I was mostly unemployed and BAROQUE in 1994. By 1995 I was working at my sister's company and then I was getting online, checking in on boards that posted Highlander fanfic. My sister taught me how to use ftp. It was amazing. We could get huge documents from Germany just like *that*.

In just a few hours! 1200 baud modem, baby.

I remember gopher and ARCHIE, but not Veronica.

We got AOL in 1994 -- I remember because I mostly used it to email friends I'd just made at my summer camp that year. Also to post on listservs for fans of the Nields, Dar Williams, and Ani DiFranco.

It's weird at first, huh? Enjoy it, though!

Thanks! It's mostly weird how not-weird it feels, except when I think about Rose at home with M all day. (He doesn't go back to work until classes start in another couple of weeks.) Also, I think I will be going through my backlog of emails for at least a week. Yikes.

I never had an AOL email address! I had email through work and never needed anything else because the company was so small no one was spying on it. I think my first personal email was [myname]@yahoo which I still have.

I was on USENET in '87 or '88, but I don't think I grasped the enormity of what was going on--despite it being somewhere authors were hanging out, and stuff. Once I graduated, it got frustrating. Our AS/400 at work was on an all-IBM network, which...limited fun, but I did get nookie out of it. And when I came to the US in '93, I found FidoNet, and it was on, baby, ON. And then AOL/Prodigy/Juno/whatevs...that very special time where everyone had their own website with a guestbook, and then Friendster and...I can't believe there are kids on Tumblr younger than my Internet addiction. My Internet addiction can drink and vote.

Also, I think I will be going through my backlog of emails for at least a week. Yikes.

Delete 'em. Add a note to your signature that says "I was out of the office, resend anything you still need a reponse to" and delete the whole backlog.

Juno! I remember that now! Juno might have been my first personal email, come to think of it.

I remember getting AOL on my first computer (a Mac Performa) and then having to ban a roommate from using it because he racked up so many minutes of long distance phone charges that he couldn't make rent.

The yahoo I still use as my primary email address is the one I got in 1995, when I needed a personal account.

Delete 'em. Add a note to your signature that says "I was out of the office, resend anything you still need a reponse to" and delete the whole backlog.

Yeah, I'm deleting most of them -- I had an autoreply set up so that anyone emailing me about book pitches got directed to a coworker. But I do need to get back up to speed on what books are coming out this fall/winter, and reading through publicist emails and industry newsletters is one of the best ways for me to do that. But yeah, almost none of them are going to get a response at this point.