The first time I saw the internet
A CRT glowing on a narrow cabinet at the end of my uncle's hallway, my dad watching, and the first dial-up screech I ever heard. Then the long dial-up childhood that followed: AOL to Prodigy to MSN, four messengers at once, and a local number out in Harvester.
The first time I ever saw the internet, I was not the one using it. I was just standing there watching, and I was little, maybe eight.
It was at my uncle’s house. He had a ranch, and the memory survives mostly as a set of directions: up the stairs, down the hallway, and a left at the very end into a room that used to be one of my cousins’ bedrooms. He has three daughters, and somewhere along the way one of their rooms had been turned into a small office. I could not tell you a single other thing about that room. What I can still see, clear as anything, is a CRT monitor sitting on a tall, narrow cabinet against the wall. I do not even remember the computer itself. Just the glowing screen.
My uncle was telling my dad about this internet thing, and to show him, he sat down and pulled up AOL on what was almost certainly some Windows machine. He clicked connect. And then came the sound, the one everybody my age has filed away somewhere permanent: the dial tone, the touch-tones, and that long warbling screech of two modems finding each other. I had never heard it before. We did not have a computer at home yet. This was years before our first one.
I am fairly sure this was back when AOL still billed you by the hour, so he did not stay on long. But he stayed long enough to show my dad the part that mattered: the AOL welcome screen, with its little panels you could click. News. Entertainment. Chat rooms. A whole world folded up behind a few buttons. I did not understand most of it. I just understood it was a big deal, because the grown-ups were treating it like one.
Looking back, I think I watched the exact moment the idea got planted in my dad’s head. I would bet that whole visit was half the point, that he asked his brother if he could come see this internet everyone kept talking about and decide whether it was worth buying. Whatever got said in that room, the answer turned out to be yes. Not long after, our family got its first computer, a Packard Bell, and we got online at home.
Three email addresses and no sentimentality
My early internet life is easiest to tell through my email addresses, because I went through them like seasons and never once looked back. First there was packard20@aol.com, from the Packard Bell days. Then emachine4me@aol.com, once I had my own eMachines. Then trihedralguy@msn.com, which stuck around until the day Gmail showed up and I switched to that almost immediately. I had no sentimentality about any of it. When I wanted a new address, I made one and let whatever was behind it fall away. It is a little horrifying to me now, how casually I abandoned the places people knew to reach me.
Those addresses also track how we got online, which was its own small saga, driven entirely by my dad trying to save money. We started on AOL, because AOL was the cool one, the one everybody had. Then my dad worked out that Prodigy was the same internet for less, and we were a save-every-dollar household, so we switched. I was quietly devastated. All my friends, everyone I talked to, lived on AOL, and leaving felt like moving out of town. It worked out better than I feared, because AOL’s messenger let me keep talking to all of them anyway, but I did not know that going in.
Prodigy turned out to be cheap for a reason. It dropped us offline constantly, emails would simply never arrive, and odd little failures kept piling up that I was not yet good enough with computers to fix. I could not help my dad triage any of it. Eventually MSN came along, also cheaper than AOL and a lot more reliable, and we moved one last time. That is where my @msn.com address came from, and where I stayed for years.
Being reachable everywhere
The real reason I was online was simple: my friends were there, and I wanted every possible door open for them to find me. Most people back then picked one messenger and committed, because keeping up with more than one was a hassle nobody wanted. I was, predictably, not most people. I ran AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, and now and then ICQ on top of those, so that whichever one a person used, they could reach me.
That eventually became a small obsession with the programs that did all of it at once. There were these multi-protocol clients, Trillian and Pidgin and a couple of others, that logged into AOL and MSN and Yahoo together and stitched them into one buddy list. You never had to think about which network someone was on. And they let you reskin the whole thing, which mattered enormously at the time. This was the golden age of making your software look however you wanted: Winamp skins for your music, custom Windows themes (a real buffet before XP, a much shorter menu after, and then theming quietly died off), Kaleidoscope to repaint an entire Mac. I themed everything I owned.
What the internet was actually for
Strip away the providers and the programs, and here is what I actually did with it. I talked to my friends, constantly. I went to zdtv.com, because I watched a frankly unreasonable amount of ZDTV, the tech network that later became TechTV, with shows like The Screen Savers and Call for Help and X-Play, and the internet let me keep going after the broadcast ended. I looked up cheat codes for every game my friends and I were playing. I sat in chat rooms talking to strangers on the other side of the planet, which still strikes me as a small miracle when I say it plainly. I started teaching myself to build websites. When a band put something out, I would go hunting for clips to preview it. And I played games against real people on the MSN Gaming Zone, which is a whole story of its own. It was, more or less, everything you could want the internet to be back then, and I wanted all of it.
The dial-up itself
Underneath all of this was the dial-up, and for years that meant calling one specific local number out in Harvester, near St. Charles. It was 636-272-1501, and I am fine putting it here, because it is an old service line, not a person. Last I checked, you can still call it and hear it start to negotiate, that same handshake reaching for a modem that is never going to answer it again.
The screech finally went quiet for us around 2003, shortly after The Sims Online and just before I got deep into Enemy Territory. That was when our provider started offering DSL. It still ran over the phone line, but you snapped a little beige filter onto every phone in the house, plugged in a different kind of modem, and suddenly you could be online and take a call at the same time, which felt like the future after years of the internet and the telephone fighting over one wire. You never heard the handshake again.
After that the story stops being about dial-up at all. DSL gave way to cable when I bought my own house in 2012, and cable gave way to fiber around 2022, a full gigabit up and down, which is what I am on now and the happiest I have ever been with a connection. But that part, the modern boxes and wires I am weirdly proud of, deserves its own post one day, and when I write it I will link it from here. This one is about the screech, and the narrow cabinet at the end of my uncle’s hallway, and the first time I ever heard a computer reach out and touch the whole world.