I met people all over the world, though compared to now there really weren t that many people online. I surfed for hours. I did homework assignments online. Even though we d been studying and using computers in school for a few years, still most kids didn t have them and for a while having one gave me kind of an edge. They would kind of look at me funny.
People just weren t hip to it yet.
In 1997, my father upgraded the old Gateway which he gave to me. He got a new Sony Visio with a 4 GB hard drive, 24X CD-ROM, 32MB of RAM and a gorgeous 17 inch trinitron monitor which showed of 32 million colors. The modem was new something from US Robotics called 56kbps. All of these computers, all of these hours logged on. I watched my favorite Prodigy all but disappear, which bummed me out.