Remember when...? 14.4 kbps modems and Word 2.0

Remember when you got your first computer? Modems were not a requirement in that day.

Then you got your first real PC. 14 kbps modems were alright, but for faster downloads from your city's BBS, you really needed a 56 kbps modem. And even with RAM at $50 / MB, it was worth the upgrade from 4 MB to 8 MB, even if it did hurt the wallet. Especially now that MS Word 6.0's come out. Word 2.0 is faster, but 6.0 looks so much better. Yeah, WordPerfect for DOS has a clever WYSIWYG interface, but Word is clearly superior now.

And using email for the first time on text-based terminals - overusing it, caught up in the newness of it, to the annoyance of your correspondents.

And then came this World Wide Web thing. It's neat to check the world news on Yahoo. AltaVista has the biggest search index, but Google cleverly ranks search results by number of inbound links. You can check your email on the web using Hotmail.

I want to create my own webpage; my ISP gives me 10 MB free space. I wish I could comment on that article. I can comment on that article but I need to wade through all these registration pages and banner ads. I think you can put a video on the web using OurMedia, but it takes a day to show up.

Then came Blogger. And del.icio.us.

And Flickr. And Google Maps.

And Bloglines. GMail. Google Earth. MySpace. YouTube...

We live in an age in which anyone can publish information that becomes instantly accessible to everyone in the world. It's a great time to be alive.