Shyzer.com

This “review” of what websites looked like back in 1996 is easily the funniest thing I’ve yet to find in this early new year. In fact, it reminded me of a post I’d half completed over two years ago and so I went back and finished it up. But before you read anything else, please, please click that link above and read it. It’s been ten minutes and I’m still cackling uncontrollably.

—–

A lot can change in 10 years.

I’ve written a little about how much has changed from since I was a “kid” and now, especially with regards to technology. But I wanted to share a quick story with you.

My earliest memory of on-line gaming was back when I was in 7th grade. It was the end of 1995 and my dad had just built a new computer which at the time was smokin’ awesome but if it was sitting in my room today, would be around the 19th most powerful electronic in a 10 foot radius. A few days later, he bought a game called Air Warrior and installed it, to which I quickly became addicted. Yet beyond that, I never touched a computer for any other reason.

By the 8th grade, my dad bought a new service known as AOL, which provided blistering surfing speeds of up to 56kb/sec. I would sign onto my account whenever I had the chance, only to realize there was nothing really to do and quickly grow bored with the whole experience. The only person I knew that had an account as well was a snobby girl from school, so the IM feature was of little useless to me. Oh, you could go into chat rooms and play .wav files of Homer saying Doh and cars crashing. So there was that. Or you could go in the religious chat rooms and just type “satan satan satan” over and over and watch people get immensely angry at you. Actually, you can still do that today, but I digress.

It was around this time that companies began advertising their websites in television commercials. I don’t know if anybody really remembers this, but I clearly do, if for no other reason than I started writing them down.

That’s right, I had a notebook where I wrote down all the websites I saw on TV since I was that desperate to find something to do on the Internet. Each page was filled with nothing more than lines of random companies with their websites next to them.

Pepsi - www.pepsi.com
Sunny D - www.sunnydelight.com
Nike - www.nike.com

You know you’ve got a brilliant piece of technology that people are starving to use when they’ve resorting to going to Sunny Delight’s website. I just wish the purple juice had had a page, I would have been all over that.

By 9th grade, I no longer needed my notebook. Lycos and Excite had finally entered my life and with a few (ok, a lot of) mouse clicks, I was able to find at least something somewhat interesting on the Internet during my alloted hour of computer time every day. It wasn’t until the 10th grade that the wonders of AIM finally burst onto the scene. Actually, I only had AIM for a few months that year before getting in trouble with my dad. My punishment? He “deleted” the program by taking the icon off the desktop.

Think about that for a second. I was a 10th grader in high school and was convinced that AIM had been removed from my computer simply because the icon was no longer there. Wow.

I remember starting an angelfire page in the 11th grade. When we were moving right before I went into 12th grade, Napster had just been ordered to shut down and thus I loaded my computer up and schlepped it across town to our old house since it still had Internet, hooked everything up, and sat on the floor in an empty room for about 5 hours so that I could download maybe 30 songs on dial up. For you see, when Napster was finally shut down, file sharing would finally be eradicated!

Now? I’ve got cell phones. Myspace. X-Box 360. Facebook. Google. AIMSKYPEMSNYAHOO. And I don’t bat an eye when it comes to not only understanding it all, but knowing how to work it. I’ve come to expect my cell phone to not just give me directions if I’m lost, but to also let me know where the nearest pizza joint is since driving makes me hungry. I carry in my pocket a thumb drive with more space on it than was on the first three computers my family owned - combined.

All in the span of 10 years. I can’t freaking wait to see what we’ll have in 2017.