Web 1.0

Thanks to Jia Tolentino, in her intro to Trick Mirror, I am fascinated to read the objective description of a time that I lived through- beginning with the interest in BBC Apple floppy discs (these games still available to play in a timewarp trip down memory lane at National Computing Museum in Bletchley Park); writing the first page of example programmes in the enthusiastically prepared and typed manual accompanying the Amstrad CPC464, Using the Apple Mac computers to type in Helvetica at GCSE English, understanding what HP computer with Encarta CDs, Ask Jeeves, AOL dial-up PCand then.... The first forays into Internet emailing Ballymena High school kids as penpals.

My penpals joke is always to go completely screw-loose halfway through- like getting the Spanish-English dictionary and finding all the words for 'pooh' or 'fart' and 'crazy' and assembling them into pseudo sentences.

I think that really worried our internet penpals they would get into trouble.

How the worm had turned- schoolboys bullying me on the walk to school "hello dickhead" actually under the thumb.

Getting to my first ever Hotmail address, my first digital ID- of a means to call home in 1997 in the cyber cafes, technofuelled, Rocket dog, neon painted cafes of Thamel Kathmandu.

Web 2.0 as I've learned, of 20six, Lastfm, Myspace, Bebo... Still dawdling now.

Could this be my Metaverse?