I was thinking about a post on Michael Gannotti’s blog, and it struck me that I have been online for approximately 15 years now.

To be precise, “online” is referring to the Internet. My first glimpse of this beast was on my father’s IBM Thinkpad 700, setup on our kitchen table with a telephone line plugged into a giant USRobotics 9600 modem. I was a burgeoning high school student at the time, and wanted to send an “electronic mail note” to a university professor for an answer to a paper I was writing.

I was less than a year later that I got my first email address at Trent University. Oh, the days of logging into VM mail and Pine on our student VAX 5000. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s fine - this was back in the days when the internet was the realm of nerds and geeks, and hanging around a VAX 5000 wasn’t a great way to meet women.

It may surprise some people that I have only had three email addresses in my lifetime. My first was at Trent, and my second was when I signed up with the TVOntario Online bulletin board. My third, and current email address came into existence in 1998, when I bought the mikehelms.org domain.

But seriously - 15 years on the Internet. Almost half my lifetime spent pushing electrons around the globe.

1 comment
Posted in Blog
Written on Tue, 10 July 2007 at 9:57 am
Tags: history, Internet, TVOntario, VAX
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