I was an intern at Adobe during the summers when I was in high school. This started in '90 or so. I had been relegated to a windowless team room, assigned to help test PostScript printer drivers. It was, as you could imagine, simultaneously the cushiest and simplest job ever - and the most soul-destroying monotony ever. To this day, I am convinced that performing device firmware QA is how some people spend their eternity in hell.

I found the Internet quite by accident. I used to spend my lunches wandering aimlessly through people's public directories across the network. Every once in a while there'd be an unsecured machine I could snoop around inside. This wasn't espionage, I was 16. I was looking for sound files ("Game over, man" from "Aliens" was a favorite) and games and whatever else I maybe wasn't supposed to have access to. When I got bored of this, my colleague James introduced me to Fetch, a simple Mac FTP app that let me access far away .edu servers at universities around the world. That was my first encounter with the Internet.

I'll be honest and say there was very little magic in it, for me. At no point did I marvel over the idea of accessing a machine that wasn't in front of me. At home, I'd been doing that on BBSes since my dad had brought home my first modem (US Robotics 1200 baud) - and at first, using FTP (and then d/l-ing bins off of Usenet) seemed like using a dumber, bigger BBS.

For someone who grew up reading William Gibson, the Internet of the early and mid 90s was a disappointment. There were, quite simply, too few places to "go". I had suspected the visualizations he wrote about were gratuitous, but at least he talked about the net being so big it encompassed everything - all bodies of information available persistently. The early net was just too limited to hold my attention. By the time I got to UCSD, the Internet was just a place for email to pass through.

Now, if you want to talk about Gopher or Netscape... damn. That's an entirely different conversation altogether.