A walk down memory lane II : i-n-t-e-r-n-e-t

Internet. The very thing that revolutionize the way you live now. In a developed urban city. 10 years ago, who will think of doing everything online? Most don't unless you have great foresight.

I remember my first taste of doing things online by calling into a Bulletin Board Service (BBS). At that time, it is the next best things you can get beside the Internet. Trying your best to level up at a popular BBS, so that you will have more time to download files uploaded by other people. Either upload files, donate moolah or try your best to know the operator of the BBS personally.

I remember back then, one of the more popular sites actually has 10 lines available for calling in. Imagine you are running a hobby and you gotta apply for 10 residence number? Its almost like those dial-up internet plan, where one gotta dial to a particular number to connect one-to-one. So on a good day, you can login real quick to your favourite BBS. If you are down on luck, you can be trying for days just to try to can connected to a BBS.

So back then, its very common to get a 2nd residence line. I had one too. If not I had to DC my line just to let my dad made his call. So just have to top up my own 2nd line. At least for a period of time, there seems to be some form of promotion going on. Even the local telcos were like convincing everyone to take up a 2nd residence line, but that is during the start of the dial-up internet.

By mid 90s, internet was finally catching on here. Everyone started to use it though you still do not find a lot of home users having an internet account. But most are already starting to surf the net, be it at school or work. Back then, a 14.4kbps is consider really fast! My first modem had a top speed of 9.6Kbps. That is good enough, back then. But not everyone had an email account. Its like when someone knew you have an email account, they will look at you like you are from some prestige club. Serious. Hey, we are students back then. Dun bug me if you are born with a silver spoon or your dad work in some bigarse company.

Before the existence of Hotmail (where it used to belong to this now-rich indian guy instead of Uncle Bill) and Yahoo, it could be quite a hoo-haa when you filled in the email field when literally most of your friends don't even know what is email then. But then slowly and not so steadily, more and more people were getting internet accounts at home or at least have some yahoo or hotmail email accounts. Then suddenly everyone was talking about email and I was like getting tired of it. I even stop asking people for email address, unless I think I want to email them anything.

And the first version of ICQ, the very greatdaddy of Instant Messenger (at least to me, and I dun care what you say about MSN or Yahoo or AOL), started arrived to you by the email. Its madness when you spend more than 30 minutes downloading 5 emails, which containing attachment of the ICQ installer. So its my first step into the digital world, identifying myself ICQ, but still, I'm already its 12XXXXth sign up. Kinda slow, ya think?

(This post been inside the draft for so long, and also telling myself to post shorter post. Friends bug me to write shorter post coz reading long post in the middle of the night is a bad thing. Probably will continue with a part II on this. haha)