Today was a special day.. after finding some old parts and some connections, we were able to fire up the ole colortini and watch the pictures as they flew through the air–20th century Tom Snyder style. What we mean by this old reference is this: We dug out an OLD computer from the closet and .. boom.. have it set up like the good ole days again.
Now keep in mind, there are historic roots with this old Packard Bell. My mom and dad, now deceased, made sure this was the mighty Christmas gift for me back in 1997–I was online with Dial Up before several other friends.. I used this computer to create an Angelfire site.. eventually a Geocities site.. and then finally got the .Com and the Horror Report was born.
But also on this old handy dandy piece heirloom: AOL instant message.. as though it never got deleted by the AOL .. it exists, with an internet connection, just attempting to sign on. No one told this old beast that AIM is long dead. Sadly.. We didn’t know how good we had it.
But I also found my old email.. just bits and pieces of history .. snippets of times gone by and photos, dumb forwards, and an email chain including the “All your bases are belong to us” pre-social media meme.
And reviewing these previous emails answered a very important question as to how memes spread, and how the word was exchanged: EMAIL!
Email was where it was at.. you got contacts by seeing who others forwarded things to. You got jokes and strange memes before there were memes. There were few GIFs but there were sure links to them. Until DSL came around, 4 second clips took up too much room so we just told each other what website to go to in order to find them..
I have a lot of emails from people I quite frankly do not even remember really.
Mostly people who emailed me through my website back then. Let me tell you the most amazing thing of all .. people wrote in complete paragraphs. I did, too. Not just completely paragraphs, but well thought out versions of them. With punctuation and grammar that was impressively accurate.
We cared about how we sounded and we wanted to express ourselves in funny ways .. this is just 20 years ago. Two decades.
But in that much time we basically became one sentence of one word people. Or just memes and gifs are used. Is it really true that we don’t have time anymore?
Or do we just not have the ability to focus anymore?
Anyway.. I encourage you, if you have a similar old device, fire it up and either be proud or, at times, cringe at your youthful indiscretion. Actually come to think of it, I dare you!! Triple dog style. You will possibly not even recognize the person you were two sets of tens ago.
Either way it is a part of who you are.. and maybe at this point simply who you were..