1990s

I don't think we always had the Internet at home, but I don't remember not having it.

My first email was hosted on a server my uncle kept in my grandma's basement. I would tell people what my email was and they'd respond "no, your email is not just your first name and last name." Always made me feel pretty cool that actually, yes, mine was.

In 2nd grade, we were doing research on space. Back then, Yahoo had a search engine for kids called Yahooligans!. I don't think it worked very well because I searched something like "big asteroids" and that was the first time I heard my mom swear.

My 3rd grade class was doing a research project on Africa and I happened to have a cousin doing some work in Senegal at the time. I was able to email her and show off her response to my class. Even with our incredibly fast 56kbps modem, I was able to watch a webcam of a wildlife preserve in Africa. It would refresh like every 30 seconds or something. Sometimes you'd see a giraffe or an elephant.

2000s

As DSL and broadband were starting to become the norm, my family was still stuck on dial-up. No one would provide us better service out where we lived.

One summer in elementary school, I made my first website as part of a summer camp at school. It had a visitor counter and heavy usage of lime green text. We tried to get them hosted on Angelfire, but there were some hiccups.

For a few months when we lived in Denmark, I'd stay up late to see if I could catch my friends on AIM and chat until my parents said I had to go to bed.

In high school, I posited to my parents that I could build a PC for $250. For my birthday that year, my dad gave me $250. I was blown away. That was a lot of money. I ordered parts on Newegg. Armed with a DVD with Ubuntu on it, I built a computer. We had to take it to my dad's office to get fast enough internet to install drivers and other updates. My dad is a veterinarian, yet somehow he knew what commands to type in the terminal to get the graphics driver working. I asked how he knew all that and he was like "I took a UNIX course in college." That was like 25 years earlier or something.

I found a book on HTML and CSS in a classroom. My teacher was chill and let me take it home. I spent a lot of time going through all the chapters and following the tutorials. I kinda liked it.

2010s

I somehow got a prototype Chromebook. The Cr-48. I just filled out a form and it showed up. A free computer that looked and felt great. One of the cool things is that the computer came with like 200 MB of Verizon 3G data every month. Still had dial-up at home.

Also around this time, I bought my first domain. I used GoDaddy. Put up some blog that I never updated. That's a trend in my life.

In 2013, my family finally got rid of dial-up. Still not able to get cable, my parents got some sort of service that was like permanent 4G. Finally had internet in the megabits per second speeds instead of kilobits.

I also got my first smartphone in 2013. iPhone 5s. My parents and I went and got Chinese food afterwards. We were doing that thing where you wonder and speculate about things. Then my dad was like "Don't you have a phone you can look that up on?"

I started buying more and more domains. Got some credit for Namecheap in college at a hackathon, so I'd be stupid not to. I discovered the Jamstack and Netlify. Building websites started to make sense to me.

This blog started in 2016.

2020s

I made my first real iOS app in 2020. I shared it a couple places. Got a couple emails from people who I had never met about it. It didn't go viral, but it got way more interest on Twitter than I ever expected. Met some very supportive people.

I spend a lot of time hanging out on Discord with my friends.

I'm older, but I'm still a kid trying to figure stuff out. I'm building things for me and my wife to make our lives a little easier.

I have a server in my closet that hosts a couple websites and apps. But not my email.

These are some of the first things I think of when I think about the Internet. I don't think my experience is especially novel for someone my age, but it is all core to who I am. The Internet made all these memories and experiences possible. Not everything about the Internet is positive, but these memories are. I hope everyone can experience that. The Internet is built for everyone.

My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts.

For week 2, Jared chose the prompt:
"What are your favorite places on the internet or favorite things about the internet and why? How do they differ from the parts of the internet that you dislike"

My friends' posts this week: