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A long time ago, in a library far, far away, a very young Fish was browsing the new books section. It was 1994 and he wasn't quite 17 yet. A book caught his eye. It was about computer culture, and raves, and designer drugs. After giving it a good flipping-through, he put it back on the shelf and started to walk away. And at that point, my timelines all converged into a single braid. Everything about my life that has happened since can be directly traced to that moment, when I turned back and decided to check out the book after all. It would only have taken the slightest of changes -- someone else picking up the book first, a distracting cough, a new book from a favorite author sitting nearby -- and my life would have been entirely different.
The book was Cyberia, and it was utterly ridiculous. I didn't (quite) realize that at the time, of course. It covered a huge range of topics, and pulled together elements that I had never considered could be related before, namely computers and 60s-style counterculture. Most importantly it made everything sound so exciting and crazy and interesting.
After reading it, I immediately got into the local BBS scene. I got access to my dad's shell account not too long after that. Soon I was reading alt.religion.kibology. I started listening to the Grateful Dead, and techno, and reading Timothy Leary. I found a copy of Mondo 2000 at a local bookstore. It had a list of interesting sites on the internet (not websites, of course!) which included the EFF FTP archive. Browsing around there I found A Rape in Cyberspace, which led me to LambdaMOO. And thence, pretty much every friend and acquaintance I currently have, including my wife. Because I was on Lambda all the time, I had a reason to really get into programming. I had taught myself some Basic and C several times over the years at that point, but I'd never had a reason to keep doing it. Now I was hooked. By the time I went to college two years later, going into computer science was the obvious choice.
Everything changed because of this ridiculous, laughable book. I would have gotten into the internet sooner or later, but possibly not for another year or more. I probably wouldn't have found LambdaMOO, and possibly would not have found my love of programming in time for choosing a major. (Getting into CS at UW wasn't easy -- I very likely wouldn't have even tried without a real driving motive.) Certainly my personal life would be unrecognizable.
I'm making this post because I recently found the entire thing in PDF form and reread it in a masochistic fit of nostalgia. It was even more ridiculous than I remembered, with far less emphasis on computers and way more on crazy new age theory. I'm even more embarrassed to have this as the seed of my modern self than before. But credit where credit is due -- I hadn't remembered how much of my late teenage interest in 60s counterculture was spurred on by it. It's an embarrassing book, but that's an embarrassing period of life no matter what. It got me to some pretty interesting place, and for that it has my thanks. And... it was nice, remembering the crazy excitement I felt at that time, back when the internet was difficult and mysterious. When it actually felt like cyberspace was a place to be explored, not just another facet of everyday life. The thought of reverting to that level of technology makes me cringe, but I do greatly miss the sense of having a technological frontier to be working towards.
The book was Cyberia, and it was utterly ridiculous. I didn't (quite) realize that at the time, of course. It covered a huge range of topics, and pulled together elements that I had never considered could be related before, namely computers and 60s-style counterculture. Most importantly it made everything sound so exciting and crazy and interesting.
After reading it, I immediately got into the local BBS scene. I got access to my dad's shell account not too long after that. Soon I was reading alt.religion.kibology. I started listening to the Grateful Dead, and techno, and reading Timothy Leary. I found a copy of Mondo 2000 at a local bookstore. It had a list of interesting sites on the internet (not websites, of course!) which included the EFF FTP archive. Browsing around there I found A Rape in Cyberspace, which led me to LambdaMOO. And thence, pretty much every friend and acquaintance I currently have, including my wife. Because I was on Lambda all the time, I had a reason to really get into programming. I had taught myself some Basic and C several times over the years at that point, but I'd never had a reason to keep doing it. Now I was hooked. By the time I went to college two years later, going into computer science was the obvious choice.
Everything changed because of this ridiculous, laughable book. I would have gotten into the internet sooner or later, but possibly not for another year or more. I probably wouldn't have found LambdaMOO, and possibly would not have found my love of programming in time for choosing a major. (Getting into CS at UW wasn't easy -- I very likely wouldn't have even tried without a real driving motive.) Certainly my personal life would be unrecognizable.
I'm making this post because I recently found the entire thing in PDF form and reread it in a masochistic fit of nostalgia. It was even more ridiculous than I remembered, with far less emphasis on computers and way more on crazy new age theory. I'm even more embarrassed to have this as the seed of my modern self than before. But credit where credit is due -- I hadn't remembered how much of my late teenage interest in 60s counterculture was spurred on by it. It's an embarrassing book, but that's an embarrassing period of life no matter what. It got me to some pretty interesting place, and for that it has my thanks. And... it was nice, remembering the crazy excitement I felt at that time, back when the internet was difficult and mysterious. When it actually felt like cyberspace was a place to be explored, not just another facet of everyday life. The thought of reverting to that level of technology makes me cringe, but I do greatly miss the sense of having a technological frontier to be working towards.
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On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't be that different -- I'd probably still be in Seattle, I'd probably still have ended up at UW and met
Every once in a while it still weirds me out that the Web and e-mail are everyday topics of conversation now.
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LambdaMOO changed my life too. I probably wouldn't be in Seattle myself now if I hadn't kept in touch with a high school friend through it who ended up offering me a place to stay. I also listed my LambdaMOO volunteer experience (arbitrating, cataloging disputes, and Helpful Person work) on my resume, which probably helped me get at least one job. And since Seattle is where I met my life partners and got my teaching degree...well, it's certainly made a difference. I was immersed in geek culture in LambdaMOO, before I was aware such a thing had grown IRL. I didn't even figure out it existed until after I'd been in Seattle a while.
Church of Virus was extremely influential to the path of my life too. I found it when wandering the text-only web (using Lynx on a Mac SE) looking for some kind of spiritual or religious home for my atheist self. It got me into memetics, level-3 thinking, and better communication methods, and, again, friends in Seattle to make moving here plausible.
I no longer hang out either place, and yet there they are, having shaped me.
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Poor dead Usenet.
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I think my school got Internet in '95, but it consisted mostly of "visiting pages" (first in Mosaic, then on Netscape).
Those were the days when I used Yahoo (and maybe a bit of Lycos), and webportals were bigger than search engines... which I guess makes sense when most of the information you would want to ask is *not* available online.
I recall distinctly that Delphi didn't support the HTTP protocol (or WWW protocol or something similar), which is why we switched.