It’s hard to believe that even though my parents suffer through dial-up at home, they were pretty early adopters of the teh internets, a la CompuServe, in the late eighties. I remember playing through text-only, choose-your-own adventure games, where’d you have to type in commands like, “pick up lantern” or “stab troll with knife.”

When I was ten, I was one of the first kids on my block to get America Online, which was a Christmas present from my parents. That was when you had a limited number of online hours per month, after which you were charged some hefty fees, as my dad quickly learned.  Like a typical pre-teen, I held up the phone line, chatting with random strangers, telling them I was sixteen and from California. And like typical parents of a pre-teen, my mom and dad would limit the number of AOL minutes, and that “Goodbye!” .wav when being blocked made me hate them.

File-sharing blew my mind with the advent of Napster. It took a full day to download “All For One” by Sting/Bryan Adams/Rod Stewart (the video of which took more time to find than I care to admit), but there was something amazing about liking a song, making a few clicks, and having it. For free.

Then obviously came the T1 line at the University and Audiogalaxy and updating my AIM away message when I WENT DOWN THE HALL TO PEE. And then, heaven forbid, BLOGGING.

I guess my point is, without even mentioning the true awesomeness of the interactive realm (you know, like insane data and research and community and blobbity blah), we’ve traveled light years in a few decades.

That’s what I often think about, when I see things like this:

Remember when they constantly referred to the internet as “the information superhighway”?  Clearly we know now that along every superhighway there is always something backward and subnormal, signs reading “2 Miles to the Jell-O Museum,” and “Next Exit, World’s Largest Clam.”