There are certain things about the pre-internet world that are actually difficult to imagine – even if you are ancient enough to have been there.
For instance, I now find it baffling that I would actually get excited about the post arriving, because it might be a letter from a mate or a girlfriend. Letters were a big thing, particularly in your average doomed teenage romance. You heard the postman, you thought: “Oooh!”
These days, unless I’ve ordered something from Amazon, odds are the post is from the bank, or worse, HMRC. I hear the post arriving and I think: “Oh God.”
As a journalist who’s written a lot about tech, the internet has genuinely shaped my life. I still vividly remember the fateful day, 24 years ago, when I logged on for the first time – despite the fact that I had no concept of how monumental that moment was.
I blame my slightly luddite, knit-your-own-lentil-sandals parents for the fact that I didn’t arrive on the world wide web sooner. I grew up in a household where my mother thought technology was pretty much the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, so we had a terrible PC with a black-and-green screen that was a word processor first and everything else a dim second, and that was it.
It wasn’t until I went to uni that my technological life really began. Unlike today’s students, I wasn’t kitted out with a laptop when I departed Scotland for uni down south. This was the early 1990s – the best I got was a tweed suit, which I now realise made me look like a country bumpkin.
But my uni housemates had a Sega Mega Drive, and I devoted countless hours to valuable activities such as teaching myself to complete the entirety of Mortal Kombat blindfolded. I was highly irritated when some other nerd got on Channel 4’s GamesMaster for being able to pull off the same feat, but then proceeded to do it on Easy mode. I could do it on Very Hard.
Around that year, I became aware that the internet was “a thing” courtesy of this older student who bored me rigid about how great it was for research, and how I really needed to use it to ensure my dissertation was tip-top.
Of course, I didn’t use it. My dissertation was terrible.
So when I sat down for a tutorial on the internet at my journalism postgrad in 1995, it wasn’t like I was throbbing with excitement (not like I had been when my dad finally caved in and gave me 10p to play Asteroids – these were the sort of milestone tech experiences you had growing up in the 1980s). Actually, the main thought in my head was: “Oh yeah, I should probably have a go on this.”
That first lesson involved gems such as how to turn off all pictures so that the pages would load faster over a 56k modem (ask any old person to imitate the screeching sound). This was a “top tip” I eagerly passed on for years to come; yes, it meant the entire internet was a series of text-only, grey-and-black pages – but they loaded pretty quickly, relatively speaking.
I suppose the thing that’s striking now is how some of the bad things about the internet were obvious from the start. In that first class, my tutor said to me: “There’s certain Usenet groups you don’t want to go on, full of really disturbing stuff”, and in my naivety I just thought: “Oh, OK, that’s where the horrible stuff lives”.
Did the internet change my life? Well, obviously, yes – the first life improvement it provided was that I could find video game cheats and tips without having to phone some 99p-a-minute hotline. It was also one of those brief periods where it was actually cool to be geeky, like when Nirvana made it briefly cool to be into heavy metal.
Like a lot of things, once you were hip to the idea, it seemed to be everywhere. A classic 90s joke was if someone said something vaguely slogan-like, you’d chime in with “Dot com” at the end. Brought the house down every time.
And unlike now, where it’s clear that Silicon Valley basically rules the world, back then it felt like anyone could get a piece of the pie. As the 90s went on, friends raced to register URLs in the hope that they would one day become valuable. One bought cabby.net with the idea that one day people might use it to book cabs from the airport. Now, when he’s drunk, he tells us that he basically invented Uber. He is still not a billionaire.
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