connected thoughts on the world of the internet as i know it so far.
I feel old sometimes, in the world of the internet.
Technically, I've been on the internet ever since I was seven, though at that time it was still dial-up modems with funny sounds and beeps and bbses to link up to, a rudimentary email system, penpal lists, a chatroom and online games, both text-based and SNES-like variants. But I loved the internet then, though we called it "Teleview", it was a locally-based bbs area. My sister, she's six years older than me, and I shared a computer running Windows 3.1, and I made my first online friend at seven, he was eighteen. I was in good hands in those days. The chatroom I visited had older "kids", teens and young adults who looked after this little seven year old kid who typed really slowly, and always urged me to go to bed, despite me claiming I had no bedtime (which was true). It was fun. Really fun. I wonder whether I did ever meet those good friends of mine after, in my much extended cyberlife. Did I ever meet the eighteen-year-old penpal I had? Did I ever meet the guy and girl pair who always gave each other hilarious love messages over the chatroom? I do wonder sometimes, the early days of my cyberlife.
When I got older, the real internet as we know it swung around. My sister got a better computer, I inherited the old one, and only hers had the internet. I remember writing down instructions to get on the net over and over again (click on netscape, click on connect, type in ____ at login name, type in password, wait for a certain sound etc.) and never remembering it when I had to go on the internet. My sister got quite exasperated with me sometimes. I wanted to use the net to look for research material for a project. Yahoo was around then, and stupid me typed in the whole sentence of "Racial community of Malays in Singapore" into the search field. Of course I came up with lots of useless information, and I kind of swore off the internet for a while, at least in terms of finding information.
My real revelation with the internet was when I got my own 28.8k modem, and my friend introduced me to websites. More specifically, web designing. This was when I was maybe 13? 14? I had my own site for a while, in Geocities, back when they still had those atrociously long web addresses, you know, geocities.com/2345/Something/Somethingagain/876/ . *smile* I still remember it. Black background, different colour for the words in each paragraph. It was called Lil's Cafe, and the title was centralised on top of the page, made up of individual animated gifs, so that the first L would shiver, the I would shrink, the second L would bounce, and so on and so forth. It was quite the work of art, I must admit looking back. *scratches head and laughs* I did it in Netscape Composer, I downloaded Netscape just for it. It was my pride and joy for sometime yes. Though embarrassing, it's still a part of my cyberlife, and I don't think I'm totally ashamed of it...
I picked up a book on HTML... wanted to get one from the Dummies series but in the end got one from the Idiots series. Never mind that, the book taught me a lot. It was fun learning it, and even now I still enjoy opening up my text program and start typing in code. Someone reviewed my layout once and looked through my code. It must have looked all crammed up to her, quite untidy. I guess I do know the meaning of organised chaos after all. But I enjoy typing my code direct, and over the years the HTML book has always been near, so that I can refer to it for some obscure code I haven't used for years (one time I had to do a website with frames... my god, how long has it been since I typed < frameset > ?), but nowadays I just breeze through a site without touching it. I enjoy the challenge. I like seeing a site change as I type more and more codes. HTML made me fall in love with coding in general.
One site followed another. I started my entire take on webdesigning in those crucial years when I was 14, 15. For the years to come this stand would be moulded and modified, but the original ideas would never change, and I would adamantly, perhaps stubbornly too, defend my stand, and continue to make websites in this rather unique way. (I wrote an article on webdesigning if you wish to know what the heck I'm talking about...)
The thing is, this year I'm eighteen. Suddenly, I'm the age of those nice brothers and sisters back in Teleview, who took such good care of me. It feels like I've gone one full circle, but in fact I haven't. Because for me, I don't have any innocent bad-at-typing little kids to take care of anymore. There are those who are younger than me who far surpass me at webdesign, at websites, at writing, at computers, at html, at coding. I gave up some years ago trying to be better. I'll just plod along in my slow and steady pace, and hope that my website doesn't reflect my age, which seems old in this cyberworld. There are of course, those who are older than me at this line, but somehow I still feel old. Is there already a generation gap between me and those only two or three years younger than me? Around me, the website owners and domain owners seem to be younger than me most of the time. It's a new breed of web users, people who never have to argue whether a blog is like a journal, or explain to someone what a guestbook is. They set the pace for the evolving styles of the internet, people like me either defy it or follow it. At least, that's how I feel sometimes.
Yes, I feel old in this world. Better return to real life. To where eighteen is only the threshold of adulthood, not an old fogey.