My story pales in comparison to the author's but having access to the Internet in my teen years probably saved me from a life of full-on mediocrity or worse. I

My story pales in comparison to the author's but having access to the Internet in my teen years probably saved me from a life of full-on mediocrity or worse. I grew up in an extremely rural area of the Midwest. Town so small it didn't even have a stoplight. One school served three villages, grades K-12. You were considered rich if you didn't buy your groceries with food stamps. As a teen, if you didn't have a job (which was impossible to get if your parents didn't give you a car), the only things to do with your free time were watch TV or hope one of your friends was willing to pick you up and hang out. Nobody from there went to college. The brightest ones went to trade school. The best thing my mother ever did for us was buy a computer we could barely afford, and then eventually subscribe us to dial-up Internet once it came to our town. I always liked computers and electronics but reading about things in books and magazines only takes you so far. It was until I could actually _look things up_ and see what others were doing that I became halfway proficient at computer hardware, operating systems, and programming. My crowning achievement while I was still living at home was downloading two dozen floppies worth of Slackware Linux and managing to make it dual-boot with Windows 98. Today I live in a decent-sized city, have two decades of tech career under my belt, a very solid financial situation, and a great family. My parents did their best but the mid-90's Internet (and beyond) is what got me here and I'm forever thankful for that.