A history of the Internet

A history of the Internet - as seen by me:

First there was the Arpanet .  But that was before home computers, so I didn't know about it.

Then, in the late 1980s, we were talking about buying one of the first Apple home computers.  However, my husband's brother gave us a Commodore 64 for Christmas.  So we used that.

We still used our typewriter for hardcopy papers for homework assignments for the kids and newspaper articles (me) and magazine articles (my husband who was Tech Editor for the New England MG 'T' Register, LTD).
But soon my husband discovered computer bulletin boards and began downloading packets and having conversations with people all over the world.  On it he discovered a group of writers and set the machine up so I could download and talk to that group.
It was called - FidoNet:
FidoNet was a bulletin board system where certain people promised to keep their computers on constantly to assist in the transfer of packets of information that literally went around the world. I was talking to people in Australia!
Once a day we subscribers would contact our local computer and download the packet we wanted. I downloaded the Writing packet. My husband downloaded an MG packet, plus a computer packet, and other subject packets.
After I had read my packet, I'd respond to a variety of messages in one message and upload it to the waiting computer. (located in a friend's house not far from us) and it would join all the other packets when they were sent on.

Also - I wrote my first books on this Commodore 64.  (and the newsletters for my Girl Scout troop)
Remember Dot-Matrix printers?  How thrilling it was to be able to compose on the computer, make revisions and correction and then print them off?  Print them onto continuous sheets of paper that had holes on each side so that the printer could grip the paper and move it along line by line? With perforations every 11 inches so we could then tear them apart into normal sized typing paper.  Oh those holes along the side - they were in thin strips of paper that also could be torn off.  At first it was really rough, but then paper companies developed very fine perforations that resulted in very nice looking sheets of paper.

FidoNet disbanded when the Internet began to have public access in the early 1990s.
So, I was talked into joining GEnie by a science fiction writer/ editor friend of mine. (Since I was active in the local Baltimore SF community and hung out with her at CONs) At this point, the huge business computers were only used during the daytime. They rented out computer time to ordinary people at night. Thus - GE rented computer time to GEnie groups. I joined the Children's Book Writer's group, the SF Writer's group and the Moody Blues group, and I think the Buffy the Vampire Killer group, and also mostly silently read several personal group areas such as Bruce Coville's and Jane Yolen's and other writers I admired.

When our Commodore 64 died we bought an Apple IIe.  So much easier to use than the Commodore. So much more memory.  However, I could no longer access GEnie

Friends on GEnie pointed out that AOL had a writer's group, so I moved over there.
I began to be published in the mid 1990s.
Some years later, various internet groups formed for published writers, some of which I still belong to and still interact and get messages from.

And then came laser printers.  WOW!  Instead of taking three minutes to print a page - it could print three a minute!

By this time I was a published writer and giving talks to local writing groups.  At one Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators meeting, several new writers complained about the expense of laser printers.  Why couldn't they stick with the Dot-Matrix?  Well, I replied, the quality of what is produced is so much better, so much easier for editors to read.  So, you just have to write it up as a business expense - the cost of doing your business of writing.

There was a lot of discussion among writers about the differences between Apple products and PC products - Apples being much easier to use while producing the same end product.  Nowadays, most writers and illustrators are using Apple computers and the publishers, who had begun with PCs, have had to adjust.

And now we're mostly on FaceBook.