I was half your age in 89, so don't remember the news item, but I have strong memories of the Netscape and ozemal icons taking up estate on my step mum's compaq

I was half your age in 89, so don't remember the news item, but I have strong memories of the Netscape and ozemal icons taking up estate on my step mum's compaq in the mid 90s. She was writing her PhD on it, and technically we weren't even allowed into the "office", let alone on the computer. Yet somehow I found time between 3.15 (when the school bus dropped me outside) and 4.30 (when she got home from uni) to work out what it was, connect and turn on the modem, hunt down the ozemail card and access password (after days of trial and error pw prompt denials), connect, explore first the boundaries of the ozemail portal and then beyond, and ultimately build a number of (local) personal websites using tables and hotlinked pictures that I hid in an official looking folder structure. This probably happened over many months, with the help of various co-conspirators (I would have had little idea of what the internet was before starting out, we had computers in our small state primary school, but the best thing they had on them was sim city). I was finally found out (though not red handed) when she came home early one day and picked up the phone in the living room ... at which point I bolted out the back door. Funnily I didn't really do any elective computer subjects in high school when they were available, but I did spend a lot of time at home on my step mum's computer, chatting on ICQ, making websites and playing with graphics programs like paint and cool 3d. And eventually won my first computer at the end of high school (from channel V the pay tv music channel in Australia, tho truthfully I was a dyed in the wool rage child) with an animation of a frog jumping into a fan, made with a pirated version of Macromedia flash, downloaded in many chunks over 56k ozemail dialup. The pioneering efforts of the early Australian net scene was lost on me. But it also shaped me. I'd love to see the doco.