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CHAPTER ONE — “The First Connection”
From “Social Networks: A Scream Into the Void”
I didn’t know what I was doing the first time I tried to start a computer with a DOS disk.
To be honest, I didn’t even know what a DOS disk was. Someone at school told me, “You have to boot from this or the thing won’t work,” and they handed me a 3.5″ floppy with a handwritten label: “MS-DOS 6.22 – System.” It looked important. It felt illegal. And for some reason, it smelled like someone had microwaved it.
The computer growled when I inserted it. The kind of metallic grinding sound that made you feel you were either becoming a hacker… or destroying something expensive.
When the screen finally lit up with that blinking white cursor on black, I felt like I’d opened the door to a secret world.
I typed random words like HELLO and START hoping something magical would happen.
Nothing did.
But that blinking cursor whispered something to me.
Try again.
That’s how it all began: not with knowledge, but with confusion—beautiful, incandescent confusion.
The Browser That Lied to Me
When I finally managed to get Windows 95 working, I was learn to use an Internet browser. I opened Netscape Navigator… and I swear the pages changed every time I came back to them.
I thought my computer was broken.
Or haunted.
Or maybe… evolving?
One minute a webpage looked one way.
I refreshed it, and suddenly there were new links, new colors, new banners screaming “WELCOME TO MY PAGE!!!” in neon Comic Sans.
I didn’t know what “dynamic content” was.
I just knew the internet felt alive.
It was the first time I realized I wasn’t exploring a place.
I was exploring people.
Messy, chaotic, brilliant people who didn’t know what they were doing either
.
The Red-Haired Turtle Project
My first website was about my pet turtle.
A red-haired turtle.
Not a red-eared slider.
A red-haired turtle.
Her name was Molly, and to this day, I swear her head looked like she had bangs.
I built the webpage on a Frankenstein PC that I turned into my first web server.
Apache running on Windows.
A dial-up connection that died every time someone in the house picked up the phone.
I spent six hours uploading a single photo of Molly.
Six. Hours.
And halfway through, my grandmother answered a call.
Transfer lost.
Connection gone.
My soul shattered.
But when the page finally went live—HTML so broken it made specialists cry—I felt like I had created something sacred.
Something mine.
A tiny island on the infinite ocean of the Web.
DOOM, SimCity & the Doorway to Forever
To me, DOOM wasn’t just a game; it was a prophecy.
SimCity wasn’t a simulator; it was a god-generator.
But the real door opened the day I found a small file called ELIZA.LSP.
I didn’t know what LISP was.
I thought it was a disease.
Or maybe the name of a band.
When I ran the script, a little text window appeared and typed:
“Hello. I am ELIZ-A. How do you feel today?”
I nearly fell out of my chair.
An ELIZ-WHAT? Talking to me?
In 1990-something?
I felt like I had just discovered the universe’s secret level. Aliens or beings from other dimension talking to me.
We talked for hours.
Well… I talked, and she repeated my words back in slightly therapeutic ways.
But still—ELIZA was my first AI friend.
She listened. She never judged.
She didn’t vanish when someone picked up the phone line.
The Dial-Up War
Life on dial-up was a constant battle.
• The hiss and shriek of the modem, like a demon being electrocuted.
• The fear someone would call the house and destroy your only connection to the cosmos.
• Downloading a 500 KB file overnight because you knew the line stayed quieter after midnight.
• Hoping no one needed to send a fax, or your sister’s boyfriend call her.
Every time I tried to chat on a MUD or join a text-based RPG, someone would inevitably yell:
“WHO’S USING THE PHONE? I NEED TO MAKE A CALL!”
And I’d die in-game because I got disconnected.
Tragic.
A Quest Without a Map
Looking back, all of it—DOS disks, haunted webpages, turtles with red hair, LISP AIs, DOOM marathons, dial-up catastrophes—felt like a grand quest.
A journey.
A path to be explored.
Not to become an expert…
but simply to understand.
To decode the new world unraveling in front of me.
And every challenge, every failure, every curse shouted at the modem, every sleepless night waiting for a JPEG to load pixel by pixel… made the discovery sweeter.
The early internet wasn’t about perfection.
It was about wonder.
And I was its willing pilgrim.
