The Glorious Sound of 56k.

With the new [terrible] facebook update, I felt compelled to take a trip down memory lane on “the way back machine” and re-visit all of the social networking sites I’ve been playing around on since the advent of the internet.

Hold on, kiddos, this might be a long, bumpy ride…

1994/5 ish: America Online (now known as “AOL” or “a joke”)

Raise your hand if you miss the sound of waiting for your modem to connect to AOL…..nobody? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Raise your hand if you once got in a fist fight with a sibling and subsequently recieved a fat lip over them picking up the phone in the middle of a file transfer. *PROM QUEEN WAVE*

Ok.

Now raise your hand if you are guilty of playing “disk golf” with one of AOL’s installation 3.5in floppy disks. *WAVES FURIOUSLY*

I guess that last one probably didn’t happen unless you were an IT geek working at a helpdesk in the early 2000’s, but lets just say, that was endless amounts of fun.

All kidding aside, AOL was great at the time- like the facebook of the 90’s. Instead of grabbing your cell phone and adding someone to your friends list, you asked them for their “screen name” and wrote it on….GASP…a piece of paper.

You signed on, and waited feverishly for your friends to get online. You “met” faceless people all the way across the country, that you would never meet otherwise.

I also personally learned how to program HTML from picking apart my personal page on AOL. I make pretty decent money now from my web development because of this company.

Thanks, AOL. I owe you one.

(Ok, not going to lie, there was something rewarding about that modem connection finally happening……)

Next up: Geocities!

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