I grew up during what I consider the beginning of the personal computer era. I learned how to type on an electric typewriter, but personal computers with floppy disks and black screens with orange or green text soon replaced the old machines. We had a computer at home, mainly for the family business and the occasional game of Pac-Man, but I never experienced any other software than what we purchased for the home PC.  One day I remember some friends asking me to go to the school library to check out the new computer and what it could do. I looked at it and remember not being too impressed. That was until a friend clicked on an icon that loaded a primitive search engine. He typed in the name of a celebrity and we waited for a few minutes. Up came a page of pictures and articles about that celebrity and I was blown away. To this point in time, I had never thought about networking computers outside our school with ours. I could feel the importance of this new invention and sensed that it would change our lives.

Within a couple of years, that same friend invited me to his house to see what he had set up on his computer. He explained that he had become the middle-man for a computer service. People would use their modems to dial his computer and get information or pictures that he had access to. They would then pay him for his service by sending a cheque in the mail. I saw the stack of cheques that my high school friend had accumulated that week and new that this could be big business. I saved my summer job money and bought a used Pentium 4 computer for $750 from a business that was upgrading their computers. This computer was my first look Windows and more simple games, but what I really spent my time doing was surfing the internet. Every page took about a minute to load but the information was endless and I was a dry sponge soaking it up.

In university, I was exposed to the Mac system as they provided subsidized or low-cost machines for higher learning. I was also taught how to do some programming in Pascal in order to solve simple math problems. I saw the value in programming but knew that some of my classmates were much better at it than I was so I never pursued it much. Once again, what I really liked was the access to the web through the university library. For some reason I have always seen the internet as the main onramp to the information highway and I want to ride on it.

Since than I am on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I have multiple computers at home and handheld devices that all link me to the outside world.

I guess my question is, “What makes technology, especially the internet, so enticing?” Is it the visuals, the instant information or news, the design of each page, the 256 color display, or the vast amounts of information?

Dennis