This “Series of Tubes” and Me: A Brief History

What follows is a true story, though the names have been changed …

“Man, ya’ll gotta come out to my house. We just got the Internet … You have to check out some chat rooms, man. They are baaaaaad.”

It was the latter part of 1994. At my archetypal, small-town public high school, guys who owned NBA Jam for the Super Nintendo outnumbered those who had access to a home computer by roughly 30-to-1. For those of us fortunate enough to have a Windows 3.1-equipped machine, the Netscape Navigator icon had heretofore been one of those useless pre-installed pitfalls — an accidental click on your mundane travels between Microsoft Paint and Solitaire.

And then, one night over Mountain Dews and breadsticks at the local pizza place, Scott schooled our mutual friend, Hank, and me on the Internet. On the World Wide Web. On dial-up access and modems. On chat rooms.

“So, you can, like, talk to people on your computer? … I mean, you can hear ‘em and sh*t?,” parmesan crumbs flew from Hank’s mouth as his eyebrows crinkled. He laughed.

I can remember the look on his face. It was somewhere between confusion and disbelief. Sure, it’s sort of funny now, but I’m pretty sure that if Hank hadn’t asked, I would’ve.

There was nothing else going on that night, and gasoline was less than a dollar per gallon. So without a thought, we hopped our flannel-sporting selves into our cars and made the 25-minute, back-roads drive to Scott’s house.

And that was the night I first “surfed the ‘net.”

It was new — not new like compact discs or Sony’s Playstation, but new. It was something that just had to be seen, probably not unlike the dawn of television had been for my grandparents. It was a giant leap for mankind, the first one our generation had ever experienced. I like to think that, on some basic level, we understood that.

We spent most of the night glued to the monitor as we e-mailed a request to a Nashville disc jockey named Pauly, hurled random insults at faceless chat-room strangers and waited … and waited … and waited … and waited some more to download a business card-sized image of Jenny McCarthy.

Within weeks, I was buzzing along on a 14.4kbps connection of my very own. Always supportive of homework-friendly tools and hobbies, my parents, bless them, had been very receptive to my request. Of course, they didn’t know about chat room horseplay. Or Jenny McCarthy, for that matter.

The appeal of just goofing around soon lost some of its luster, though, and a competition of basic HTML skills eventually budded between Scott and myself.

We lived on message boards where, occasionally, someone in the know would field a question about how to post in different font colors, font sizes, font faces. Figuring out the secret behind headache-inducing, scrolling and flashing text was among our crowning achievements.

We could never have imagined how different the web would be just over 10 years later.

Scavenging for HTML tips gave way to website construction on some ad-heavy, pop-up-overloaded, free hosting service. Then came instant messaging. And then Napster. Next there was Google and iTunes and MySpace and YouTube and Facebook — evolutionary steps that happened in a blur of ones and zeros. Part seasoned veteran and part anxious student, I still devote time to following the new developments, hoping to again be among the first to experience the next giant leap.

And technotorious, for me, represents the next logical step.

I hope you’ll drop in from time to time, maybe even subscribe to my feed. If you feel so moved, say something.

Just watch it with those parmesan crumbs.