Once upon a time in the west Wicklow

Sometimes I miss before-the-internet. I don’t remember it very well, but I know that it was fun.

My first computer was a huge, huge desktop Packard Bell. My granny and grandad bought it for me in PC World. They paid using the cheque book and I’m convinced that it was nine hundred pounds but my brain keeps reacting to such a number with the words “ah Jaysus no it couldn’t have been, sure you could’ve bought the internet for that money in those days”. It weighed more than Roseanne and it had a floppy disk drive and it’s very own accessory – a Spice Girls mouse mat. Twas far from flash drives and usb keys I was reared.

The Bell lived in my room and I spent many happy hours wrecking it – being about as technically proficient as a loaf of bread at the time. I drew things in Paint, wrote things in Word and revelled in the glory of accessing the content on Enhanced CDs (which seemed like they were going to be deadly, but were actually complete shite). I watched the music video for Hit My Baby One More Time several hundred times just because it was on the album and I could.

The Bell never had an internet connection. Much begging and pleading went on, but the internet was a den of iniquity and The Bell was purely an educational resource. Encarta ‘98 was as close as I was getting to a search engine. By the time The Bell was replaced by the Sony Vaio, it was a shadow of its former self. The monitor turned off at will and the mouse strayed so far from where you wanted it to go you’d have scrolled off the edge of the desk and across the windowsill just to hit ‘Start’.

Sony Baby (the best laptop in the world ever, RIP) and later Tosh the Toshiba (affectionately known as Bubbles because my ipod (black with a pink skin) was known as Michael Jackson) hailed the dawn of the online era. With patience, I would sit on the bottom step of the stairs (beside the phone socket) and navigate Hotmail via dial-up. I’m not really sure why, nobody ever emailed me when I was 13. I didn’t know anybody else who had the internet. A boy in my class once asked me to download porn for him but I politely declined – a one hour video of Circle-Jerk of Friends at 32kbps would’ve been more ass-pain than extended stairs sitting was worth.

For a long time, the internet meant nothing to me. I lived in a small town and I only knew the other people who lived there. Keeping in touch meant going to school and catching up after mass on a Sunday. Sure what would you want the internet for? Dangerous place, that. You’d only need to click the line into the phone socket and the paedophiles would know your a/s/l down to the house number.

It boomed. Broadband, Gmail, YouTube, memory sticks, card readers, flatscreens. Maybe it just boomed in my world because I used it more – but it does seem utterly fair to say that the internet’s gotten progressively cooler over the last decade. Maybe just in Ireland, cos we have it now, but still. Mostly, it’s deadly. A lot of internet stuff makes life fun. A flat monthly fee brings unlimited chat with friends and show watchage and the answers to any question that comes to mind. Only, it takes a little fun away too.

We were big radio listeners in my house. The Mammy was on the Just a Minute Quiz every time Larry Gogan said ‘Wicklow’. I think she invented Speed dial for the purpose. There was (and remains) a big tradition of calling in fake requests to local stations congratulating people on babies they aren’t having and birthdays they’re a good five decades away from. It used to be that the challenge in winning a radio quiz was knowing the answer. Once you had that, if it was an any way decent question you’d have a fair whack at getting through because nobody had Google to help them out. Now everybody has the answer.

In a way, people have innovated around it. You can’t Google for the 98fm secret sound and nothing but your own skill will you get you anywhere with FM104’s Fastest Texter. You couldn’t type fast enough to beat a quiz against the clock.

The internet’s deadly, but I can’t help wondering how we’d fare if it was turned off for a day. (Perhaps I’ll move to China and find out – ooohh, political slam).

I had lunch today with a friend of mine, and it went something like:

Me: I thought you were going to Czechoslovakia

Him: Croatia, and Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist…

Me: Czech Republic, whatever. I thought maybe you were going on holidays to 1992.

It was flippant, but it is odd to imagine living in 1992. Years that you lived through somehow never manage to seem all that long ago until you suddenly realise that you were five, that people drove Sierras, that nobody had a digital camera and that mobile phones were giant bricks that you could commit aggravated assault with.

Stuff that you weren’t around for always seems devlishly antiquated. Stuff that you remember buying when it hit the shelves manages to maintain an air of recentness. Nostalgia is a funny little thing that I don’t like to engage with because it means imagining things were better in the past – which of course they weren’t. Stuff Nostalgia doesn’t even manage to happen very often until you happen upon an old mix tape and realise you’ve nothing to play it on. (I eventually did and it contained a lot of fail music including Okie Dokie Karaoke). Owing to being nostalgic about material stuff, I’ve decided to guard possessively my VCR and my tamagotchi.

It’s simply very odd to realise all of the things you’ve already outgrown when you’ve only just been around for two decades. I remember before-the-internet, and I’m not sure that any other generation will. They wont know that half the fun of it was working things out.

Having said all of that, I’m still a huge internet nerd and I direct you to the delightful news of the first Irish Web Awards. Well done Mr Mulley.

/snarf.