A Brief History of a Life Online

In the beginning, there was no internet. But then, in 1998, my parents drove us to a big-box electronics store where we picked up a boxy Compaq Presario and drove it home and plugged it into the wall in the downstairs guest bedroom, and then suddenly, there was a little bit of internet. I was six years old, and I mostly remember marveling at the gratification I felt being able to instantly load Britney Spears fan pages and the Disney games website and Microsoft Encarta with the historical trivia game and being mildly freaked out by the computer’s alien-sounding dial-up noises.