Total Eclipse

regurgitated from my livejournal, too busy to write new content.

I don’t remember the day I first connected to the internet.
Strange, as in retrospect, it was quite a landmark day, worthy of a flashbulb memory. Like I have of The Day Rabin was Assasinated.
Oddly enough, I remember that when Rabin was shot, I was busy chatting with the SysOp of some BBS. I was not in the Peace Demonstration, though a lot of my school friends were, probably because I was a lazy bastard even back then, and couldn’t bother taking a bus to Tel-Aviv from Jerusalem.
My dad came into the study room, which is where the household computer was, and told me that Rabin was shot. Instead of immedietly rushing to the TV, I took the time to “yell” in caps to the SysOp on the other side that Rabin was shot, and that he should go watch TV.
I suddenly wonder where that SysOp is now. He’s the only person I can say was with me when I Rabin was shot.

But in what sense was he ‘with me’? He certainly wasn’t with me in the same room, we were cities apart. But this is the precise glory of the World Wide Web; It let’s you immerse, in ways never previously conceived possible.

Okay, not never.
I kind of pity anyone who starts reading Neuromancer for the first time today, when the concept of cyberspace is so plainly obvious.
Back when I was dialing to BBSes late at night, it was pure fantasy to think that I was somehow immersing myself in some sort of new Wide Open Space, like Gibson describes. Absolutely fantastic.

Shortly after we buried our prime minister, and after some experimenting in the wonders of text-based internet, I managed to convince my parents to sign up for this (rather expensive) new hobby. I had already poured money into my BBS hobby (EXCELNET, anyone?) so this was nothing new.
Windows 3.1, with 16-bit Winsock and Netscape Navigator 3, 30 hours a month for around 35$ at glorious speeds of up to 14.4kbps.
That’s how it started, at least for me.

The web was a lot less colourful than it is today. Old HTML wasn’t really heavy on images, and there wasn’t really much content up anyway.
A good friend of mine was really big on newsgroups, particularly alt.tasteless. I was more fond of early internet memes like THE REALLY BIG BUTTON THAT DOESN’T DO ANYTHING and EFnet IRC.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment, but there was a moment it suddenly started to fall into place.
Even before unlimited daily net access (though still dial-up), after moving from Webcrawler to AltaVista (Oh my! It’s on a DIGITAL ALPHA machine! woo FAST!), from Kosmic Music Foundation to #mp3, the internet started working for me. We clicked.
By the time AltaVista became Google and #mp3 became Napster, it wasn’t my geeky toy anymore, it was already an integral part of my life.

In those early days there were some truly magical stuff. The demo scene, the tracker scene, Usenet, MUDs, the early days of I-SEEK-YOU and Winplay3. A lot was going on, and a lot of it inspiringly innovative.

Maybe I’ll yap a bit about those stuff some other time, when I decide to reminisce down amnesia lane..