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Old Days

Reading this article hit me with a severe bout of nostalgia for the mid 90s when I first gained access to the internet. 

The words on the screen couldn’t adapt to your presence and your interests as you browsed. Interacting with other humans and having conversations – all that was still what you did with email or USENET or dial-up bulletin boards like The Well. The original Web was more like a magic library, filled with pages that could connect to other pages through miraculous wormholes of links. But the pages themselves were fixed, and everyone browsed alone.

That wormhole of links cast a hypnotic spell on me and my wanderings lead me to places I did not anticipate or know about. Every time a new pathway and a new set of discoveries. The joy of  these serendipitous finds was unlike anything I had experienced until then. Then social media happened at all that was amazing and wholesome about the internet devolved into echo-chambers of content that was all about the same thing over and over. It became harder and harder to wander without a plan and learn unexpected things along the way. 

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