It's called the Interweb
Was a Digg story, but ultimately "digged" out from the CBC online archives.
That thing is hilarious. Newsgroups. E-mail. Emoticons. _O_
My introduction to the Internet came during an end-of-school pool party a schoolmate was throwing during spring 1995. He was a total geek straight out of WarGames; his father was with the RCMP - and at some point, he showed off his computer, attached to some box with lights flashing on it. And so that was the Internet. Absolutely thrilling.
Two years later, 1997, we got ourselves a 28.8Kbps phone modem and a subscription with an ISP called "Total.net" (since then consolidated several times) to hook up our comp to the Internet.
When I was in grade 5 (1989?), now I remember using computers at school equipped with modems used for connecting to one computer at a time. Only a few of us, after school hours, would remain in the classroom, and play some online quiz games over the "network" run by the school board. I'm not even sure if I'm dreaming this or what. Later in high school (or earlier in elementary - but I doubt that), I remember programming stuff in Basic, to make basic pixels-by-pixels primitive vectorial drawings.
Man, and now you wonder why people keep their old video gaming consoles, or still use the big bulky IBM keyboards with the sticky keystrokes (and *w/o* the Windows button!).
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