	May 1999

My Life on the Net

By Dustin Gill
Dustin Gill is a college student and technology user who has written for Tapping Technology. You can reach him at picklez@home.com.
When I first started using computers about 15 years ago, I knew nothing about the Internet or anything that is related to it. I don't even know if the Internet was around back then. The first computer I had was an Apple II E. It was enough to run games and simple programs, but it wasn't anything spectacular. It didn't even have a modem with it but it kept me happy for the few years I used it. I did once get a 300 baud modem to hook to it that didn't work very well at all. So, that was sort of my experience with modems.
A few years later I got a new computer that was so much better than my old one. This one was a 386 DX 40 PC that did a whole lot more than the Apple computers could. This one didn't have a modem either which was alright because I still didn't know anything about modems or the Internet. A few months later I went out and bought a 2400 baud modem with some money I had received for my birthday. It wasn't the fastest thing in the world but it worked well. This was my first experience with a modem that actually worked. I first started playing around with things called Bulletin Board Systems or as they're usually called BBSes. These are things you can dial in to and post messages to people, play on-line games, or transfer files. I even started my own BBS which was called Beyond Reality. I was addicted to that stuff for a long time until I discovered the Internet and all it's infinite information.
A few years later I bought a 14.4k modem and a few years after that I bought a 28.8k modem. My first experience with the Internet was about 5 or 6 years ago. A friend of mine gave me a shell account off his university Internet account. I had no idea what I was doing on there. It was so much different then what I was used to doing on-line. I played with different things like Gopher which is a type of search engine (I think). It also gave me a chance to fool around with UNIX which is interesting. So, that was my main source to the Internet for a few years until I was able to control a mouse through my morse code program called EZ-Keys for Windows.
That was also my first time using Windows on my own. While I was still using the shell I found a Telnet site called Lambda MOO. It was kind of like the BBSes but hundreds of times larger. It's pretty much an on-line community where hundreds of people can get together and chat or play games or pretty much anything else. Most people I tell about think it's a typical chat line like on most Internet providers. I totally got into this virtual world. It had me completely absorbed with all the people on there and all the things you could do. I spent hours and hours on there making friends and sometimes enemies. So, after I got used to using the new version of EZ-Keys for Windows, I signed up for America On-Line.
It was so much nicer surfing the web with a graphical browser. After a few months of using the Internet with AOL, some people from Maryland Rehab Center came out to my house and brought a piece of equipment called a Jouse. They let me try it out for a while. It was so much easier to use to control my computer than anything I had ever used before.
I wrote about the Jouse in a previous article but in case you didn't see it, it works like this. The Jouse it has a joystick like control and sip and puff connectors. The joystick part is used to move the mouse around the screen. The joystick is connected to two sip and puff connectors so a sip does a right click and puff does a left click. There is also a bubble that you squeeze that switches it between morse code and mouse mode. It's really easy to use. Anyway, that is about the end of my tale of my life on the net. These days I'm running a rickety old Pentium Pro 200with a cable modem. This cable modem is like the ultimate in on-line connectivity. It think that's about it.

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