Inside from the Inside

I *heart* My First Mac

I won!

It was the door prize at a computer event: some piece of electronic gear called a 300-baud modem. I could attach it to my new fat Mac, the one-drive wonder that set me back the outrageous sum of $2795 and it might have done some significantly awesome black and white graphics with MacPaint, one of the two programs it ran, but the laser printer was still an embryo in a university lab somewhere. The Internet hadn’t been born, nor had the World Wide Web.

I didn’t know anyone who’d ever used a modem, but I read somewhere that the Chicago Public Library maintained a list of all the dial-up systems that existed at the time. The rushing sound as my modem connected to the Library’s thrilled me. The characters blasted across my screen. The list didn’t fill one side of a single page when I sent it to the state-of-the-art dot matrix printer.

I first dialed a system called Logopolis, clearly a Dr. Who reference. I didn’t stay long. The system operator kicked me off because my posts—attempting to teach time travel—were popular enough to hog precious bandwidth and memory, stealing it from more worthy fan-related topics. So, within a few days of my first post, I was cast out to the electronic ethers without a landing place.

That’s when I dialed a place called “Kaleidoscope.” My life has never recovered.
I swallowed the hook when I entered the wild headspace of a Diversi-Dial system occupied by up to seven people and overseen by the gracious hostess and playground supervisor, Lady G. Kalidoscope ran on an Apple IIe that ran in a suburban home, one of just a few dozen systems across the country.

What ensued was a 24-hour party for nearly two years with the wildest cast of characters you can imagine. People like Prak Sindog, one of my best friends on the system, who was so sophisticated and typed so well that it was months before I realized he was only eleven. Or Maxx, who’d built his own modem. I met him in “real life” for the first time as a co-leader for a course in telecommunications. He showed up in a businesses environment dressed in black leather and spikes from head to foot while I, in my silk blouse, pretended that it was just a normal part of the course when he distributed the list of government agencies he’d hacked along with instructions on how you could do it too. Or Tiger Lilly, the attention junkie who staged her own virtual “death” for the benefit of her teen-boy fan base. It was such a compelling world I fell in love with it and the sleep deprivation I experienced rivaled parenthood.

The thing that was so appealing about chatting online wasn’t the anonymity so much as it was the possibility of being anything and nothing. It was the liberation of no identity, no gender, no age, no race. I was who I said I was or what someone conjured me up as. I didn’t have to be a narrowly defined version on myself but a rambunctious six-year old who liked tricycle races or a kitty who decided that the left side of the screen was a litter box, or a that an asterisk * was actually a snowball.

We invented how to play, how to show emotions, how to serve drinks over a computer system, and the conventions we made up would be shared and propagated and added to millions of times over the years. They still exist today every time someone uses an emoticon or lifts a brewski in Second Life. All of those things were invented before the Internet was. We creators were suspended like baby godlings with wands waving magical worlds into existence across a fertile matrix for a golden moment in time. I got to witness it.

But we didn’t know any of that then. We just knew that we loved what we were doing. If you’d asked us, we’d have happily told you that the best thing anyone had ever invented was a modem and the best possible thing to do with a computer was chatting.

I think of this because the Internet is a world of color now. Images are everywhere! The magic is provided by “developers” and “content providers.” It becomes more like television every day. I use my real name online and my real picture is there on Facebook along with that of my “friend” and twenty-year-old daughter whose father was the man who kicked me off Logopolis.

You can see who I really am now, what color I am and everything. Not a kitty, not a snowball. It’s a bit of a loss actually.

On the other hand, I’m chatting on Skype with my friend in Mexico at three in the morning as I write this. Some things haven’t changed. (o:

Monica Rix Paxson's Profile | Create Your Badge


Tags: 300-baud, D-Dial, DDial, Diversi-Dial, early_Mac, fat_Mac, pre-Internet, raceless, technology