1st Internet Experience

It’s hard for someone of my generation to pinpoint the first time they used the internet. In my case it’s even harder because I was raised around computers and the internet. My mother is a graphic designer and her office is in our house, so since birth I would see her and her employees on their Macintosh’s for hours at a time. I remember when I would return for preschool my mother had a Program that would make Oscar the Grouch come out of her computers trash can and say “I love trash” I would have her do that every day after school. I am also the youngest of three boys so I remember as a very young lad playing my older brothers' computer games (Doom 3D, Flashback and Lemmings) although being the youngest opportunities to play were few and far in between. Of course Sega Genesis, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Game Gear and Gameboy all came in to my computing picture well before the internet was widely popular.

My first memorable experience with the internet needed to be downloading songs on Napster. I remember coming home from school one day and my older brother Rex wanted to play a song for me. We went into our “play room” and he played a Basshunter song off our iMac. I Said “Dude that’s sick, burn me a copy of that CD” Rex replied “it’s not on a CD I downloaded it off the internet”. This really blew my mind being a big music fan with no means of acquiring CDs. I had Rex give me a quick tutorial on how to use Napster and I went on a music downloading rampage. Not soon after this phenomenon another device changed my music collecting experience, the Apple iPod generation one hit the street. My mother being the Mac Enthusiast she is had no problem acquiring one for me. My Piracy hobby grew from there So by my freshmen year in college I Had over 100 gigabyits of pirated music all stored on my Macbook and a shoebox filled with outdated IPods. All of this came to a crashing halt when while packing up for thanking break my sophomore year I dropped a week old root beer on my Macbook losing all my music. I still haven’t recovered from this tragedy.
Although Napster was my first real encounter with the internet it defiantly wasn’t the most mind blowing. The biggest WOW I ever got from an internet device came in high school math class. A friend of mine was fiddling with his new Sidekick, when I asked him what he was doing on it he told me he was on MySpace. The fact that he was searching the internet wirelessly from a cellphone blew me away. My first encounter with wireless internet was pretty eye-opening as well. I must have been twelve at the time when I saw an employee of my mother’s sitting on our stoop with a laptop surfing the web.