In 1993, we didn't have closet laptops and old pocket supercomputers taking up space/up for grabs. Computing was expensive. Communicating with a computer was

In 1993, we didn't have closet laptops and old pocket supercomputers taking up space/up for grabs. Computing was expensive. Communicating with a computer was even more expensive. I was a kid with a BBS back then. I had parents who were very, very tolerant of an enormous phone bill, until that one time when I discovered the free-to-use-but-long-distance dial-up Internet service that was then known as cyberspace.org. Shit changed a lot in my world when that four-digit phone bill showed up, and it stayed changed for quite a long time afterward. The pre-WWW Internet did have some neat stuff going on, but meh. As much as I like to lament on the downfall of things like Usenet, I think we're in a much better spot for communicating and learning using these machines and networks than we were ~30 years ago. (I do wish things were more local today, like BBSs usually were, but...)