I plugged my Mac SE into my dorm's Appletalk network in 1988. We had an awesome graphical e-mail client called Blitzmail. It was so fast that sending e-mail back and forth was the equivalent of IM. No one used the telephone to communicate.

I had to go down to the computer lab to actually get on to the INTERnet from a Unix machine. Mostly I used Talk to chat with a friend studying abroad. There was some occasional Usenet. The Fetch FTP client was written by a student in the summer of 1989.

After I graduated in 92, I was shocked, *shocked* to learn that most of the outside world did not in fact communicate by e-mail (or use Macs. I threw up in my mouth a little when I first saw Windows 3.1.) First I paid some heinous price per character for MCI mail, and then I got an AOL account, and joined various BBSs. There was even one for chicks.

The first time I saw the Web, a friend's roomate "the troll" was showing us Lynx and trying to explain why it was awesome. When I saw Mosaic for the first time I was incredibly excited and spent hours browsing the hyperlinked academic papers and net-enabled coffee pots of physics departments around the world.

You kids who don't have any idea what modem noise on a landline sounds like, you don't know how good you have it.