HP on Dial-up

My first computer was an HP running Windows ME back in 2003, I believe. I know a lot more about computers now compared to then. It was a good computer for browsing the internet and chatting with friends on AOL, but it couldn’t really do any serious gaming. It was a computer that my mom got for me and my sister for Christmas. I remember all the fighting and arguing we did about who would get to use the computer. Eventually, my sister stopped fighting about it and found friends to hang out with while I continued to venture through the virtual spaces.

I learned quite a bit about computers because of that computer. The second computer I owned was an HP Slimline running Windows XP. I thought it was a huge upgrade. I’m pretty sure my first computer came with something like 64 MB of RAM which I eventually upgraded, but this new computer came with a whole gig of RAM. You don’t need to know a lot about computers to know that the phones in our pockets are much more powerful than the computers we had just 20 years ago.

The internet was a much different place then, too. When I compare it to today’s internet, it seems like the wild west. I remember in middle school, we were supposed to do research on the Whitehouse but we put a .com at the end of it instead of .gov and it brought us to an adult website. That was a big learning opportunity for both the teacher and the IT department. There was little censorship on the internet, and it was very obvious. You could search for things on the internet and find them, things that you can only view on the darknet these days.

In some ways, I miss those days. However, today our internet has much more functionality to it. For example, I remember when YouTube first came out and it was impossible to watch the videos for most people because most people were still on dial-up at the time. Then again, our internet is three and a half thousand times faster than the internet back then. Broadband opened up a lot of doors for people accessing the internet. It would be unimaginable trying to browse the internet on a 56k modem these days.