I remember trying to pull up the web site for Tristar's Godzilla movie in late 1997 and it took 15 minutes to load the homepage on a 14.4 connection. Ah... good times.

A few months ago I came across this 70-minute video from the 1994 Internet Marketing Conference presented in San Francisco.

It's ancient and futuristic at the same time.

I remember the days when it took 2 hours just to get connected to AOL in the dial-up days. Busy signals. Busy signals. That sound haunts me to this day. Then you'd get on and within 10 minutes be booted off and have to start all over again.

I remember doing a report in college back in 1995. The University had email, so I knew how that worked, and my professor said that we could go online and pull up the websites of companies and email them for information about their company. Well, the few companies that actually had a website had lame info on them and the ones that I emailed never responded. I never thought that 12 yrs later, this is where we'd be.

I remember using the state dept. of education's IDEAnet in like 1993. In retrospect, it kind of like IMing in one big chatroom. Of course, it was all kids and teachers. You'd get online (after the frustrating dial up) and whoever was there would ask if you were a teacher or a student (I happened to be a grad student and an IUPUI writing instructor at the time). A situation like that is full of creepy possibilities now, but back then it really was just kids and teachers figuring out how to use it. I interviewed a junior high kid for an article I was writing, and he explained the then-difficult process of printing off a copy of an online conversation. On my dot-matrix printer. With those annoying edges you had to tear off. (Truly the Internet dark ages.)

I remember a friend having the internet in high school, but I didn't actually use it until my freshman year in college on a primitive email system....black screen, orange type. That would have been in 1996.

I have had numerous ISPs throughout my lifetime. My first was ECICNet. However, they went bye bye without much notice. I recall getting only a weekend's notice before they ceased operations. Then...CIOE was my next ISP...and they too went kaput.

I had enough of small operations, so I chose much bigger ones. AOL and MSN were next and I even subbed them at the same time too. I figured it was best to have a backup ISP in case something went wrong. At times, it worked.

I still have MSN and AOL email addresses, but they are free ones now. The funny thing is that the MSN one is the same one I used as a pay service, but it has more storage space as a free address. The AOL pay ones are RIP, but I do use one occasionally and I use their Netscape 9 browser, mostly for the name.