I only very recently got broadband. Not recently got wireless broadband. Though it is. I mean that up until this year I was on a dial-up connection. As long as I told people not to e-mail me with attachments but post me them instead on a 3.5in diskette, I could quite happily tootle on with my 33.6 kbps online life, the comforting noise of computer static, bell and chirp speak reassuring me that I was connected to the most vast information source the world has ever known. Unable to make of receive landline calls. But I can now say I am a convert. Broadband is the business.
The reason for upgrading was two-fold. Of course a main factor was this blog along with the development of online networking, both of which, I decided, meant acquiring the ability to connect to the internet more conveniently would be advantageous. On dial-up you find you really have to want to social network.
The other reason was a friend, who works for BT Internet. He actually, properly, fell off the stool at the bar when I told him I retained a dial-up connection in 2009. Apparently not many in the Western world still were. He said that I was essentially keeping an office running at BT HQ where 3 female operators with bake-o-lite headsets sit in front of a switchboard and when I click on my home PC to connect to the Web: one of them says Greville wants to use the internet and the 2nd plugs in the appropriate copper and brown nylon cable to make a cloudy glass valve light up on a cabinet. I didn’t ask what the 3rd one does – I suspect my friend was being facetious – or I figure she is the backup server – but I think more that he was being facetious – though I can’t discount the back-up server theory.
I wasn’t always behind the times. There was a period where I blazed a trail in this area. No, really.
It was a teacher at school who first introduced me to the internet. No one had really heard about it at my school and certainly computers were far from being something the majority of kids were interested with [in fact this was still at the stage that going out and making your way in the world en route to becoming a man was viable and more attractive an option than staring indoors and jobless at the World Wide Web]. But the teacher was enthusiastic and a few of us went to see what all the fuss was about.
Of course back then the internet was on a 14.4 kbps modem launched through CompuServe on the one Macintosh IIci in the school Library, so it wasn’t exactly great and we didn’t appear to be able to take over control of the nuclear armament of the USA with it, but we quickly believed we were pioneers and preferred to call what was basically looking at screeds of straight edged font, word processed documents about geographical facts and having to wait for 8 minutes to download a Panini sticker sized picture of Gillian Anderson: Surfing the E-Wave.
We would say to each other: “Are you able to surf the E-Wave after school?” “Yeah, I’ll be surfing the E-wave”. Still, not even this attempt to bond computers with the mental image of cool and sun burnished surfing dudes persuaded any honeys to join our exclusive club (or, more accurately, sit, cramped, on hard blue plastic chairs around the Library computer, moving only when your time using the mouse on the ROTA came up, for an hour and talk about Street Fighter combos while another Gillian Anderson picture slowly revealed itself, line by line) though.
I got a pen friend out of that. From Japan. I wonder what happened to her. I’d forgotten about her ‘till now. It turns out that even in the electronic age pen friends go out of fashion.
It was only a matter of time before a school chum was to get onto the Electronic Superhighway. So after talking to Japanese girls online in the school library, by the end of the term I was down at my friend’s attic conversion bedroom having my mind blown by the speed of his external 28.8 kbps modem on his Mac Performa. That was 50% faster than what we had been used to. Or to put it another, laddish, way: 4 minutes per Gillian Anderson pic.
We spent many a happy summer’s eve clicking on things then going off to play International Superstar Soccer while the page downloaded before coming back to see what text had appeared. Mainly we used the internet to find song lyrics and sheet music. Not that we ever formed a pub duet band – though looking back, to all intents and purposes that was what we were in effect inexorably an inexplicably preparing for.
It was also here where I made my first and last foray into the dark, seedy Black Forest Gateau side of the internet. Sex chat. I didn’t initiate. The whole thing was rather thrust into my (virtual) lap as an online dialogue with a girl from New York suddenly took a left turn.
There we were discussing REM lyrics when the girl wrote:
#I am leaning over you#
I don’t know what this means. She patently is not leaning over me. I should wait. Say nothing. See if she explains this.
Then half a minute later:
#I am removing my top#
Right, still not sure where she is headed with this, it seems very off topic from wondering what Losing My Religion meant just moments before, but she seems to be furrowing a path somewhere, so best to wait to see if she is going to write something else.
She did:
#My pendulous breasts are free and swinging in front of your face#
Ah! We are indulging in cyber-sex. Ok, I need to write something back, clearly. Something encouraging, but not too overbearing and keen. Jesus, this is difficult – it was bad enough for an adolescent without the internet to get by in these sorts of things.
Luckily, being at my friend’s house, we could confer, she wouldn’t know [that’s the best thing about virtual intercourse, I always find] and get the tone of reply just right:
#Magic!#
Nailed it! But we would never find out if our approved by committee smooth line would have prompted any more anodyne “erotic” text from her as my friend’s Dad came into the room with diluting juice and crisps and the modem was quickly jacked from the socket. That there, incidentally, is a more sexy line than that American girl, I believe, could ever have written.
A few years later I hooked my own PC up to the internet and there it stayed sending and receiving as many as 3 e-mails overnight while I slept. Then somehow I was left behind. Not even when I got a new PC with an internal 56kbps modem could I keep up. The internet had moved on faster than my dial-up could catch it – blogs, online forums, streaming video content, shopping, video calling, news, games, all the Paul McCartney is dead theories, State taxation and pension information. It’s all there.
I didn’t realize until I finally had broadband installed for myself just how good it is: Sorry ladies in the BT Dial-up Exchange (I am sure he was being facetious although maybe the 3rd one takes the photos?), but I am not going back and you should definitely look into getting broadband like me. The E-wave really is quite rad these days.
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