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Twelve years ago I started playing my first ever online first person shooter game – on dial-up internet. It seems like an eternity since I’ve had to deal with 300ms pings in games, but I think it’s one of the few things I will NOT miss when reminiscing about the good old days of the internet. The others would have to be the slow download rates (remember when it took 45 minutes to send someone an mp3?) and the random connection drops. Oh those random connection drops were infuriating, especially when someone else in the house happened to pick the phone up. And even though I thank god every day that those problems are gone, I still have a fondness in my heart for how things used to be.

One of the great things about the internet in the beginning was the fact it was new to everyone. Chatting with others on services like AOL in 1990s was exciting, mostly because it was a new way to communicate and get to know people.  Remember how giddy Meg Ryan was to get online once her boyfriend left for work in the movie You’ve Got Mail? That was me when I was a kid (though it was when my parents left). I’d sit there for hours on end getting to know people online, all the while having little to no social life off the computer. That was fine with me though. The other kids at school were mean, and I wasn’t a big fan of the bullying that always went on. I found that the internet was a great way for people to be judged for who they were and not for more superficial things like appearance.

Sometimes I wish I had been older during the rise of the internet, just so I could have enjoyed and understood it more when things were in development, but I am thankful that I did get to witness a glimpse of it.

Times eventually changed what the internet was and most of those changes were positive. I ended up getting off dial up and finally got dsl which improved my latency in online games dramatically. I became a significantly better player from that one upgrade alone. Mp3s would transfer in a matter of 2 to 3 minutes. No longer would my connection drop anytime my mom wanted to make a call. Things certainly were more convenient, but other parts of the internet started to devolve as well. It has become increasingly harder to meet intelligent people as internet service became more common for everyone to have. Thankfully, even though 90% of the chats out there are mindless sex rooms now, I’ve still maintained many meaningful relationships with people online, and that’s what keeps me coming on every day. It’s not the games, it’s not the mp3s, or even the fast transfer rates. It’s the people that make the internet interesting to me and I feel lucky to live in a world where such a fantastic thing exists to connect people.