From Letters to My Great-Grandchildren, 2048

Yes, I know it's hard to fathom.
There was once a time before computers
and I wrote then. My very first novel --
no, unpublished, just my first attempt
at fiction; no, I don't believe I have a copy
you can read; it was never put on line, and I know
your attention spans wander, kids, if it's on paper --
anyway, I wrote then. On a typewriter.
Then your great-grandfather bought one of the first
personal computers, which is what we called them,
even though there were no implants back then.
Expensive? Oh, yes.
My entire next novel could barely
fit, not with its miniscule memory capacity. And back in
the 80s, oh, not long after your grandfathers
my sons were born, we were already
experimenting with on-line documentation,
and I read all the psycho-babble about
hyper-space dis-orientation, and believed it,
too. Yes, well, it made sense, our screens were
small, flickered radically and hurt our eyes.
Old technology, bits and bytes, museum-quality.
And then the 90s and I was one of the pioneers
of the Wild World Web, yes, back before
it was regulated, when we'd have shoot-outs over
domain names and would have to pay off
the squatters. And we made up our own rules about
branding and e-commerce -- yes, we used the "e"
tag then, I remember one of my clients said "e-nough"
long before it became popular. You don't remember that?
Imagine, then, a world before air-bornes and step-through
downloads, when you had to wait, sometimes minutes
at a time if a site was graphically intense, when you
actually had to wrap code around concept, when banners
and click-throughs and linking were all brand new --
okay, maybe these terms aren't still in use, forgive me.
A time when you couldn't just speak into the air,
when search engines were necessary but rarely worked,
when the web was absolutely free, except for the phone lines.
Yes, we used phone lines, of course we did, more arcane
references for you, my spoiled whiz-bangs.
The thing you really can't fathom, though,
is how excited we were then.
It was a new age and a new medium, and we felt like
Gutenberg with his Bible, and a little frightened, too,
like Socrates when he thought the written word
would ruin memory. Use these old-fashioned links if you want
to follow my archaic allusions, you post-modern-media babies.


___ -- Michelle Cameron



Michelle Cameron is a writer and editor working in webspace (a.k.a. Parsippany, New Jersey), and has just finished a novel set in Elizabethan England.