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.