Dial up the Bunnies

I know the following has little to do with music and culture, but it does have to do with the Internet, which has changed the way we receive and listen to music. I was asked to write an article about the first time I ever went online for BreakThru Radio as part of their "Communication" theme week. Perhaps, after reading this, you will end up thinking about your own discovery of the Internet and the very first Web site you visited.

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In the fall of 1994 and I was taking a 12^th grade law class even though I was still in the 11^th grade. The reason for this was that the teacher, Mr. Regan, had a reputation for being not only an excellent instructor of law but also one of those faculty members who was “in the know” with all the up-and-coming stories going on outside our small community bubble in northern Ontario. He was a man who was educated at Notre Dame University (a far-reaching impossibility for students in my high school) and a teacher who participated in cultured/educated practices like reading The New York Times every day and subscribing to The Economist and The New Yorker. He was a true “mover and shaker” long before Larry Page and Sergey Brin had even thought about their Stanford dissertation.

I remember sitting in the portable classroom and listening to him try to explain this new computer “thing” (I am almost positive this was the noun he used to describe it) called “the world wide web.” Only one girl in our class of about 30 had any notion of what he was talking about, as she told the class her father had already made appointments to have it “installed” the following week. As I recall, the way Mr. Regan explained it to his class was that the Internet (“Sorry. The what?”) was like a library in your computer. As unbelievable as it was, one was now able to visit different places to read written content and look up pictures taken almost anywhere in the world all from home and through a simple PC. “Think of it like a million books inside of your computer,” were his words.

It sounds almost ridiculous now; but how does one go about explaining this concept to a group of 17/18 year-olds most of whom had only been on a computer a handful of times, and out of that, only to type an essay or play a game. The concept of “online” was as foreign to us then as the concept of solar energy is to Republicans now.

Trying to wrap my head around it as a 17 year old, I realize now that it was the verbs “visit” or “go to” that confused me the most. I just couldn’t understand how one could operate a computer to “go somewhere.” Has the computer somehow become some sort of teleportation device? “This is freakin’ AWESOME,” were my most immediate thoughts.

Less than a year later, my parents were on board. Trust me when I tell you, for those of you too young to know life without the Internet, this thing took off like a forest fire. One day you were sitting in a classroom trying to make sense of a concept that places a worldwide library inside your computer, and the next you are sitting in front of your Compaq Presario 486DX2 listening to the sound of digital fibers rub up against one another like wounded crickets in a dying attempt at a mating call inside of a snowy television set.

It was a Friday night and my parents had gone away for the weekend when I lost my web browsing virginity. As you do in high school when the folks leave home, my brother and I had a small get together of friends to drink Olde English and play euchre around the kitchen table. Only this time, the drinking led us upstairs where our family computer sat in my sister’s room. One of my friends was well on his way to establishing himself as a tech-nerd (he is now a Senior Vice President of a banking IT division that designs and develops algorithms for Mutual Fund management) and was going to give us other athletic hooligans our first taste of the online world. He showed me how to disconnect the phone line from the wall and plug it into the back of our brand new Compaq (“A computer with a telephone jack? What the F?”). He then demonstrated where to click in the bottom of the screen to prompt the connection between computer and landline. My buddies and I had little patience for the tiny blue light that moseyed its way back and forth between computer icons waiting for something to happen. After a full beer and a few shout outs of, “this suuuuucks” and “dude, are you kidding me with this?” the green light was lit and we were on our way to being “connected to the whole world.”

The next step in my friend’s futuristic hacking abilities was to “double-click” on this picture of a shipping helm that sat on the desktop of the screen. After a few loading minutes, a new “window popped-up” and there was apparently “an address bar” at the top (recall: all of these terms are in quotation marks because they were so foreign to me/us at the time, we had no idea what my wiz-kid buddy was talking about. He was using a language none of us had ever heard before). “Are we in yet?” the group of adolescent fellas all wondered like a band of thieves who were trying to crack a safe. The loading Netscape home page had yet to produce a thing other than a taskbar and scroll bar--two features none of us had ever seen before.

Some things about the Internet will never change – they may have gotten a lot better – but they will never change. My reason for this quick digression away from our story is to prompt the question to the reader: “What Web site do you think a group of 17 year-old boys would first visit while drinking on a Friday night in a parent-less house?”

My friend explained that we had to type in “www” which stood for “World Wide Web” (“Woooaaaa. Cooooool!” we all gasped) and then the “address” of the place we wanted to visit. Apparently, we could type in anything (this was long before search engines were popular. You used to have to know the actual http address of the site you wished to visit in order to get there more quickly).

Then my friend hit the keys: w. w. w. p. l. a. y. b. o. y. .. c. o. m.

“Awesome dude!”

“Are we gonna get in trouble for this?”

“What if the cops come?”

“Will my parents know I looked at this? How do we delete it?”

The anticipation and adrenaline rush of the Internet was thrilling. What was going to happen? For all we knew the most recent Playmate of the Month was going to step out from the monitor of my computer screen and start asking us for i.d.

I can remember the page taking many minutes (which felt like hours) to load. First, the background color would appear; then the logo at the top. Next was the written content, which practically appeared word-by-word. There were very few images on homepages back then, as it would slow down the page download time way too much. To see an actual image, you would have to click on the “thumbnail” and it would reload a page. This could take several, and I mean SEVERAL, minutes. And the photos wouldn’t load top-down the way they do today either. The entire image would appear on the screen as one large blue-gray, out-of-focus mash. As minutes passed, the pixels would slowly become more defined and into focus. It was a bit like looking at a magazine through dirt-filled, foggy lenses and having them rubbed clean one swipe ever 2-3 minutes until you could make sense of what you were supposed to be looking at. After about five minutes, you could start to see an image that resembled skin tone and a female figure, and after about ten, you finally had a clear picture of a nipple.

It has been sixteen years now since my first Internet experience. Yesterday, I video Skyped from my iPhone while walking down Broadway in New York City to a friend of mine who was sitting at Heathrow waiting to board a flight. It is almost inconceivable how far, and how fast, the Internet has evolved. There is no arguing that it has literally changed the way we live and communicate.

For those readers who are now only 17 and using the Internet as a daily source of social nutrition, I wonder what you will be writing about in sixteen years? What will you be describing as archaic and unbelievably vintage? And just how will you be doing it?

In sixteen years from now, I wouldn’t be too surprised if you just hook up some nodes to your temples and think about what you want to say. The software program will write the words itself, translating your thoughts to text in seconds.