A Cutting-edge Construct of Confounding Complexity

There was a time when I thought that the whiz-bang noises that emanated from my family's 56k modem were the collective chanting of tiny wizards, working together in their mysterious tongue to conjure up a connection to the world at large. Little did my 8-year-old self know that that was exactly the case, for the Internet is truly a work of heresy that deserves nothing less than the cleansing scorch of holy fire wonder that the Golden Age of Technology has bestowed upon us.

Having received an enlightened lesson on the history of how the Internet came about, I sat back in my easy chair and put considerable thought into how and why I was led to believe that tiny wizards existed in my modem. What a strange and somewhat extraordinary revelation. With this in mind, I have decided to reflect on how the internet played a part in my formative years.

Mein neger.

As we all know, the internet was originally a doomsday device devised by an evil genius bent on extorting the world a series of interconnected networks known as ARPANET that was developed by the US Department of Defense to circumvent a breakdown of communications between military bases in the event of global thermonuclear war. It was created to allow information to be shared quickly between networks, as well as decentralize information; if a base was captured or destroyed, all the information it held wouldn't be lost along with it. Amazing stuff, these war inventions.

My first dabbling in the arcane mysteries of the internet was in the late 90s, when the internet was starting to be used as a form of rudimentary e-learning platform. My father worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP) Singapore at the time, and was a huge computer geek (and perhaps still is). He had this (at the time) expensive HP 56k modem wired into our Windows 3.11 that beeped and whooped every time the internet wizards were summoned.

My parents made sure I was computer literate from a very young age, and by the time I was eight, I was already versed in how to turn on a computer and start Windows from DOS, as well as execute simple directory commands to plays DOS-based games like Wing Commander and Doom (which my dad also played by way of his aforementioned geekiness). So by the time this internet thingamajig came along, it was just another program to me. Little did I know that my rapscallion assumption was to be blown asunder by the wonder that this new marvel would bring to the table.

Yahooligans.com, THE website to be.

The first website I ever visited was Yahooligans.com, an educational portal created by the web search engine Yahoo. Looking back, it was a pretty bare-bones edutainment website, but in 1998, Yahooligans was the best thing since sliced bread. I cut my teeth on that site, spending several hours a day just staring at the screen, voraciously swallowing every morsel of information I could. To me, the internet was THE way to learn. To hell with books and worksheets and useless penmanship. 

All of my HATE.

No, the internet was so much better! Why, if only my school were to shove every single one of us dreary-eyed pupils into bright CRT screens and made us peruse the internet at leisure, our grades would shoot so high into the roof, the school would require renovations! Alas, internet usage was confined to the home, and I continued to submit cursive homework that I never practised again. Well, at least I learned what Momo Monsters ate.