blackrimglasses.com

The time was 1995. I was 15 years old, nearly 16.

Around three years prior, I befriended Greg Hurst, who worked at my mom’s company (The Orange County Register). Greg, who was ten years older than I, became sort of an older brother to me. Plus he was a huge geek, and helped me bring my geekiness out. I went from wanting to be a doctor (like a good Jewish boy) to wanting to be a computer nerd, whatever that was and whatever that entailed.

Greg fed my newfound addiction through a steady supply of floppy disks and CD’s that came from the bowels of companies in Redmond, Vienna, San Jose and Cupertino. They had codenames, they were colored (sometimes) and they crashed all the time. I loved them dearly. My dear 486 DX50 (with 8 megs of RAM and a 120 meg hard drive) was reformatted and redone more in the two years that followed meeting Greg than I care to think about. I actually had to have my mom buy me a Colorado tape back up drive so I could continually have a fresh backup.

From 13 to 15, I beta tested various applications including Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (enter 32 bit addressing of the disk!), Delphi (early Internet), America Online (right after they went public and changed names, pre the Dec 1993 500,000 user milestone), Photoshop and others.

And then I got Chicago.

I first got Chicago (which became Windows 95) at the alpha stage, right after John Ruley published his article in Windows Magazine. I was on the Microsoft boards on AOL at the time, which he was on. Greg hooked me up with the same alpha (which didn’t work btw).

After that, I got put on the beta under Greg’s ID. A part of the beta was MSN. The original MSN of course was built onto Windows Explorer, so it was more a bulletin board system than anything resembling an Internet service. Going on MSN at this point was pretty funny, as it was a ghost town in which things were getting built out for public launch. It was akin to going into a party before doors open, where the lights are up, the staff is out, things are getting put into place.

The best thing about MSN at this point was Frogpond. Frogpond was a chatroom created just for us beta testers. It was in fact, the only chat room available at the time I believe. On the chat screen, it was signified with a little frog, and at any hour of the day you could enter and find an assortment of beta testers and Microserfs engaged in collective nerd-dom.

I was 15 going on 16 and a complete geek at this point. I had yet to start driving, and was completely hooked on the notion of chat rooms, forums, etc. My first AOL bill was 300 dollars, mind you. I started getting free minutes from AOL because I was a “charter” member (pre 500,000 mark), but that didn’t help matters much.

Frogpond and I instantly clicked, because I could enter it and see 20 or so uber-geeks who not only were up at 2AM, but also up, on a beta operating system and talking about build numbers, thunking, 32bit memory addressing and other Microsoft betas. It was beautiful. I felt like I was home.

I made a lot of friends in Frogpond. And I loved every minute I spent in there. It might be sad, or maybe its funny to think that a chatroom on a beta online service from Microsoft played a large role in my adolescence, at least for 6 months, but that is the truth. In 1995 or so, the Internet was not necessarily understood. My friends and I, those of us who traded beta CD’s, were on the Internet using SLIP connections to our local college, traded Elite BBS numbers and the like were freaks, and at that age, the primary reason for us reaching out online was to find others that overcame the obstacles to get to a position where we could type “Hey, Ethan from CA here, who else is online?” without fear of reprisal or curious glances.

I know a large part of why I created Murmurs.com in 1996 was because I wanted other people to have that feeling, specifically those that were REM fans. Being an REM fan in 1996 wasn’t very hip either, hence I felt the need to find a place, or create one, where acceptance could be assumed. We’re almost ten years down that path. I think it succeeded.

It is almost 2006, and its over ten years since I was a Frogponder. Its four years since I gave up on Microsoft products and it’s a long time since I was an MSN member, but as I approach the ten year anniversary of Murmurs, and marking almost 15 years that I’ve been online, I have to give a large portion of credit to the geeks in Frogpond for convincing me that social connections through the textual ether can have ramifications long after ones logs off.

So for that, if nothing else, I give Microsoft and Chicago credit.