I was excited to surf the web when we got our computer. Internet access was paid for at an hourly rate. Our modem was 14.4 baud. We had both Ameirca Online and Prodigy. My mom liked Prodigy better, but I had a hard time navigating it. And I liked the chat rooms on AOL better. I had no clue what listservs or IRC was until a few years ago.

I soon discovered there were webpages, and that the internet was more than chat rooms. All the websites looked like this. Sometimes they had a textured background, sometimes nothing at all. Images took too long to load, so most sites only had a few, if any. Soon, people began to use frames to divide their "personal homepages" and include navigation sidebars. And since modem speeds were increasing, so did picture usage. Everything was always "under construction."

By the time I decided to make my own personal webpage (6th grade), I used AOL's WYSIWYG editor and made it a wondersite of image-overloaded net-crap. It used to be cool to just have a webpage full of animated GIF files (hampsterdance was not that far off). This was back before bandwidth was an issue and most websites were based out of Geocities.

Think of that name for a second. Geo Cities.

In no time at all, I crafted myself a persona on the net. Older than I was. Cooler than I was. Sci-fi role-playing games. Tricked-out profiles. My website had a midi file on every page. And everyone was always pushing to have something cooler, something you hadn't seen before.

Then I discovered the mp3, and was shocked by its technology. Since then, nothing I've seen has been a bigger surprise, only an impressed acknowledgement of progression.