My brother had just become a freshman at the local university a month prior when he showed me the Internet for the first time,
it must have been about '93 or so. I can't remember what I wanted to bother him with, but he'd been sitting there in front of his machine all day, a dirty-greyish three-eighty IBM box with an impressive 8 megabytes of RAM and a fourteen-inch VGA monitor of the same color on top. As I entered his room, I noticed how focused he was locking onto the ray tube.
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Shortly after he realized my presence he frantically waved at me to come closer, saying something like: "Look at this shit here! It's from a computer I just called a minute ago!"
Well, I shambled behind his seat then and - looked, wondering what he was talking about. His box was running Mickeysofts third attempt of a circus act that shouldn't suck as hard as the last one, a spectacle I wasn't particulary intrested in watching. But my brother insisted that I put my eyes onto a program window, pointing at it with his greasy finger. And there, in all its greyisch black-white glory, did it reveal itself to me: It was a bunch of unformatted text with two or three tiny pictures inbetween and the logo of his university above. I still could't see it - it kept looking devastating boring to me. Being irritated of my scaring motionless face he then moved the mouse and clicked onto something that had been correctly called a hyperlink back then.
And in a wondrous sluggish way something entirely unexpected was happening and something new was about to appear - piece by piece, byte by byte. Images, which colors looked like coming from a awefully misconfigured LUT (palette) and - again a lot of text. But in a different language this time. Being a German it quite looked like English to me.
My brother grinned at me like a moron and told me: "We're now in the U - S - A, can you believe that? All this comes from a machine somewhere in America, I'm directly connected to it!" (editor's note: more or less directly)
<brAt this point I could easily pretend that I'd seen the webcam picture of the famous coffee machine of the University of Cambridge. But it would be a lie, all the more so since Cambridge belongs to Britain and not the United States.
I can only remember remotely what I'd seen actually, but it had consisted of false color images and a ton of Times New Roman that spread more or less loose all over the window, like it had been franticly stapled together by a professor to make a bunch of students happy.
But in contrast, I remember clearly how the penny had dropped in my head finally and how I'd grasped what kind of show had taken place infront of me. Some other computer in the back of beyond had been sending data through a line thousands of miles accross the great pond straight to the fucking computer of my older brother. Post-free - but not free of charge as he had to find out later.
An entire continent that had been practically unreachable far away from us back then now was suddenly and immediately in close proximity. Without noticing it myself right away I mirrored the lunatic grin of my brother and we were grinning at each other like complete lunatics for a good while, in the light of dramatically flashing LEDs coming from a modem.
It must had felt that way when the first Morse code signals went over a long copper line and the befuddled reciever heard them for the first time. Something far beyond his reach had been sending him beeping sounds, like from a ghostly place somewhere in the ether. It'll surely feel like this if we ever recieve a full, real message from a civilsation that doesn't call Earth its home, which crossed the empty space for thousands or more lightyears till it reached us. It's just a very special, magical moment when Communication literally crosses boundaries and an entire new unexpected world reveals itself.
This idea alone, to connect these highly sensible, crash-prone ancient machines at such distances was so risky and huge, that it had immediately catched the attention of hundreds of thousands of students and nerds all over the world. At this time, everything had been way much farer away from each other than we can possibly imagine today,
even the states of our own countries. Well, at least in my mind. And an entirely different continent? That was like something on another fucking planet. But now we could easily connect to this distant world with a few mouse clicks, could learn ourselfs what was happening there, without it being delivered to us through the regular channels until it had been mentioned in the newspapers or shown on the tv, hours, days or even weeks later, depending on how important and interesting it was, if at all. You could learn everything right now and firsthand from the source. It was like being just there, were it happend.
At this historical day, in the year 893 of the Lord (roughly), in this moment, my brother and I had been in the US although we never had touched its ground. This notorious, distant country, which had took up the cause of freedom, that consisted of countless mega-cities full of colossal sky scrapers, endless highways and roads, and that showed us narrow-minded, hard-assed Krauts> at the cinemas, in the television, as well as in every McDonalds how to kick-ass and what's hot at the moment - like this interdotcomnetorg thingy.
We visited via altavista.digital.com eagerly the home pages of Jean Luc Picard and the
NASA, right after we'd fetched the-galactic-empire.org/STAR-WARS.
We went from
THE-A-TEAM.org further to darksecrets.fbi.gov/i-want-to-believe, from were we made a detour to
Weird Gifs That Induce LSD Like Halucinations as well as
Scary Urban Legends From Hellskitchen.
Finally we found via america-online.com the page of COLT SEAVERS, were he showed us pics of his most wicked stunts and pointed us after this - friendly enough - straight to
Jody Banks
XXX-D. - If you're asking yourself now, why the heck these German guys didn't visit German web sites ...
Well, altavista didn't speak German back then. The problem had been that in Tiny-G this internet thing was just becoming available through universities at that time. Besides, it had been way more chilling to leave the borders of our own country behind us as far as possible and to dive into the bizarr shallow waters of a country full of nutty cowboys and indians, who shot themselves into the space and were nothing short of shy to make a ton of noise around them. And boy, did it not disappoint us.
We felt like astronauts, just like we'd landed on the fucking moon ourselves right now, for really real and in impressive 216 colors.
We had the moon dust sticking in our noses, had looked into the endless void, which opened itself infront of us with all its stars and galaxies therin. No shit. Suddenly everything had become so tangible, had got so close, almost touching our skins. That comical description "global village" that had been all around in the media in these days, had made complete sense to me.
We had absolutely now clue what was about to happen then, what waves it'll make. How this would immediately effect and change all our lifes, our societies and the rest of the entire fucking world, and how breathtakingly fast. I had been just sixteen, seventeen years old and had thought of all these touch interfaces and the computer with its pretty voice on Picards Enterprise-D as pure science fiction. Just like the Big Brother from '84.
But by now the one has become just water under the bridge and the other quite usual. What has happened here just didn't only replaced the phone, or the audio cassette or the regular cable tv, it has radically pulled us out of our doze of these times and put us into an ever alternating reality we can't even recognize anymore from day to day. The instantaneousness of the data exchange has lead to an immense compression of our lifes and all our knowledge, which can be fetched and combed through literally any time, everywhere - Which itself constantly creates new data again - as well as unforseen disruptions and bubbles that consume us right away ...
Unfortunately, fear and ignorance gets also compressed, and what started as something that had been called a global village so cuddly once, looks now like an impenetrable metropolis which spans from horizon to horizon and which has districts that fence themselves of from each other. Partially with barbwire, cameras and spring guns.
The genie we've let out of the bottle has a mind of its own, which is also a slightly bit larger than our small primate skull. It's equipped with the collective knowledge of all humanity, with all our strengths and weaknesses, with our innocent curiosity, but also with our sheer fear of itself. It's intricately connected and continues to grow every millisecond, leaving many of us slower meat-bags behind like obsolete models from a bygone, irrelevant era.
Where this spirit will lead us is as predictable for us as the weather for the next two weeks - quite dependent on the day. Let's simply hope for the best, stay tuned, and try to get the wagon on the right track. To boldly go where no man has gone before. Anyway, we have no other choice, and in the meantime, we can put Praise You by Fatboy Slim onto our headphones.
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