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Alex writes about how they got online
I've been "into" computers on and off since I was an early teen. I got a ZX-81 like so many others and spent some happy months copying listings from magazines. Probably broke my brain learning BASIC. We sometimes had "Byte" at home.
My dad has always been interested in document production (he wrote a *lot* of reports) so he got a Wang(!) 286-style word-processing PC with 2 floppy drives. I remember I got a strategy game for it ("Sun Tzu's Art of War"?) but it was too complex for me. I wrote a lot on it though.
Around the same time I was peripherally involved in (paper) newsletters and zines. A dude I met in the last year of high school was way into "cyberpunk", had a t-shirt with the arms ripped off and a zine.
In 1989 I started at the University of Lund. We had computing classes but I never got online. I didn't have a computer but I shelled out for a landline!
After a couple of years that involve military service and some philosophy and Swedish literature I moved to Stockholm and started at KTH in 1992. I got an email address (f92-ger@nada.kth.se) and took programming[1] classes using Sun dickless^Wdiskless workstations. We used Emacs. A few of my classmates almost flunked out due to playing incessant MUD on the section's computer rooms' PS/2s.
I knew a bit about mailing lists and joined one about the artist Lloyd Cole but never got into it. Usenet was for (*hrmph*) "binaries".
In our class about information retrieval held by the university library I read about Gopher and something new from CERN called the "world wide web", which looked interesting but was way less structured than Gopher.
At home I had a 386 (a gift from my parents) and a decently fast modem. I used it to contact the uni's First Class BBS system and to get terminal access.
I got involved in the section newspaper and had great fun designing it in PageMaker (it was a monthly A5-sized zine).
Around 1994 someone showed me that we had a web page - http://nada.kth.se/~f92-ger. I quickly learned how to write HTML. I wrote some SF reviews (probably inspired by P.M. Agapow's famous "Postviews" from Usenet) and I believe I got mentioned in "Cool Site of the Day" once.
I remember at the time reading "Wired" and a lot of books about the internet life. Some people had their own domain! It sounded wildly extravagant.
In 1998 I moved in with my future wife. I installed my first Linux on the 386 (Debian from floppies, without manpages to save space). We were both getting online more and more. I remember Telia trying to flog metered ISDN with the argument that downloading Netscape Navigator would be much faster (but it would cost as much as a metered local call).
I got my first domain name when I was 30, in 2000.
I started blogging a few years after that.
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[1] Pascal and a small amount of FORTRAN. I knew Pascal since earlier. The year after us was part of a disastrous experiment in teaching general engineering students Scheme. The year after that got Java. Most of the coursework in numerical methods after year 1 was in MATLAB.
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