Here is a Polaroid of me from October 1985, when I was ten years old. I’m using my first computer, an Acorn Electron. To my left is the tape deck that would take nearly ten minutes to load the software. I can’t guess which game I was playing but it was probably Chuckie Egg. I played Chuckie Egg a lot.
Not sure what was going on with the tracksuit…
It doesn’t take an expert to see a correlation between the massive increases in childhood obesity and the rise of the computer age. In 1974, just 6.1 percent of adolescent males were obese, according to the American Obesity Association. By 2000, it was 15.5 percent. You can make a number of valid arguments about diet and exercise, but I can tell you this: If I’d had access to an endless cornucopia of pornography at that age, I would’ve never left the house either.
I’m 34 now and not terribly interested in porn, but I can practically hear my adolescent self calling to me from the early ’90s: “You can see porn seconds after logging onto a computer? WHY AREN’T YOU DOING THAT RIGHT NOW?!” Sure, the pre-Internet age had dirty stuff—history shows a close relationship between pornography and emerging technologies—but describing it now is like hearing my grandparents talk about life before television or indoor plumbing. We might as well have been scrawling dirty pictures on cave walls.
The last computer we had before I left for college in 1994 was a gargantuan no-name “IBM-compatible” machine with maybe a 386 processor—probably slower—that ran this weird hybrid of DOS and Windows. For some reason, when it booted up, it opened to a DOS menu with an option to launch Windows. In addition, we had a VGA monitor, a Panasonic dot-matrix printer, and a dial-up modem that probably hovered around the 8,000 kilobytes/second range.
That modem provided the gateway to social networks of the pre-Internet age: bulletin-board systems. Usually havens for hardcore computer hobbyists, they also occasionally provided low-tech porn to bored, sexually frustrated adolescents like myself. They released us from the shackles of late-night HBO and Cinemax, from our pathetic attempts to decipher scrambled pay-per-view channels, and from the cat-and-mouse game of hiding dirty magazines. We were the foot soldiers of the Internet Porn Revolution.
I don’t recall how I found the BBSs, though I’m sure my equally frustrated friends tipped me off. Connecting to them required an elaborate ruse, because it wasn’t anonymous: They often required a mailing address and phone-number verification to connect—positively Orwellian now, when anonymity rules the Internet landscape. Like the anti-meth rules that limit how much Claritin you can buy at once, these roadblocks made anonymity more difficult, but not impossible. Glancing at my high-school directory, I picked first and last names at random to construct aliases. (My go-to: Frank Rodriguez.) For a legitimate street address, I used the archaic precursor to Google Maps, the Key Map. Key Maps provided detailed street maps of my hometown of Houston, broken down onto letter-sized pages in a spiral-bound book. The index offered a comprehensive list of all streets, with page number and quadrant placement depending on the address.
Unfortunately, there was no way around phone verification: The BBS would disconnect you, then dial you back. From my perspective here in the Anonymous Age, I’m not sure why this was necessary, and it created headaches. My parents had little patience for phone calls waking them up in the middle of the night, even if the phone only rang once before the modem connected.
With the verification complete, you could finally start looking for files. That’s what all of this effort came down to: low-resolution photos, or if you were lucky, equally crappy animated .GIFs: a photo with a couple of seconds of motion on a loop. (I distinctly remember a green monochromatic .GIF that involved a dildo, or at least that’s what it looked like—again, low-res.)
My system worked pretty well, but I had little to show for it. Even though I was the family’s computer expert and only shared the machine with my mom and dad, I couldn’t exactly leave files on it. Any time I looked at that dildo .GIF, I erased it, and if I wanted to look at it later, I had to unerase it in DOS. In retrospect, the labor-intensiveness of this whole system really dwarfed the payoff, but I was an adolescent without any other options.
It didn’t always go to plan. One time my mom walked in on me just as I had arrived to the designated “adult” area of a BBS. I practically tripped over myself telling her I had accidentally stumbled on it and was trying to leave—which is right when the system administrator messaged me (I can’t believe rudimentary instant-messaging existed then) to say “Hey, what’s the hold-up? Finish registering so we can start this!” I disconnected immediately, but the damage had been done: My mom now knew what could be found on these BBSs—with the heat on me, I had to lie low. Not long afterward, Nick Rodriguez, the kid whose last name I used as one of my aliases, killed himself. I’m not sure which made me feel guiltier: that I’d used his name in the first place, or that the first thing I thought when I heard about it was, “Oh shit, the kid whose name I stole!”
