At the risk of exposing my age [whatever — I'm 35], I remember that in the 11th grade, connecting to the Internet wasn’t as easy as ordering an overpriced latte, an overpriced piece of cake and peeling open a laptop. We literally used a telephone keypad, dialed a long string of numbers which literally connected you to the exact machine you were connecting to [even before the days of browsers!] and waited what felt like ages before finally, a message would slowly crawl up the page saying, “Welcome.” And if you wanted to see something on another server, you had to call that server directly.
Everything was nothing but words and numbers. Animated .gifs? Streaming video? Personal homepage? There were no such things, nor blogs, tweets, RSS feeds; not even pictures, sound or even color. Color! And if anyone had a webcam, it was Al Gore while he was developing the Internet.
