I blinked because it's a little disconcerting to suddenly realise that your mind contains the memory of something so trivial. I remember - just - the days when the internet quite literally came on a CD. And it got me thinking about how much the internet has changed even within my lifetime. It struck me that one of the weirdest things is not how much the internet has developed, but how much I, at least, take the current status quo for granted. I haven't thought about my childhood experience of the internet for, quite literally, years.
I know that I can't exactly claim to have any memories of the 'birth' of the internet as a technology, but I think I certainly fall into the age bracket of people who were children when personal computing and using the internet started to become more and more common within the home. I remember my family's first computer - I think for some reason I called it 'Sally' - with its screen that was massive not in width but in depth - and the excitement in discovering that, unlike my grandfather's slightly older computer, it showed colours that were not black and green. And dial-up internet! Just listen to this sound clip. Doesn't that take you back? It's hard to imagine that eight-year-old me happily waited up to a minute or two just to get onto the internet, when twenty-two-year-old me gets antsy when Gmail takes more than 5 seconds to refresh -heck, when a large PDF document takes more than ten seconds to download!
And then there was the fact that, in the first few years at least, my parents had the type of internet that you paid for by the minute. I seem to recall that they agreed a tariff with me and my brothers whereby we would pay a certain contribution to the cost of the internet per minute (I think it was maybe 2p per minute?). Speaking of childhood memories, does anyone remember the Wonka chocolate bars and sweets that were around in the late 90's? Gobstoppers and chocolate bars with crackling candy in the middle? I think the packets advertised a website that had games on it, and I would save my pocket money to spend ten or fifteen minutes playing games on that site. I don't think I was really aware that the internet contained anything else.
It's very strange to think that a technology that seemed, at the time, a bit slow and a bit silly is now such a large part of my daily life. I backup my work to 'the cloud', I write blog posts in my browser, I stay in touch with friends and family via email, and so on. It's pretty rare that I ever happily 'work offline'. (Ah! Another memory: the good old days when webpages contained so little information that your computer would 'save' the pages you'd loaded automatically and you could look at them again without being connected).
However, if it's strange to think that technology we now take so much for granted was - so recently - just a fifteen-minute game when we were children, it's even stranger to realise that, 'even' today, the majority of the world is not on the internet. Obviously, some might argue that other more basic problems, such as world hunger and disease, need to be dealt with before we start worrying about digital equality. But perhaps it's striking to realise that, for all the talk of this being a 'digital age', accessing the internet - be it in ancient dial-up form or through high-speed broadband - is still a privilege. And perhaps that, just as much as amusing childhood memories of AOL cd's, should remind us not to take it for granted.
