Late In the Last Century

There it is: my studio. Where? There's a door in the archway beyond the propane tanks. Yes, I agree: it's not readily accessible or even noticeable to the average visitor. It looks exactly like what it was, an old broom closet. The studio number is 20, but you can't see it on that back wall. The trees have grown up and hidden the numbers. But it's my embryo business, and I'm happy to have it.

The early internet was like that, hidden in a corner of a couple of buildings, not visible to the passersby. In those early days, we had email, although I'm sure we didn't call it that. We each had a userid consisting of eight letters and based on our name. We used an old text editor orginally designed by programmers to write code. Once you got to the end of a line of text and hit the return (enter) key, you couldn't go back and make edits. Graphics? There weren't any on the IBM-based computer in those days. Everything was text based. And colors? The type was white on a black screen. If you were lucky you had a monitor that showed green letters on black. That was considered very fancy. And when were those "good old days"? Twelve years ago.