|
There's something we don't talk about, which happened about 1993.
I grew up with Commodore and Mac. Never had a PC, never had a modem. At 22, I was burned out, hitting bottom, and moving back in with my parents to become a bum.
A friend asked if I wanted to have his old IBM XT computer. It had a modem and I started calling into Bulletin Boards.
At that time, things were pretty set. A call to the next town was a "local toll call," and it was easy to rack up phone bills talking to friends across the SF Bay Area. Gas had more than doubled in price since high school.
I began to meet fellow slackers and Xrs. They were also broke and burned out, chatting on hand me down and used PCs. Most of us didn't even have windows. Everything was low budget/no budget.
My first e-mail address was with Inferno in Silicon Valley, and I soon got a Netcom account which cost about a day's pay.
We weren't planning a revolution, but we were building community on the cheap.
Within two years, mainstream picked up on it. Boomers started buying new PCs with internet service. You know the rest.
Look for community on the cheap.
__________________
Publicist and owner of HighOctaneHeart.com, FetishArtist.net and FetishForLife.com
|