Comment Re:Acoustic coupler era and POTS! (Score 4, Interesting) 249
Ahh, and not only exciting, but would only later be known as 'epic'. My first foray into the internet was on our school library's VT100 terminals which were primarily used for queuing up inter-library loan requests. This was in 1995. Getting Mortal Kombat cheat codes and fatalities was never so easy. I also remember printing off the Duke Nukem 3D build editor docs on that same machine, but I think that was a bit later on. Shortly after my church confirmation class took a trip to a ''church'' college which had machines which displayed the WWW in all its graphical glory. They were running Netscape (probably 2.0 or 3.0, I didn't bother to check at the time). I was smitten. Not long after that, our town got local dialup access, and at age 15 I convinced my mom to let me pay for and install a second phone line for it. I soon learned enough HTML and Javascript to 'hack' the Perl/CGI chat room I used to fool around in -- giving myself full administrative ability. W00t! The coolest damned thing I ever did was play my chatroom buddy in Quake II -- ON THE INTERNET!
To this day, there is nothing more exciting than hearing that 14.4 modem chirp off the connection sequence. Sometimes I kinda wish my DSL connection made that same noise. I'll always treasure those halcyon days. Thank you, Mr. modem inventors. Mine served me well far longer than it should have, mostly reliably, and is the singlemost important reason I ever became a computer geek. Thanks a million! Now who is calling me at five in the morn--
-AT++[NO CARRIER]