My first internet experience

My First Internet Experience
It seems like so long ago when I think back to the first time I can really remember using the internet and understanding the significance of what I was doing. I was in the sixth grade and my best friend had just moved to Minnesota a few weeks before. We went to the same school, the same church, and our parents were good friends as well. We saw each other every day and would even spend the night at each others’ houses on the weekends. We were about as close as best friends could be. When his family moved to Minnesota I was devastated. Before he moved I could see him or talk to him whenever I wanted and now that seemed impossible. Before this happened I had an idea of what the internet was, but no real grasp of what it was really capable of. This was before cell phones had become so accessible and the only real way to talk to my friend was to wait until my parents and his parents were done with the phone and then call and talk. Our parents eventually got tired of us asking to call each other and came up with a new strategy. My mom and his mom got together and agreed to show us how to use email.
I can still remember, as many people my age and older can, the sound of the dial up connection. It would take a few minutes but eventually the browser page would come up and you would be ready to go. I will never forget the mixed emotions I felt the first time my mom showed me how to email. I was excited, confused, and overwhelmed all at the same time. Just the thought of being able to talk to someone halfway across the country by using a keyboard and computer screen blew my mind. I typed out my first message, which took me quite a while back then, and felt a rush of excitement when I hit send. All through the next day at school I could barely sit still waiting for the last bell. I got on the school bus and headed home to get on the computer and check to see if my friend had written me back. The last few tones of the dial up were excruciating as I waited. Finally I got my email account pulled up and there it was. My friend had emailed me back. Although we never really talked about anything too important, email helped me get over my best friend moving away. While it all seems so simple with all the technology we have now, it was a big deal to me at the time. Until that point, if your best friend moved halfway across the country, you probably did not get to talk to them very often. A year or two later another huge stride was made in communication via the internet: instant messaging. But I will leave that story for another time.
If for some reason you have not been able to guess yet, I side with Vannevar Bush. The internet was never intended to be used in many of the ways in which it is used today. It has evolved from a way to communicate and exchange information into something with potentially endless possibilities. Bush was definitely ahead of his time with the memex, but I do not think that he could ever have imagined what the internet would become. I was much the same way when I first used the internet. I thought of the internet as something that my parents used for work, but I was never really sure exactly what it did. Even after my mom showed me how to email, I assumed that this was the only applicable function that it could perform. This was approaching the year 2000 and the threat of y2k and there were many people that believed that the internet was evil and would bring about the apocalypse. Nathaniel Hawthorne would probably have been one of these people. He probably would have argued that the internet would eventually replace libraries and books and people would forget how to read. I, on the other hand, never really bought into any of that and remained open to all of the possibilities that the internet could provide. My early understanding of the limited capabilities of the internet quickly changed as it became more common, not only in households, but at school. The internet we know today is almost nothing like it was when I had my first real experience, but I will always remember it that way.