handheld devices that used a stylus for input and that no one really liked.
When I was a kid, our mail boxes would fill up with AOL floppy disks and CDs. We got them glued to the inside of magazines along with cologne samples. Stacks of them were available for free just about anywhere you went. We got so many disks people started coming up with different ways to use them. Need a coaster? AOL disk. Need to tile your pool? AOL disks.
8-year-olds didn’t have cellphones back then. When us kids left the house, our parents just trusted that we would stay out of trouble and come home for dinner on time. And we usually did. Because the Internet was so boring and shitty, we actually spent most of our time outside the house. I used to go to the coffee shop and get free refills all day while I wrote in my notebook and listened to burned CDs of stolen music I had spent several days trying to download.
It was a simpler time. A time when technology was awkward and bulky and no one was sure how to use it so we just left it at home and let it collect dust. There weren’t flatscreen TVs at the grocery store bigger than the one in your living room yet. The NSA wasn’t tracking our Google searches and Facebook posts. We didn’t have supercomputers in our jacket pockets or on our wrists. Plus, you know, 3D Doritos. Am I right?
We didn’t… Oh fuck, my Apple Watch says I have an appointment in an hour. #brb #toodles #lol #TotallyFuckingOnFleekRightNow
Ben Stark is a creme egg who does computery things, amateur photography things, YouTube things, and sometimes donates bad writing to underprivileged online magazines.
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