The History of the Intarwebs

Hey everyone, Michael here. I suppose I should start from the beginning, as that is the assignment. My earliest experience with a "computer" that I can remember was before I was 5 years old, I was keen on playing my brother's new Nintendo Entertainment System. He would let me play Super Mario Brothers with him and would let me win sometimes, since he was six years older than me


Later, in 1st grade, I'd come face to face with an actual personal computer. These IBMs were basic and crude, and aside from a word processor program that we used to practice our skills at typing (which was actually what they were intended to be used for) they possessed classic "educational" games such as Math Munchers, Word Munchers, and the legendary Oregon Trail.




Some time after that, after numerous experiences and ownership of various video game consoles, my family bought our first home computer. It was 1995 and was an old, black-and-white Macintosh. It had a word processor and a rudimentary puzzle game, and that was good enough for me, at first. My history of computer ownership would progress with steadily increasing technology within our household. As of now, I own my own computer that I bought myself. The computer is a custom job, meaning it wasn't purchased through a single manufacturer (such as Dell or HP), but was rather bought by-the-part and assembled by a friend of mine who knows what he's doing. This allowed me to get a relatively state-of-the-art computer for half the price. For anyone interested in something like this, let me recommend the good folks at newegg.com.

Before all this, however, I would eventually discover the joys of the Internet, or the World Wide Web as it was called back then. Nowadays I can find anything on the relatively speaking back then things were harder, but it didn't feel that way. I was probably 13 when I discovered the Internet and it's bounty of images and web sites. For the most part my Internet browsing was reserved to school websites, as that was the only thing I knew of. I remember the first time I ever logged onto the internet. I was reading one of my Nintendo Power Magazines, when I had finished it and had glanced at the back cover. There sat an image of a street sign implanted on a globe that had the writing "HTTP://WWW.NINTENDO.COM." I had seen website URLs before, but they always seemed like jibberish to me. When i found out that there were videogames on the internet apparently, I rushed onto our Compaq and attempted to log on. We had AOL then, as we didn't know any better, and discovered the horrible sounds of the trademark "logging-in noise" associated with dial-up services. I believe I was scared the first time I heard this, thinking I had broken something.

I suppose I didn't become truly fascinated with the gaming prowess of a computer until middle school. I had always appreciated games on a home console that hooked up to a TV, but those games used easy-to-operate controllers that fit into your hand, not keyboards with dozens of keys scattered about them. Sure Oregon Trail was fun, but I had moved on to the Super Nintendo, and rudimentary games such as that with low graphics simply couldn't hold my interests. This changed the first day I went across the street to my friend Paul's house and he showed me a number of games by Lucas Arts and Origin. One in particular, enthralled me to no end. Wing Commander was the nicest looking anything I had seen in a while. On top of that, it featured real actors to play the characters during the dramatic, cinematic parts of the game, including the man who played Biff in the Back to the Future movies (my favorite movie series at the time), as well as Mark Hamill himself, who for those who don't recognize the name, starred as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies. In fact, he was the main character.

Gradually I would be introduced into the other, more mainstream features of the Internet. I had set up my first email account at age 15 with Hotmail (of which I checked every 5 minutes), and had discovered chatrooms. The first chatroom I entered was the Nintendo.com chatroom. Later I would discover the program mIRC, which was an integration of a number of chatrooms combined in one relatively difficult-to-use interface that many still use today. Today, I still use the Internet and the computer to play games on, some I enjoy so much I'm willing to pay monthly charges the game requires to be played.