In the fall of ’94, I left for college, which quickly alleviated the frustrations that kept me up late at night poring over Key Maps and creating aliases. It’s too bad, in a way: I had a new Compaq desktop with a blazing 486 processor and a 28.8 modem, and no family members to pry into files with racy names. I started to lose interest just as the Internet Porn Revolution took hold. My adolescent self will never forgive me.
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Kyle Ryan is associate editor of The A.V. Club, the pop-culture wing of The Onion. He lives in Chicago with his wife, cat, and refurbished 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2.8 gigahertz processor.
This is a photo of my bedroom desk in 1987, complete with a Commodore 64, VIC-20, and color monitor. My parents absolutely refused to buy me an Atari 2600 in 1983 and that’s where it started. Today, I am an information management consultant, and the IT director at a credit union. I think it all worked out pretty well actually.
It’s 1994; I’m 15 and going through puberty. This means, of course, that I am simultaneously struggling to feel understood, immersing myself in rock & roll, and spending the rest of my free time obsessing about boys. And unlike the teens who’ve come of age before me, I have access to a brand new tool that promotes my ability to do all three: a miracle computer program by the name of Prodigy.
I’ve learned from aunt Cappy, who knows such things, that Prodigy is a system of “message boards” that can be accessed and “posted on” by anyone using a computer connected to a phone line. I can’t picture this at all (am I supposed to plug the computer into a phone jack instead of an electrical outlet?), but she sets it up for me. Now, I’m not just Laura Heywood of Oakland, CA; I am also KSHG11D – the handle assigned to me along with my shiny new Prodigy account. (There’s no such thing as a “username” in 1994.)
I set out immediately to find the music boards. I’m obsessed with a local Berkeley band that has just released their first major label CD: the Counting Crows. Is there a message board dedicated to their music? I type, click, wait patiently for the screen to load… and I find it. There is!!!
My first post is titled “Favorite Counting Crows Song” and I write a thousand-word dissertation on Perfect Blue Buildings. I push a button and realize with exhilaration that I’m now a published writer! I stare at the screen, waiting for someone to comment or respond. Before anyone does, Mom comes in and tells me to go to bed.
After school the next day, I run to my parents’ bedroom and wait for the Apple Macintosh to boot up so I can check my replies. One stands out: it’s from a boy my age in Washington, DC. He tells me that in addition to Counting Crows, he loves Live, Hootie & the Blowfish, and the Grateful Dead. He plays football, has a golden retriever puppy, and even sings and writes his own songs on the guitar.
His name is Christof and we’re soon spending hours composing public messages to each other on these Prodigy boards. We calculate the time difference and set dates so we can both be sitting in front of our green-tinted computer screens at the same time, synchronizing our CD players so we can analyze new albums track-by-track in real time. Sometimes we write parallel critiques at the same moment, and I just know that we are dissolving into fits of simultaneous laughter when they post.
Via this electronic/ telephonic/ futuristic connection, Christof brings me exactly what I lack in my face-to-face relationships: the ability to feel understood, no matter how weird or vulnerable I get. We’ve never been in the same timezone, let along the same room, but I feel closer to him than anyone else in my life. I may be tying up the family phone line, but I’m also freeing myself from the overwhelming loneliness of youth.
Christof and I stay in touch for just over a year. Prodigy has upped its fees, and my parents decide it isn’t worth it any more (plus there’s this new phenomenon called America Online that’s starting to catch on, which supposedly allows its users to actually send each other private messages at no extra charge!). For a while, we keep in touch via paper letters; but as we get more comfortable in our bodies and in our real-life social lives, little by little our need for each other wanes. We lose touch right around the time I get my drivers license.
A decade later, I find Christof on Friendster and technology connects us once again. We are both now living in New York, and decide to meet in person for the first time. Over sushi in the East Village, I’m touched to learn that his memories are as glowing and affectionate as mine.
As it turns out, Christof is scheduled to move to San Francisco just a few days after our dinner. I’m bummed (of course I’d imagined that we might fall in love and have the most romantic story ever to tell at our wedding), but I can tell that we are forever joined by a connection made years ago, through our love of music and a series of computer chips and telephone wires. And you know what? I still think of him every time I hear the Counting Crows.
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Laura Heywood is a writer and producer in New York City whose work has been featured on BroadwayWorld.com and radio stations throughout the country. Her hobbies include aerobic pole dancing, Geocaching, and competitive Skee-Ball.