re: Spinoff thread: Gen Xers, when did you first see the Information Super Highway and...

In the 80's, we had always suspected that some sort of connected world was coming, but we didn't know what it would look like. There were already movies about hackers breaking into connected computers off-site and stuff (see WarGames), so we knew this was where things were heading. But in our heads we couldn't put two and two together on what instant mail delivery and web sites would be like. That was a whole other ball game. The connectivity we were looking at then was limited mostly to the government/military and research facilities, and we all knew it.

In the early 90's. I got my first taste of what the modern internet would look like. Someone brought a French Minitel machine to LSU, and showed me how it worked.



The Minitel machine allowed people in France to pay their bills online, send e-mail to each other, and order services online. Even food. I thought this was the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen, because it packaged all that potential that we saw in dial-up modems back in the 80's.

Well, of course, that tech was rendered obsolete within months, as Windows blew up simultaneously with the American version of the Internet around 1993/94. By 1996, shite was in full swing. The Worldwide Web was not just here, but fully popularized. I actually remember sitting down and trying to figure out how the web worked on my computer. It only took a few minutes to grasp it, and it's been like second nature ever since.