Daily writing prompt

Do you remember life before the internet?

View all responses

Before the beginning I worked with quartz furnaces and silicon wafers, acids and gases, and gold deposition. The quartz boats for the furnaces would burn my hands through heavy gloves. The heat from the furnace tubes felt like a sunburn in a jar. If we smelled maple syrup, it was time to run. We created the bits and pieces with so little idea of what they would become. Monday through Friday were spent building the foundations of the future but Saturday and Sunday were just as it had been for most of my life: sunburns at the beach, paperback books with dogears, record stores, waiting in line for concert tickets, waiting on next week’s TV show episode, marveling at Hollywood’s current special effects and laughing at yesterday’s attempts. Arpanet showed up 1/1/83 but I didn’t see a working model until 1989. I was a systems programmer on an IBM mainframe by that time and it meant installing a front end network processor. The internet moved quickly once it arrived and changed everything in its passing, minus dog eared books, sunburns and critiquing Hollywood’s special effects.