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In honour of the Internet’s birthday: The time I discovered the Internet in 1993

October 30th, 2019 · No Comments

Way back when, I was a social-issues reporter at The Vancouver Sun. No one really knew what that meant. It wasn’t supposed to be traditional social issues, but more like trends and social-science research.

I can’t remember how I got started on this talking through computers network thing. I believe it might have been Larry Kuehn of the B.C. Teachers Federation who got me interested in it.

At any rate, I worked for a couple of weeks on a feature in the fall/winter of 1992 that was hundreds of words long. My editors clearly thought I was embroiled in one of my kooky obsessions with the obscure. They cut it down considerably and finally ran it in January 1993, just to humour me, I think.

That was my first dip into the world of the internet. Interesting now to see how it seemed like such a force for good back then. I thought of it again when I heard the radio interviews and read the stories yesterday about the Internet’s “birthday.”

THE INVISIBLE CITY OF COMPUTER NETWORKING: Social activists discover networks offer a sense of power, solidarity: [1* Edition]

 

Bula, Frances.The Vancouver Sun; Vancouver, B.C. [Vancouver, B.C]02 Jan 1993: B3.

THE WARNING CAME across at 12:47 a.m. Dec. 1. In the second-floor offices of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee in Gastown, amid a sea of stacked papers, ancient furniture, and file folders, Ramona Degraaf’s computer screen listed an urgent action alert from the “rainforest.timber” conference on the Web network.

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