Inter.net

Sometime in the mid-late '80s, I "discovered" the Internet. I was reading an article in Times about NSF starting to implement its first backbone and their plans to expand to Canada, Denmark, France, etc. On the East side of the Iron Curtain, Romania was impenetrable to any decent documentation on new technologies. The only source of information from the West side was the American propaganda available at the US embassy. Luckily, a colleague of mine, whose brother had defected to the US and hence his career was already screwed, would dare to borrow magazines from the US Embassy library and bring them to the office. So, I'm reading an article about "a network of networks" with routers, bridges and hubs and the need to manage all that network gear by SNMP. Wow! Was not more than a journalist's understanding of networking, but plenty of food for the imagination.

A few years later, while in Bath, England (what a lovely city!) for training, I created my first email address and joined the internet! (I almost forgot that there was a time when emails were to send messages to friends, not for business and spam). For the next 10 years or so I was "Echo" everywhere in the net, that nymph who was only allowed to speak the last words spoken to her. Just right for early chat rooms, yahoo groups and all that. Those mid-late '90s and later, in the forest of the Internet, Echo met Narcissus, that beautiful boy who was getting in love with himself all over the social media. I'm still debating with myself which of those digitally mediated communications would suit me. If any!