I was born in the UK in the late sixties. So my formative exposure to cyberspace was
- Staying up late with a cassette recorder to record Basicode [1] programs broadcast after-hours on BBC radio, to run on my Vic 20. Somewhere out there was where this stuff was coming from.
- Ten minutes on a Prestel [2] terminal at a university science fair in 1984ish. It blew my mind that the thing on the screen wasn't just in the box on the table, and it was coming to me on wires.
- Downloading public domain software onto floppies from the PDSA archive at Lancaster Uni using Kermit on an Apollo DN300 and an X25 PAD to access JANET [3].
- Reading Omni magazine, which sometimes felt like plugging your brain into a consensual hallucination.
- Later on reading imported copies of Wired and Mondo 2000, which was like having a mental VPN into some other place where the tech lived and where it was always California sunshine.
- Staying up late with a cassette recorder to record Basicode [1] programs broadcast after-hours on BBC radio, to run on my Vic 20. Somewhere out there was where this stuff was coming from.
- Ten minutes on a Prestel [2] terminal at a university science fair in 1984ish. It blew my mind that the thing on the screen wasn't just in the box on the table, and it was coming to me on wires.
- Downloading public domain software onto floppies from the PDSA archive at Lancaster Uni using Kermit on an Apollo DN300 and an X25 PAD to access JANET [3].
- Reading Omni magazine, which sometimes felt like plugging your brain into a consensual hallucination.
- Later on reading imported copies of Wired and Mondo 2000, which was like having a mental VPN into some other place where the tech lived and where it was always California sunshine.
Good times
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET