Holy Shit List: Computers

Pr0n (circa 1992)
Sears and Victoria Secret catalogues were old hat by this point, but I think it was my friend Jesse that passed on this 5 1/4″ floppy disk of sin to me in Grade 6 or 7. I’d never looked at ladies on a computer before and definitely not at videos of them. Well, video’s a pretty generous description: it was half a megabyte, black and white, pixelated, two-frames-per-second and took a bunch of MSDOS commands and half a minute to load. But it was definitely a real woman, definitely real breasts.
BBS (circa 1993)
Before the Internet there were Bulletin Board Systems. Using my computer, a modem and my phone line, I logged into Tony Gorkoff’s (R.I.P.) computer across town and downloaded a file, played a game and chatted with Tony, and other classmates both friend and foe, in real time. We chatted/badmouthed through our keyboards. I’ve increasingly weaned myself off traditional communication tools (phone, in person) ever since.
Return to Zork (circa 1993)
I was never much of a gamer and I’m still not, having resisted most everything beyond Super Nintendo. But when I saw and heard Graham’s sister playing this (the same night as my Internet introduction?), I knew I’d been left behind by technology and entertainment again. Return to Zork was my introduction to the first-person and adventure/puzzle genre, and to the incredibly stunning 3-D graphics and sound of CDROM. Characters talked with real recorded human voices. You could walk anywhere (well, almost) and everywhere was different, unique. What was especially cool about Zork was the humour: character’s made jokes, had accents and you got to solve ridiculous puzzles. I still quote with an Irish temper from the game today: “So just go! And take that ludicrous box with ya! I didna order it and the Misses didn’t order it either!”
Netscape and the Internet (circa 1994)
My introduction to both of these went hand-in-hand thanks again to Graham. Our family was over at his family’s place for dinner one night. I’m sure I must have heard about the Internet but hadn’t a clue how to get on it. Graham’s Dad did, though, and before dinner he fired up the modem and Netscape (with the big pulsating 3-D ‘N’). I searched for “colnago” and we “hyperlinked” to a “page” in–and this was definitely the holy shit moment–the UK. And incredibly, after we’d finished dinner, a picture of some guy’s bike, my favourite brand of bike, had finished loading. It was blue, my bike was red, but suddenly (well, in 30 minutes) I had new information and a connection with a stranger halfway around the globe.
Multimedia (circa 1994)
When the Moms footed the bill for our first 486 it came with speakers and a CDROM, just like our stereo. The tower even had a “Multimedia” sticker, which in a confusing way just meant computers now came with soundcards and could play (tiny, choppy) video. Brad and I sort of knew what to expect: we must have had friends and classrooms at school that’d already gone “multimedia.” But after we very delicately inserted Microsoft Encarta in the drive and the real-life video and sound began to play, we knew the future had arrived in the Werner home.
Flash websites (circa 2000)
It was only three or four years ago that I proclaimed to a friend that Flash-based websites were the shit and would become the dominant format online. It was like there was no comparison: HTML Site A had, uhm, text while Flash Site B had text that slid into view, pictures that went from vectors to pixels, buttons that glowed and pinged when I touched them. I’d seen lots of Java and DHTML before, but Flash was slick. I’m a tad more informed about usability, design and a proper-tool-for-the-job approach now, but those early millennium Flash sites from the likes of Yugo Nakamura and 2Advanced were–before I began spending all day and my full-time job online–so much cooler and interactive and engaging than the oh-so-boring HTML and slice GIF pages.