In today’s world, folks think of “online” much as they do electricity, water and the other basic utilities. It’s a necessity. We access the always-on ‘net from our sofas via our phones, tablets and laptops, often while watching something/anything on TV. We trade instant messages, texts and emails, browse and post to social media, and inevitably ask the spouse “what did (s)he say?” when our multitasking leads us to miss snippets of dialogue.
It wasn’t always so.
Diane and I purchased our first computer in 1991, a secondhand x286 IBM clone that ran the DOS operating system. It boasted a 30mb hard drive, 640 kilobytes of memory, a 5 1/2-inch floppy disc drive, and an internal 1440-baud modem. My dad, who was far more tech oriented than either of us, did the heavy lifting, scouting PC stores that stocked new and refurbished models, and then creating a list of recommendations that fit our modest budget. I came across that one-sheet a few years back, while packing for a move:
Along with the CRT monitor and dot-matrix printer, it set us back a whopping $1200—the equivalent to $2880 in today’s dollars! He didn’t stop there, however: Since we were computer neophytes, he devised a simple menu system that allowed us to bypass the DOS prompt. A was for this, B was for that, C for something else, and on down the line.
Within a few months, the letter we pressed most often opened Prodigy, an online service that charged a flat monthly fee of $12.95 to connect to its sandboxed universe. It featured an encyclopedia, news, and bulletin boards about almost everything under the sun. One also paid the telephone company for the call to a local POP site, of course. As a result, depending on one’s plan, it could be cost-prohibitive if you logged in via a different area code than yours; phone companies charged much-higher rates for what they classified as “long distance” calls. Several friends of Diane, for instance, wound up with $600 bills! (Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?) One could send and receive personal messages, too—but only to other Prodigy users. If a pal was on AOL or Compuserve, c’est la vie.
Anyway, I mostly trawled the music boards (no surprise there, eh?), trading cassettes of live shows by favorite artists and engaging in lively debates about esoterica—the meaning of Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” for instance. I also traded personal messages with my parents and brother, plus a few old friends I’d lost touch with through the years. Diane, on the other hand, forged deep connections with folks she met online; they called themselves “the heart sisters” for a time and met up in real life.
As the years progressed, we upgraded to a x486 computer that allowed us to access AOL, Compuserve and other online services, and finally, in late 1996, the Internet via a free-range Internet provider called Erol’s. I joined many email groups about various musicians—off the top of my head, I remember conversing with fellow fans about Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nanci Griffith, Maria McKee, Bruce Springsteen, 10,000 Maniacs and Neil Young. I founded the first Old Grey Cat website not long thereafter and continued with it until 2006—at one point it was attracting 400 unique users a day!
I start there because, well, we all start somewhere. I’ve communicated online for decades, now. But the advent of social media upended everything. I first logged onto Facebook in 2008 at the behest of my mother, who thought it would be a fun way to stay connected, and was fairly active there for a long time; I reconnected with even more old friends than on Prodigy! (Of course, the downside to that is discovering that you no longer have anything in common.) I joined the wild west of Twitter a year later and continued with it, off and on, until this year, when the rightwing trolls populating my feed led me to quit. I’m also on Instagram, Threads and Blue Sky, where I take part in conversations mostly about music and TV. (I’m less active on Facebook, these days, as the constant algorithm tweaks have turned the newsfeed into a trickle of inanity.)
There’s also this blog, of course. I launched it on WordPress in July 2014, after two years of occasional essays for my neighborhood Patch. I’ve since moved those posts, along with two FB “notes,” to this space—why not, right? Just trawl through the Monthly Archives to find them.
The Old Grey Cat 
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