Dial-Up and a PlayStation
What the web felt like before anyone owned it
I remember sitting and waiting.
Sitting in the silence, while everyone else was in bed. The modem screeched and screeched some more. I’d learned its rhythm so well I could tell from the modulation whether the connection was going to hold or drop.
Surely my parents can hear this, I'd think, quietly, to myself.
It’s quaint now, so quaint, but that noise was two machines feeling out a phone line invented for human voices. People called it a handshake, which made it sound polite. To me it sounded more like I was dialling into some reluctant alien mother ship.
I held my breath. This time, the connection held.
ASL?
This was the world I found the first PlayStation in.
Sony brought the console to Europe in September 1995, and the web I was teaching myself to use was barely standing up. There were only around 23,500 websites that summer, not that I'd have known to count them.
By the start of 1996 it had crossed 100,000, though from where I sat it felt limitless, which tells you how little I could see of it. It seemed like a week of evenings would take me through a meaningful chunk of the whole thing.
It was a stranger place then, and a s l o w e r one as I didn't browse so much as wait, then read, then wait again. A single image loaded from the top down, line by line, and I'd guess what it was before it finished.
AOL was my way in, the disc arrived free through the letterbox like everyone else's, and Joanna Lumley's voice would greet me with "Welcome" and tell me, in those unmistakable tones, that my dad had email. Pages were mostly grey or black, text was blue, and half of what I found was somebody's hobby.
Well, apart from the official Naughty Dog website.
The magazines were already telling me everything about the PlayStation, the review scores and the release dates and the screenshots I’d stared at for weeks.
The internet didn’t replace that, not yet. But what it added was other people. For the first time I wasn’t just reading about the games, I was in a chat room (for better or worse) chatting with strangers who cared as much as I did, somebody in another town typing back in real time.
It was raw and always shifting, and in the background companies were waking up to this new world wide web. They were plotting. How do we get a piece of this? It feels like such a distant time now. It sits in some tiny recess of my mind. It definitely happened, but I'm right on the border of, well, did it?
There was no algorithm deciding what I saw, because there was barely anything to decide between. I found things by following links somebody had typed by hand, or by reading a magazine that printed addresses in the margins.
Initially we paid for the call, by the minute, which meant the internet had a meter running the whole time I sat there. Then someone picked up the phone downstairs and killed the connection stone dead, that flat click followed by the dial tone of defeat.
So I learned to go online late, when the rates dropped and the house was quiet. I don’t think my parents ever knew. I’ll ask them the next time I see them.
Distant as these memories are, with me straddling that line between real and not, I can still line the two things up neatly. The PlayStation booting in the corner of my room, that startup chord swelling out of the speakers, while in another room a beige box hissed and chirped its way onto a distant network.
Two new sounds in the same house, both of them promising me something.
The PlayStation kept its promise, giving me exactly what it said it would and never asking for anything back. The other one promised the same, and for a while it delivered, getting faster and slicker every year until the waiting was gone and so was the feeling that I'd arrived somewhere.
But I didn't know that then, didn't know I'd had my time not with the internet as such, but with a feeling I can't get back. One of those moments that lifts you clean out of yourself and is gone before you know it, the first time I heard Everybody in the Place, the last time I saw a friend before his family moved off to some other estate.
I just sat there, lit by the screen, not knowing it was the kind of thing you only get once.
I wrote an article about Rare's website back in the late 90s, because that was my daily portal into getting any kind of information on their upcoming games. Just as dated as you have described, having to dial a number while the machines screeched to connect, but it felt glorious. My children would never understand what that feeling was like, if suddenly knowing very little of the outside world to know a lot more (perhaps now too much more).
Thanks for writing this.
Man. What a nostalgic (and depressing, thinking on the state of modern internet) article. Absolute blast to read.