Okay. My mind is officially blown. I have been involved with the internet since it was a series of 'Tubes'. Well maybe not that long, but long enough to declare that I'm a native.

My first experience with online social networking occurred in a day where we would logon with our 300 baud acoustic modem on our 8 bit machines and hit the local BBS to chat on the message boards there.  No, it wasn't real time chatting because only one person could logon at a time. The whole thing ran more like a daily newspaper. We had to be pithy and try not to monopolize the system. ATDT123-4567.

My favorite site at the time was called "The City of London" and it was run by a teen-supergeek,  yes he did work at RadioShack. We could rant and complain and exercise our right to be idiots to our hearts content.  Those were the days of Telenet and Fidonet and anonymity. No formal internet, just a network of independent computer hobbyists and Sysops who chained their machines together to transfer the contents of  newsgroups and Bulletin Boards. Allowing the rest of us mere mortals to debate the facts of life and politics with whoever had the savvy and the means to connect. All at their own expense.

And slow? I mean slow!

I would pay serious money for a Telnet connection so I could logon to BBS systems all around the world. You could tell I was a true geek from my translucent complexion.

My friend Tony got a job working for a company called GEnie. GEnie, an arm of General Electric and another company called Compuserve were the first of their kind to take advantage of the burdgoning industry that was network computing, to supply it's users with something called 'Connectivity'. There were texts based games, primitive MpRP games and Roundtables. GEnie charged an absolute mint to play the games but the Roundtables could be used for the connection charge. By todays standards the whole thing was 'meh'. But back then it was the best thing going.

The only way to get access to updated drivers and software was to order update disks or use the fee based online services. When Tony asked me to be the librarian for the Microsoft Support Roundtable on GEnie I jumped at it! I would get all the access to GEnie services that I could stand! And all I had to do was to upload and maintain the Microsoft's software and driver support library. Cool! For this small amount of work I got a lot of premium content! When Tony moved on to do the same thing for the upstart AOL. I was along for the ride!

GEnie eventually died. They couldn't compete with the ultra cool graphics that AOL supplied. The user experience was like the difference between DOS and Windows, no contest. And there I was getting free minutes along with the valuable experience of working in an online environment.

Things have changed so much since those days. And the biggest change that I can point to is that there is no longer any Anonymity. If you think you are anonymous I'm sorry to say you're deluded. This became evident to me  today when in the course of 2 days I found 6 people who I had lost touch with over time. I haven't talked to most in 20 years and one of them almost 30 years. And how did this miracle happen? Facebook.

You would think that with my online presence they would have found me on YouTube or Twitter or any one of a number of sites that I frequent. But no. FaceBook, the site that I have spurned as being yet another in an endless stream of social sites.

Catching up with all the births and deaths can be draining.

Well I never...