The garden path to the internet

Signpost: Welcome new user, to the computer world.

What happens when hours and hours are spent by thousands of people doing mundane things? Well for a start, we get condensed versions of truth. Hours spent converting CD music to mp3 and months spent downloading mp3 songs led to the knowledge that 96kbps is smaller in memory and still pretty good quality, while 256 kbps is perfect quality but hugely wasteful for memory. Anything less or more is extraneous to human ears. 44000hz is fine. 

But I feel like I have to atleast show you how I grew into the computer world, from getting a PC in school holidays to play 3d games, to playing on LAN with gamers just before gaming became e-sports. 

I'll index these memoirs chronologically, atleast, in order of reality and not in writing. 

First toy 

My first toy was a computer that asked questions, like spelling questions. If you typed in the correct word, it would say "yes, you are right. Find the answer to question _3_"  

That little voice clip stuck with me, all through life. "Yes, you are correct. Find the answer to question 4."

Dad's laptops and typewriters.

Mom is a trained stenographer. Stenography being the subject of typing that girls got taught, back in the 20th century, ready for cush office jobs. 

Dad has a nice ribbon-ink typewriter, and then he would once in a while bring a super-heavy portable computer from his office to work at with at home. No games, no touching besides once, that first time it came home. But that fresh computer smell and its whirring floppy disk smells, are something i'll remember. 

A lesson here is to not touch laptops unless you are working, and make sure they stay factory fresh. 

1993-1994 the personal holiday computer. 

Our computer had DOS. Disk operating system. There were multiple famous OS back then. Even in the 2023 movie Moonfall the moon is an OS. Our DOS had a menu, and dad had put games on it. We had all the ID games. Commander Keen. Cards.  Wolfenstein. Starwars.  The computer came home in the school holidays. Perfect introduction for children to wisely use a computer.  Just in the holidays. 

Cousins came to play. Neighbours came to play. We had ID games as they came out. Certain games we played were cutting edge, the boundary of infinite was being pushed. Commander keen allowed scrolling scenes.  Soon Sega mastersystems and such would be in peoples houses, taking up the t.v. but for us, we just had a computer on the holidays. 

We played seirra games like monkey island and kings quest. Top quality, beautiful games filled with jokes, puns, and euphemisms. How to be peaceful? Have witty barbs. 

It took a while for the cheat codes to make their way into our way of playing. "God mode" meant never dying. What a game changer, cheats were. 

I didnt access the internet until 1995, when games were available for us to play, like DOOM which was on school computers. 

For years we played games. Such games from Lucas Arts from whom came Star Wars movies and graphics, IdSoftware which was revolutionary in creating certain technologies such as scrolling the world rather than scene by scene staged paths. Sierra was also particularly memorable as they had many adventure puzzle games that combined harmlessly funny humour with adventure. 

1998 to January 2000

The internet arrived. I used the internet to research games and science. There was a website www.gamespot.com they offered free email addresses. I was into entering competitions back then. free stuff. the internet was free also. the phone companies offered the internet free of charge. 

I didn't get any new games, and the games stayed the same sorts, FPS, running around some world talking to NPCs. 

yahoo.com offered free email and chat rooms. For some reason, children ended up in the same chatrooms, and i had a friend i remember i talked to twice or three times. 

2000 - 2022

Personally, i went to Australia and in Australia all the computer magazines had porn booklets in the middle. Rapid adoption of the internet was the game. I made a website on angelfire.com and had porn advertizing.

Hotmail.com, Microsoft's email service offered a chat application. Microsoft messenger linked to the email account. You could add users via their email addresses. 

Large networks formed, like the saying '2 degrees of separation" , people had friends that encorporated their close friends and similar aged people from neighbourly countries and towns. 

The only form of expression was single line of text, known as your name.

The internet was released by DARPA, the military arm of the United States of America. The machinary of the Internet is actually very easy and designed  to be easily understood by humans. There are RFCs which describe exactly and perfectly how to make tools which use the shared protocols of the internet. the Internet Protocol  (RFC 791)  Transmission Control Protocol (RFC 793)  UDP can all be learned about and understood as a child by reading the RFC. The HTTP protocol especially is very easy to use, since it uses actual English words as code for sending and recieving information. 

The internet was very open back then. There was one website for stringtheory.com

The people used to congregate on IRC, Internet Relay Chat, for which there is also a set of RFCs. People from different parts of the world set up their own rooms, and their own cultures shone through. Culture was the name of the game, not identity but culture. How rude were people? how crude were people? what were people interested in?  There were 3 Networks, where the majority of people knowledgeable congregated. Dalnet was one of them. 

I being a victim of racism, congregated with the KKK and neonazis, due to our affinity for black metal music.  That ended in 2001 with the world trade center terrorism of September 11, 2001. 

Before the American War on Terrorism, the Anarchist Cookbook was the most popular book on the internet. Any place you went to find a book, had the Anarchist's cookbook. It had all sorts of weird recipes like home-made napalm. 

That book dissappeared slowly but surely.

Then Napster appeared around 2001. You could get free music from other people. Music was a big deal for the kids back then. People loved music. Musicians united generations and Musicians united whole races. But it was free music. We simply ripped the music onto the Peer to peer network. I had a few hundred songs. my fellow friends from school had thousands of songs. Metallica complained that they weren't getting money, and instead of listening to black metal all the white bogans were listening to 1980s rock metal like Metallica. So... Napster was shutdown, like the free internet was shut down a couple years prior. 

And people started walking around with Ipods, the Apple MP3 player. Apple somehow funnelled money to these American Musicians. 

In its place, people took up Peer to Peer sharing. One was Bear Share. But at the same time, people were sharing porn, and child porn. US Former President Bill Clinton had made the first law about the internet, to not have child porn. In hindsight, Bill Clinton turned out to be a raving sexual maniac, who forced Monica Lewinsky to suck his dick while he was working as the president. And He apparently was a rape victim as a child. So, porn stars started trying to fight child porn, by shaving their pubic hair. 

Anyway...

The Internet was growing in terms of technology. IEEE was developing the technology along with Mozilla and Netscape browsers. Javascript and Java were competing. Yahoo was still prominent. Yahoo Finance became the main source of business information for business people. 
Linux was growing. Unix was growing. In fact the big billionaire companies were ripping the ideas from the open source software. 

by 2004 Sourceforge and freshmeat were places where you could share Linux packages. 

Eventually, by around 2009, the big corporations decided to advertize the internet as "the cloud." 

Everything hidden to the public, by describing everything as "the cloud." Jesus Christ was making pictures in the cloud. personal, pretty 3D pictures in the clouds. Perhaps the Americans were counterfeiting that, or glorifying Jesus. Free access to the internet was now all but gone. You can't get an IP address without it being DHCP (another RFC.) 

Social Media became popular. as people found that Facebook and there was another website before facebook, called something. But Facebook was more dynamic, more game-like in its interface , that that website which was more like an HTML website, than some PHP social network where you see the friends of your friends.  

By 2023, the Government offered to us, the TV Show "Capture" where the government controlled everything we see and do. Maybe the government is an alien that feels it has that authority. 

good luck copper top.