#20PHnet

With twentieth anniversary celebrations for the Philippines joining the internet held in the previous week, I think back to far along that timeline where and when I got to experiencing the internet.

For the actual end of March 1994, I was likely panicking over how much of a mess my third year in high school was.  Then I spent summer being an unused alternate for the programming team, and then I spent most of my graduating year on normal things.

Things happen late in that year.  I remember being sequestered by the CISD chief with Joseph Gilbuena to one of the Strata buildings in the Ortigas district, and we were being taught how to use email.  Can't even remember what the program was (Pine?), but what kept in my mind was how difficult it'd be to remember an email address (blahblah@blah.gov.ph?).

Graduate, go to college, spend a semester being decent, then pick up on the internet once more, this time in an internet cafe on Katipunan Ave. (Compass Pacific?).  This was at a time when net access would go for 100 pesos an hour. (And we would be there for afternoons at a time.)  I'd go get dial-up at home in a year or so (at i-manila, though I think we tried edsamail for a while), and made sure to get internet access for the home since 1996.  (One of my friends had net access earlier, and from a country backbone, if I remembered correctly.)

Went for broadband (Destiny) in 1998-9, luckily in a low-concentration area, so it actually felt broadbandish.  Did One Internet Day for digitalfilipino.com representing our org (UP League of Internet Communicators) at the turn of the millennium.

I've lost a hotmail account, the edsamail account, the local ISP addresses and a few websites (mostly from Geocities), but I've kept most of my other contacts, including an ICQ account (though I may have lost an earlier one), and most mail-groups.  I've used Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer while they were at their peak, Firefox and Chrome when they came out, Eudora through to Thunderbird, Trillian and Pidgin.  mIRC is familiar, AVG and ZoneAlarm were early protection, though I've only really recently picked up Avast.  I've lost track of a number of net contacts through the decade and a half, but I've been present on a larger number of networks than I'd personally like to keep active.

It firmly entered the window of my life that Douglas Adams says provides excitement, and has it ever.  Now, to start rehearsing the "get off my lawn" speech for whatever new comes along.  That won't be mobile, since we're in the thick of that, so maybe the VR paradigm care of Oculus and Facebook, or the wearable paradigm care of Google Glass and smartwatches.  I'm personally looking forward to Sony's e-paper notepad.