I grew up in the 90s, so computers were an up-and-coming thing before they became a staple in all of our lives.

We had an Apple with Oregon Trail in our portable 5th Grade classroom, but I couldn’t really do anything on it. You put in the floppy disk and called it a day. There were other computers, yeah, but you couldn’t leave the fenced-in areas of educational games. 7th grade was when I finally felt like I could get my hands dirty on how things not only worked, but how things could be created. We covered different office programs and their files, databases, and light networking.

The recreational vibe of Computer Club, however, was where I was most comfortable. While I applied what I learned to fun middle-schooling projects (I really enjoyed making PowerPoint presentations), I surfed the Internet. A lot. I spent those weekly Wednesday afternoons putting search queries in Yahooligans! and coming across forums, shrines, and personal sites.

It all clicked in High School. The class programmed in QBASIC before lesson plans for FrontPage became available, and as a self-proclaimed Internet Denzien I pivoted to that. I was familiar with Web pages, but it wasn’t until here that I realized I could build. I fell in love with HTMLing and building Web sites of my own.

I also got into blogging around this time, too– teens love self-expression, and back in the day we were used FreeNetDiary, Xanga, and the highly-coveted Livejournal (way back when, you needed an invite from an existing user). I settled on BlogDrive for my first blog, the URL referencing Cloud Strife.

I also had someone’s fan page of Chibi Usa always bookmarked, and I was able to see it evolve over the years (until I lost the link). I thought to myself, “I want to put information out there, and I want to do it with style.” It has since morphed into an emphasis on accessibility and readability.

I still love blogging, and I still love manipulating content with color theory and best practices to display different media types, for everyone.

And what now? I am nostalgic from when The Internet seemed more fun, less cookie-cutter and corporate.

Backwards into The Old Internet, I go.