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In the late 90s, when it first became possible to rip a CDs into MP3s, it was a revelation. Mix tapes had been a staple of my youth and now I could do the same with CDs. It was all very innocent and quite legal. But then I discovered Napster in 1999, where you could share your MP3s via the internet, the legality of which quickly led me into a sordid life of unspeakable crime: music piracy. Those were dangerous times. How badly did you want that Eminem song? Badly enough to risk fines in the thousands? Maybe even JAIL? My mom begged me to stop. My future was at stake.

To be fair, thousands of people were actually sued for sharing MP3s online. Artist’s got involved. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich became an outspoken opponent of online piracy. He was probably right, but he was also an out-of-touch douchebag. I also remember reading a “think-piece” by Courtney Love (!) where she displayed a remarkable lack for foresight with her claims that nobody would ever spend seven hours downloading an entire CD’s worth of music on MP3 when it can’t even properly emulate the tone of a warm guitar. I don’t know how I remember that so specifically, but it’s probably because she’s awful, too.

Anyway, it became really uncool to blame the fans for stealing music, and even though Napster basically shuttered, other file-sharing sites and technologies quickly took its place and all the futile suing seemed to stop. So then websites like Oink.cd and What.cd just brazenly opened up free-to-all BitTorrent sites that could download entire albums in seconds and all hell broke loose. The only way to stop it was to figure out a way to make listening to music easier than stealing it, and Spotify was born.

In the end, nobody who downloaded music went to jail. The unlucky few who were sued before people stopped caring paid a couple thousand to settle out of court. Lars Ulrich is still a douchbag and Courtney Love has done much stupider things since. Now I pay over $200 a year for a streaming music service and I cannot even tell if that’s a good deal or not because I don’t actually own any of it, but concert T-shirts are now $60 a pop and artists are still pissed off so nobody is a winner. Yay!

In 1995 I was desperate for Desperado. I had heard they were making a big budget sequel to El Mariachi and that it was going to be wild. Quentin Tarantino was somehow involved! I wanted to see the trailer so badly but never seemed to be able to catch it on live TV. I watched entire episodes of shows I didn’t care about, just in case it appeared during the commercials, which was the only real way to see trailers in those days if you weren’t in a movie theater – except wait! WWW!

There was no streaming back then. You had to wait for a video to fully download before it could play on specialized software. Even on my blistering 28.8 dialup, the estimated download time was over six hours. But I was a determined, patient kid.

The progress bar was crawling toward 92% complete when my mom picked up the phone in the kitchen to call my aunt Marilyn and broke the connection. My devastation was considerable. There are tragedies that shape a person. This was one of mine. To this day I still don’t like my aunt Marilyn.

So I wisened up, and started the download right before bed when surely no one would be needing the phone. And no one did! Except apparently an unknown error had crashed the download at around 3%. So I waited until bedtime again to restart the download, and I woke up the next morning to find that the download was 100% complete!

But apparently I needed Quicktime to play it, a video player with a larger file size than the movie trailer I had just spend three days downloading. At this point I had invested nearly a week of my life into what was essentially a two-minute advertisement, but everything was finally in place to watch the video.

And watch it I did. Hundreds of times. It was about 1.5 inches wide by one inch tall in its native resolution. Literally postage-stamp sized. And the janky processing power of my PC made it nearly impossible to watch without random skips and pauses. Totally worth it, though.

I can’t imagine anything I would wait six hours for these days. Now I can watch a trailer instantly in 4K while standing in line for coffee and somehow feel nothing. It took me 5 seconds to copy and paste this embed code and even that seemed like too much effort.

There was a time when the internet arrived in the mail. It came in shrink-wrapped CDs with bold fonts: 500 FREE HOURS. Somehow I talked my dad into a free trial of America Online or AOL – pronounced almost like a drunken slur – AYOWELL.

Most people I knew had no computer at home, and if they did, they didn’t have a modem. If you were lucky to find someone who actually had one, you could seem really cool by asking, “So you got a fourteen four or a twenty eight eight?” Like asking what they had under the hood for an engine. As if it made a huge difference. You were reducing the time if took to download an image from twenty minutes to ten, which were somehow equally intolerable.

Choosing a screenname was a new experience for most poeple. Lots of people were too stupid to make their chosen username untraceable – using their real first and last name combined with their house number. Luckily, nothing was already taken back then. You could’ve chosen John and it would’ve been accepted.

The first time I entered a chat room, I was far too naive to understand what being asked “ASL?” meant. I was blithely oblivious, confused but intrigued about how one could communicate online in sign language. I’m sure many perverts thrived in the entirely unsupervised chaos. I’m kinda surprised I wasn’t kidnapped early on.

But mostly I spent time trying to find actual commercial websites on the WWW, which were quite novel at the time. NBC had one, so I spent 400 of my free 500 hours downloading pictures of everyone in the cast of Seinfeld standing under an umbrella.

When you clicked to view an image on the early web, it didn’t just appear. You had to wait as it revealed itself line by line, like it was being faxed from space. Which I suppose it kinda was. First the top of someone’s hair. Then a forehead. Eventually a pixelated face. Then fifteen minutes later you have a single JPEG in beautiful ultra-low res.

Then of course I had to print it in black and white on the dot matrix printeer paper with the sprocket hole edges so that I could hang it on the wall, like a monument to my bandwidth, and this was truly living in the future. I kept these printouts until just a few years ago because I thought throwing them out would have proven to my dad that this was indeed a waste of both paper and ink. I’m over 50 years old now.

When the 500 hours ran out, there were always more AOL CDs in the desk drawer, and those suckers didn’t seem to mind people accepting their free offer multiple times in a row. I always needed more hours because back then you could run out of internet.

The back of my dad’s Omni magazines had ads for online Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) where – if you could navigate a maze of operating system configurations, low baud rates, and mild parental suspicion – you could dial-in to an online message board using your first-gen modem to read obcene posts by a ton of dank basement perverts – regardless of the board’s ostensible topic.

I often visited the Sierra Online BBS to search for hints on how to beat Kings Quest V only to find “grown” men replying to innocent gamers with salacious, anonymous bravado. But if it were late at night, and you were sixteen like I was, this might cause you to purposefully wander over to the “Adults Only” BBS, where it got so obscene that you could see the admins erasing posts in real time – literally watching lines vanish mid-sentence. I’d just stare at the blinking cursor, trying to decide whether I was intrigued or just tired. Usually tired.

But I still learned a lot in those days. Universal kinks. Various numbers representing certain sexual positions. It was wild. But not wild enough for visual carnality or dirty pics. This was way before the internet could easily handle imagery. Naw, If you wanted filth, you had to generate it yourself using your own imagination. Unless you were into ass drawn out in ASCII.

So, it was always disappointing.

Kids these days don’t know how good they got it.