I didn’t really write what I meant in my mind. I meant before dial-up internet came to the public and they were using those other services.

Even though I was too poor and rural for internet services, I am old enough to remember the analog days, and this is very interesting what you’re saying about the narrow perspective and then broadening it.

Like I remember the nightly national news on television and accepting it in the way of a kid who’s bright but hasn’t seen anything of the world very far from his house. Maybe the wider world seemed like something that happened only on television. Whatever Tom Brokaw said seemed like probably what was happening out there.

But I think I would have expected at least a Southern cop to fuck anyone over whom he didn’t know, and we knew that cops liked to sit at the bottom of a hill with an unexpected speed limit and ticket the public all day.

I can remember being a little bit aware of adbusters in the late 90s (IIRC, they were trying to sell something called black spot sneakers, and I kind of suspected they were just being like any company except with different rhetoric), can remember seeing that there was some company called Loompanics (I think) that sold every kind of crazy book. I knew that alt.2600 existed, but I didn’t really understand it.

But, beyond that, I don’t think I recall the broadening as clearly as you do. There was probably a good bit of waking up that I didn’t do until the 2000 election happened, saw how the people around me regarded it, etc.

I’ve never heard of Spin! I’ll watch it now.

Did you have to spend a lot of time fending off weird, dorky guys?

I do remember the pre-internet days, but we were too poor and rural for me to buy a modem and dial into anything.

I always kind of wished I had a pen pal back then. I was so lonely. I was looking for clips from Big Blue Marble a while back (a children’s television show I just barely remembered seeing once or twice), and there was something about pen pals being part of the show, and it made me feel all over again like oh if I’d had a pen pal back then! Although my life was so dull I might have struggled with what to write about.

I read an article in some magazine where the author talked about using email, and it did sound just mind-blowing to have a larger world than your mother and your father and the television.

Was your family reasonably well-to-do?

I was half-expecting you to say they got the first bill and hit the roof because no one had really grasped what was going on.

I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.

They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.

When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)

Yes, a cool artifact. Thank you. Did you (or your family) end up using CompuServe much?

I’m old enough to have experienced some of the analog days, but we were too rural and poor for me to participate online.

I read an article in some magazine back in the day where the author talked about using email, and it did sound so amazing. And then when I eventually had internet access, yeah, when I traded emails with someone in Italy, mind-blowing. I thought the internet would make everyone outgrow small-mindedness!

I suspect cloud storage would have sounded old-fashioned and “mainframe” at the time.

Thank you, that was careless of me. I intended to refer to before dial-up internet came along for ordinary people.