30 Years as an Internet Power User: From Dial-Up to Whatever This Is
On June 9, 1995, Washburn University handed me a certificate that proclaimed me an Internet Power User. At the time, it felt like holding a golden ticket. What they didn’t tell me was that the ticket also included hours of listening to the soothing screech of a 28.8k modem and negotiating with my family about tying up the phone line.
Back then, the “power” in Internet Power User mostly meant:
Being able to disconnect and reconnect three times in a row without breaking something
Understanding that ICQ chat was basically the Wild West, complete with ASCII characters
And, of course, crafting a personal masterpiece on Geocities, with a blinking “Under Construction” GIF and enough animated fire text to melt a Pentium processor
The Dial-Up Era
I remember the struggle vividly: trying to download a single JPEG image and watching it load one row of pixels at a time. It was like opening a Christmas present by unwrapping it inch by inch. And let’s not forget that the greatest threat to your Internet session wasn’t a hacker - it was one of your parents picking up the phone in the kitchen. “Goodbye” with door closing.
If you were lucky, you could sneak online at 2 AM, where the only competition for bandwidth was a neighbor’s Tamagotchi uploading its soul.
The Geocities Years
Ah, Geocities. A place where everyone was a web designer, whether or not they knew HTML (spoiler: we didn’t). If you visited my site back then, your retinas probably still haven’t recovered from the neon backgrounds and MIDI files that auto-played without mercy.
But it was magic. For the first time, anyone could carve out a tiny corner of cyberspace and say, “This is mine.” We were explorers planting digital flags - just with more Comic Sans.
The Broadband Boom
When cable modems arrived, it was like upgrading from a tricycle to a spaceship. Suddenly, you could download an MP3 in minutes instead of hours. Napster made us feel like Internet Robin Hoods (with much less noble endings). Wikipedia turned late-night arguments into fact-checked victories. And Google made “surfing the web” feel less like wandering in the desert and more like being chauffeured in a limousine.
Social Media, Smartphones, and Beyond
Fast-forward, and here we are: streaming movies on demand, video chatting across the globe, and yelling at AI assistants who still can’t quite set the thermostat correctly. The Internet grew up, and somehow, so did I.
I’ve lived through every phase: chatrooms, message boards, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter (sorry, X), TikTok, and whatever’s next. I’ve seen memes rise and die faster than you can say “Harlem Shake.”
And through it all, that certificate on my wall has been my reminder: I was here at the start of something world-changing.
The Next 30 Years
If the last 30 years of the Internet have been mind-blowing, I can’t even imagine the next 30. Will we browse the web through neural links? Will we have AI co-pilots running our entire digital lives? Will Geocities make a nostalgic comeback (I can dream, can’t I)?
All I know is this: what a time to be alive. The Internet has been the most incredible ride of my life, and I’m still proudly holding on to my title of Internet Power User.
Because once you’ve survived dial-up, you can survive anything.