I’ve been catching drips and drabs of a National Geographic Drama/Documentary (dromedary?) about the first Internet wave called “Valley of the Boom”.
I very clearly remember losing my WWW virginity. It was early summer of 1994 and I was living in Tokyo. I had been “online” since 1984 in high school through Compuserve (where my email address was something like “852948,2884@compuserve.com”) and had been reading about this graphical interface to lots of information and entertainment. My mail was being forwarded from NY and in the middle of Byte magazine (that 200 page monthly glory) was a disk for Prodigy online services. Prodigy had built Mosaic (Andreessen’s predecessor to Netscape) into their software and they were the only real onramp to the “World Wide Web”. As you might guess, they didn’t have Japan-based dial up numbers.
I needed to know, so I rocked a 9600 baud dialup (my current 35Mps connection = 365x faster), called into an upstate New York access point and for a slow-loading half hour looked up a Mets score, clicked on the news link at Yahoo! and I’m sure tried to find a naked picture of Madonna).
Phone calls were charged to my credit card — $480 for 27 minutes.
I’m not sure where my education faltered (a common theme here) that my first WWW experience didn’t prompt me to move directly to Silicon Valley. Overall the theme is I never should have left New York, but this should have been the unresistable moment.