Hey Todd! It’s me, John from Alaska!

I’ll never forget when I had my internet virginity taken. WAAYYY back in ’96, my buddy at work showed up one day all grinny and whatnot, going on about his new computer and “Web Surfing”. I was all whatever-ish and he was like, No really you need to come check it out. I even got a 128K modem, so it “Loads” really “Fast”.

Anyway, I came over and checked it out. We were in his den , where he had everything set up in one of those cheap particle board stands. Lights low, tension high, he “logged on”, and we were off and running…so to speak. I remember him telling me how Netscape was his “Search engine” and he had already written down some of his favorite sites, like a joke page, some sports stuff, etc. In what proved to be somewhat prophetic and understated, he said “You can also see porn on here.” I made him show me since I didn’t believe it. Then his wife brought in a big snack tray and beers for us, so we had to get off THAT site in a hurry, only their was no getting off ANY site in a hurry in those days, so we just kinda sat there all sheepish until it went away. She just gave a “boys will be boys” head shake and left. It was pretty funny, and I STILL hear about that every time I go over there. She’s always like “Hey John are you getting any at home, or do you need to be alone with our computer for awhile?” Ten years later, man! Let it go!

Okay, that’s it. Bye!

My first memory of the internet would be back in 1997.  I was attending a tech school and it was a super big deal when in the spring they added the “evil” internet.  I say “evil” because I believe that the school thought that if they gave us too much freedom the students would be surfing porn all day.  We had to sign papers that said we wouldn’t use the internet for fun, but for research only, and if we got caught looking at porn, our privileges would be immediately taken away, and could possibly be kicked out of school…I guess they thought we were a bunch of pervs!

We were warned that you could accidentally run into porn sites when you were innocently searching for stuff, so if we were to stumble upon some porn by accident, we were supposed to report it immediately!  I heard a story where a woman said that her daughter had tried to search something about dogs because they had a new puppy and they found some porn sites about bitches! 

They made it sound like someone was constantly monitoring our every move kind of like that creepy Baldwin flick where he lived in a building and was watching everyone on monitors, and frankly it made me a little paranoid!  I don’t think we weren’t allowed to email anyone but our teachers.

Terri