It occurs to me that 2012 is almost surely the twentieth anniversary of my hearing of the miscellany we now call the Internet via an article about Mosaic and the barely nascent web in a (possibly defunct) magazine called Puget Sound Computer User.
Incredibly, I seems I have made my living from the Internet more or less since 1996 or so.
I remember being shown some kind of bulletin board discussion on wicca. People were claiming to be able to turn street lights on and off by force of will. I told my friend, “I’m a bus driver. I don’t need a two thousand dollar computer to talk to crazy people.” I think that might have been around 1990. I first went on line around 1994. I was in a Sears store playing with a net tv device. Remember those? I managed to find IU’s web site and from there I found the school of library science. Jim Hurd was in the school of Library Science at the time and I knew he’d been given an assignment to create a web site. I found it and found a picture of ME he had posted. There I was on the big screen at Sears. For a second I felt famous. I decided I was going to have to buy myself a computer. It took a couple of years. God, computers were really expensive back then. I bought an IBM thinkpad with a one gigabyte hard drive and a CDROM drive. It was state of the art and cost around $1,500. The internet has been costing me money ever since.