Description

The Internet was a funny place in 1994. The World Wide Web was being used to do cutting edge things like allow people to keep track of the levels of coffee in a pot in a computer lab in England. Dial up services that were not AOL typically offered users the option of using a Terminal-based interface, and PPP or TCP was a luxury that often required a special login and administrative permission. It was a text-based Internet.
That’s the world this novella was composed in, and the world it was composed around.
It was never meant to be a period piece, and I have resisted the effort to go back and make it so-- for now. It was my first, serious attempt at writing something with a longer format. I share it today as a time capsule of the Internet as it affected a midwestern college town in the Spring 1994.
Today’s computers, high speed connections, and always-on-Internet life-streams make fifteen years ago seems so far away now-- and so foreign.
Because they is.
Gabe Wollenburg -- April 10, 2009