On the Cusp of the Data Generation
I wasn’t yet two when the first commercial domain name was bought in 1985. I was seven when the “World Wide Web” was a seed idea in 1990.
When I was eleven—months before Netscape Navigator and almost a year before Microsoft Internet Explorer were released—I would have my first experience in data communication using a terminal system to connect to regional Bulletin Board Systems via modem. A month later, my mother would get the single largest phone bill she’d ever seen. At nearly $400, this bill would be the cause of the only severe grounding I’d ever gotten as a kid.
Punching those alien commands into the terminal system, listening to that horrible grating modem connection and navigating through simple line-by-line text menus, did I have any idea it would lead to all of this?
Not a chance. I didn’t think about what it might become. I only knew that I was punching commands I didn’t entirely understand into the darkness, and I was getting a response. I wanted to know more about what that meant. I wanted to know more about what this machine communication was. I was so amazed at the fact that my computer dialed a phone—and another machine answered my call. I was interacting with machines miles away, bringing information from those machines to the screen in front of my eyes. It was mind-blowing.
The most amazing part of all this is being twenty-seven and realizing that I’m already telling stories like an old man. The way I describe this experience in communication—it’s with the awe that only a member of the last generation can have.
Just fifteen years, and already we take SO MUCH DATA for granted.
