One small dial-up for man

Do you remember your first time? I can picture mine vividly, as if it were yesterday.

I was sitting at my desk in my study in Pittsburgh, having carefully followed all the instructions. It felt like a scene out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I didn’t really know if we were going to make contact. I heard the chirpy dialing sounds, the beeps and then that melodious, sustained sound of static.

“I think we’re on, honey,” I yelled at my wife, who was in the other room. We were indeed online, at last, on what was then called the information superhighway.

Actually, it seemed more like an information cul-de-sac at first, with its low speed limit in that pre-broadband era. Within a few minutes, I ran out of things to do within the confines of the America Online community. I knew this was a momentous occasion (“one small dial-up for man ... “) and was a bit sheepish about the fact that I wasn’t altogether sure what to do next.

My only e-mail was a welcome from Steve Case -- no Viagra pitches to nix yet, no notices that great riches awaited me in Nigeria, if only I’d relay my bank account number.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Internet as a mass consumer phenomenon. In July 1995, Jeff Bezos started selling books online. Earlier that year, Stanford graduate students incorporated Yahoo, a directory for the unwieldy World Wide Web, and eBay was launched to create a marketplace for Pez dispensers.

Then on Aug. 9, 1995, half a century to the day that the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, the dot-com age was truly born with Netscape’s initial public offering. The Internet browser’s shares were priced at $28, but closed the day at $58.

Netscape had a meteoric rise and fall, but its importance cannot be overstated -- either as a financial watershed or as the vehicle that got computer users out of their private online culde-sacs (such as AOL or Prodigy) and freed them to browse or surf the actual Web.

The facts and dates in the above paragraphs all flow from a series of Google searches. If it seems like only yesterday that I first dialed in, I am not sure how I would have gone about writing this column the day before that yesterday, before the chirping and the static, before being online. I was in my late 20s then -- younger, faster -- but I couldn’t have been very functional.

Take away the Internet now and I’d be a mess. Within the last week, I have booked travel, downloaded music, researched books, bought movie tickets, sought directions, corresponded with my mother, paid bills and gone to traffic school (a blinking red light that stopped blinking, if you must know) on the Web.

This is all unremarkable, I realize, and I suppose any such list of online activities could be countered by a pre-dot-com analogue. I could have mailed my mother a card, bought a map, gone to a bricks-and-mortar bank, but it’s the package deal that seems irreplaceable, the notion that we are now empowered to interact with the outside world in our own space and in our own time.

And then there is the Web’s serendipity, the things you discover online en route to another destination. For some people, it might be those old Pez dispensers, for others a stock tip or a spouse.

Dot-com years fall somewhere between actual years and dog years in terms of real length, so the Internet is quite mature by now. It’s arguably been mature since 1998, when my mother first logged on. Hence the elegiac quality of what you are reading.

People nowadays no longer go around rhapsodizing about what the revolutionary Internet means to them, or denying that it has changed anything at all -- remember that tiresome back-and-forth? We’ve all simply incorporated the Net into our daily lives and moved on.

Now let me interrupt this 10th anniversary celebration with an embarrassing personal disclosure. Despite all the Internet firsts back in 1995, AOL assures me that the fateful day I first logged on wasn’t in 1995, it was actually March 31, 1996.

I didn’t get a DVD player until my brother had one in his minivan, it’s true, but this is ridiculous. Talk about not being an early adapter. To opt out of the greatest information-gathering tool for at least a year!

It isn’t as if I didn’t have a computer. I did have one, though I’m fuzzy now about what it did in those pre-Internet days, beyond some overpriced word-processing.

What was I waiting for to go online? The LA Observed blog? JibJab? On AOL alone, 5 million people had already joined up before I got around to it.

I have no excuses.

It was the day before yesterday, after all, and I wasn’t very functional back then.