Life Before the Internet?

Last updated May 11, 2026.

Well, I was born in 1985 and the Internet first started around 1983, so I can’t truly say I knew life before its time. I began accessing the Internet in the first grade, but I didn’t realize its potential at the time.

Although the Internet didn’t come into its own until the mid-90s. I remember the first computer I saw at school in the first grade.

Apple in School

The classroom had an Apple II and a Mac LC 500, which was an all-in-one Macintosh computer with a CD-ROM and floppy drive. The Apple II used big floppy disks, and you had to load the disk before powering on the computer because it didn’t have an operating system to boot to.

Some of my friends had other models of Macintosh computers. One friend had a Mac SE with dual floppy drives, and another had the Macintosh Portable with a little trackball.

PC at Home

My mother bought a Packard-Bell personal computer that came with a 14.4k modem. I recall trying to load a picture of Mickey Mouse from the Disney website, and it took all night, and I only got a quarter of the way through the image. After that, we got a 28.8k modem upgrade that was slotted into the motherboard.

Later, around the time I began attending high school, we got a Micron PC with an integrated video card, the NVIDIA Riva 128. This allowed for some 3D and 2D processing, and I was able to run games like Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo. I also got into Emulators and would play Super Nintendo and Gameboy games on the computer.

The computer included a 56.6k modem that allowed me to download game demos and later I got into peer-to-peer downloading. A 30 MB game demo executable file would take the whole night. So i would find a game I wanted to try and start the download before bed and hope there were no lost connections or interference while I slept.

I also embarrassingly ruined the computer when I tried to install the Tie Fighter Star Wars arcade game code on the PC. It overwrote the firmware and caused the computer to boot as an arcade machine. I got in a lot of trouble for that.

Later School Experiences

I also recall that around 1999, I began visiting the computer lab at the local high school a year or so before I began attending. In the evenings after school, the computer lab was kept open by a staff member, and some of the older students would visit the lab and play a game called Marathon Infinity.

It was a First-Person Shooter similar to Quake or Unreal. There were four Performa Macs in the lab that were networked and could be used for multiplayer matches.

Before this, I had mostly been playing Sim City 2000, which an older student had installed on a computer at the alternative school I was attending. I would actually come across several computers on which the same boy would install games throughout my school life.

It wasn’t until late 2007 that I figured out who the other boy was. Quite by accident, I noticed he had the same games in his room, and when I asked about them, he confirmed my suspicions. I had actually known his family for a long time, but I didn’t know he was interested in computers.

I also had a penchant for installing games on the computers I came across at school. There were four different Macs in my homeroom, and I installed the demo versions of Escape Velocity and EV: Override on two of them. The others didn’t have the specifications to handle such a game, so I installed Maelstrom and Apeiron on them.

I went too far when I installed Starcraft on the Power Mac. A new teacher was present when the opening video played with the Zerg overrunning the colony and the Protoss nuking the planet. The sounds of screams and gunfire were sufficient to attract her ire.

Deep Freeze

The teacher had the school’s tech guy wipe the computers. He also installed Deep Freeze software on them, which wiped any unwanted data when you turned off the computer. I was also barred from using the computers during my homeroom period.

I actually met the tech guy after an altercation with another student caused me to be removed from some classes we shared for one year. I was removed from both my Art and Jewellery classes and reassigned as a library assistant and a tech assistant.

I helped to install the new iMacs in the computer lab and library. I also learned how to run cables and set up the Deep Freeze software on the machines.

It was a great experience for me.

Although, in hindsight, the Internet has been, perhaps, the bane of my existence for other reasons. It is an addiction that I would be rid of if not for the necessity that it has become in our modern world…

Thanks for reading. Sorry to end on a somber note. Thank you for your time.