Broken Web Cherry  − 1 May, 1996

I first got to use the World Wide Web during my senior year of high school, when I discovered that the computer lab in my satellite high school had just gotten access to it. One morning when I arrived early, I stopped in, plopped down at a Mac, and double-clicked on Netscape Navigator for the first time ever.

Although I hadn't used the web before, I was already very comfortable with computers and online things, having been a devoted BBSer for three years before that, had used the online service Prodigy, and was a computer user since elementary school. I knew about web addresses, and somewhere I had heard about search engines. I typed in "www.webcrawler.com" and hit Enter.

The first thing I looked up? "Genesis": my favorite band. At that point, I believed that nobody else in the world had ever heard of Genesis, so I expected to find nothing. I was wrong -- there were a whole five sites devoted to the band! I've been hooked ever since.