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This morning while walking the dog, I was overcome with a memory from around 1998-ish. I was in Seattle for a 2-day training session on some software that I needed to support for a company that I worked for and I'd met up with a friend of mine. Rather than hitting an ordinary bar to get our beers (both of us are beer snobs...well, we were at the time anyway), we decided to hit the Speakeasy smack in the middle of downtown Seattle.
For you whippersnappers who are too young to remember doing anything on computers back in 1998 - get off of my lawn!! Everybody else can keep reading.
I am particularly sensitive to light and sound, so I typically avoid a lot of "night life" type places because, quite frankly, being within them makes me nauseous, dizzy, and physically exhausted from the effort of blotting out the stimulus. However, the Speakeasy was something else entirely. Basically a combination of a bar and an ISP, it was pure geek heaven.
When we got there, there were a few PCs strewn about and a couple of Macs, but the real attraction for us was what was actually sitting on the bar itself. Green screens. That's right people, full-on VT320 dumb terminals rigged to the ISP's linux box. Awwww yeah. So we crossed the room which was playing classic grunge music at a loud volume (but not so loud that it made me sick, which was nice) and stepped up to the bar. It was a long time ago, but I think we paid a couple bucks for the use of the green screens for a couple hours. We drank some ridiculously tall stouts, logged onto the terminals and then hit our favorite MUD.
That's right people - I'm so damn old I can remember the good old days when the MMOs didn't have 3D graphics, they just had text, fun, and good old fashioned imagination. It was one of the most fun nights I'd had in a long time and I still remember it quite fondly. Back then, the Internet was this new and awesome thing that the general public was still discovering. It was a brave new world with fantastic possibilities for gaming, learning, programming, and of course pornography.
In 10 short years, we've gone from having the Internet be a mostly-text novelty you could rent in bars for a fun night out with friends to something that is so ubiquitous that we all bitch and moan when our phones take more than 5 seconds to find the name, phone number, and business hours of the nearest Thai food restaurant within 2 miles of our current GPS location.
10 years from now, I wonder what we're going to be doing for fun on the Internet, and what features of our digital life are going to be so ubiquitous that we bitch and moan about them.
Either way, no amount of time can take away the fond memories I have of "green screens and beer".
