It seems like it was yesterday when I went on the internet for the first time and discovered there are dodgy chatrooms all over cyberspace.

Late in the night, I would sneak into the den in our apartment and try to get on to the web quietly, but that was unlikely as that was the age of the internet phone modem.

The modem was 56kbps and as I clicked a button on my screen to connect, a green light would come on the modem and it would start making sounds like it was annoyed and would go, ‘beep, deep, dop, doop, dip’, as if there was a robot somewhere grumbling and punching in the numbers on a phone.

Then there would be an irritating, toe-curling sound, just like children would make in class by rubbing a pencil sharpener on the blackboard, but to me it was the sweetest sound because that meant I was now connected to the internet.

I would log on to a Yahoo! chatroom and wait for some company to arrive or someone to say hello to me to start the conversation. It was like a coffee and shisha shop, but without the smoke, and since it was anonymous you could say the wildest things and get away with it. I am sure there are still many chatrooms on the net, but now they must be the haunt of creepy crazies you read about in the tabloids and how the police raided their home and found objectionable material and jailed them forever.

Painstaking progress

To download any page of stuff I found interesting would require the patience of Buddha. You could not do anything else while the page was being downloaded, such as open a new browser or a new window and multi-task. You had to look at a bar as the line slowly, painstakingly progressed as the information was being downloaded.

To make me go to bed, my wife would pick up the phone in the bedroom and put it back down on the receiver and that would effectively cut off the internet connection. Fuming, I would again click on the button on the screen, but it was late into the night and the traffic on the net would be high; ‘Deep, bip, dop, bleep, burrrrrrr, and then nothing, so it would be time for bed.

The other important thing I discovered was online games. I would sit at night and challenge someone in New Jersey to a game of Pinball or Pac Man and I became good at it and knew which arrow to press to eat the monster or when to tap the F9 key to activate the paddle to hit the pinball. If you think surfing the internet or Facebook is addictive today, internet games were even more so and you would wake up and immediately start thinking about your strategy for the evening’s game.

Sometimes I would use the web for some unimportant things like sending off an email. I know I should have saved my first-ever email message for posterity, but my first PC crashed.

I lugged the heavy mother-board or whatever it was called, in a taxi to the corner repair shop, obviously run by a Canadian-Chinese guy and the prognosis was not very good. “I can’t save your files, I have to format your drive,” said the repair guy, who seemed too young to know anything.

And that’s how I lost everything, even the passwords of many sites I had so smartly saved on the hard drive, thinking that is how things are done in the age of the internet and not to scribble it down in the notepad with our daily expenses.

For me, nothing much has changed since the internet was born 25 years ago, except that I now have a Dropbox in the Cloud.