Member-only story
I remember in the 80's when many of us debated the value of BBSes. The acronym stood for “bulletin board systems”, which described the technology in plain terms but didn’t do a good job explaining the magical feel of it. It was hard to explain why it was so different, and in many ways, so much better than anything that came before it.
I remember in the 90's when we were all debating networks like Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve, and Fidonet and tried to figure out what it all meant. Some things were the “real internet” and other things were “walled gardens” but there was something special going on that transcended all the categorizations and debate.
I remember newsgroups and the web and browsers and people using the phrase “high tech” to mean anything that involved a computer. We talked endlessly about what the implications of everything emerging all around us. A lot of people all made the same joke about having trouble finding the onramp to the information superhighway.
I remember being told to buy Netscape stock. I remember the day Yahoo! went public and I started hearing rumors about how the valley was exploding with wealth. I remember breathless articles in Wired about the new economy and NASDAQ 10,000 and watching the market seesaw 800 points in a day. I remember how the pre-millennium tension felt. I remember how exciting it all was.
I remember somewhere in the middle of all of this a company named Pyra made this thing called Blogger. I remember all the original zine authors turned webmasters taking a…
