It started something like this

I’ve just been catching up with old friends. Actually it was old friend’s blogs, and these friends happen to be people I’ve never met, although I’ve known them for over eleven years. These are the people that got me started on the World Wide Web, and were my first internet aquaintances. So where did it all began? If I remember correctly it began something like this;

“Welcome one and all to Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe…”

and so it was that a group of Compuserve users in late 1995 hung out in a small corner of Sci-Fi Media One, what would probably later have been called a forum, in a small but sumptuously furnished chatroom called “Milliways”, where they discussed life, the universe, and everything.

We laughed, we joked, we were all fans of Douglas Adams, and all had the incredible patience required to mess about with 9600 baud dialup, snaking phone cables, and the blue screen of death. I’d got my computer to keep in touch with my good buddy Gaxx who was heading off to York University to study computer science. My SX33 was blazingly fast to his SX25, and we became so accustomed to the modems screech that we could spot a failed attempt before the screen popped the message. These were the early days of the internet, a time when (According to the BBC News Website here) there were less than 20,000 websites in the world. Since those early days so much has happened, and it is funny to think that all these years later I would be married to someone from the forum, have met in person several others (and if anyone know what became of a young German couple called Andrea and Florian aka Chewie and Rincewind, please tell them to get in touch) and still communicate with infrequent frequency with a number of them today. So thanks to Vash for coming up with the original post that set this off, and to Dave for posting in a similar vein and spurring me on. The only question now… what happens next?