IN 1994 I WAS 11, and my dad brought home a Canon PC with a 486 Intel processor running Windows 3.1. Yes, believe it or not Canon used to make PCs; before that, we had a Tandy 1000 at home. But it wasn't until we bought our PC with Windows 3.1 that I really started to explore the Internet. Our small town of Plymouth, Ind., was awarded a federal grant to get the Internet, and I'm not kidding you, it was called "Skynet." It was a public ISP, and I still remember going to our county building for the opening meeting and hearing them say, "We're getting this thing called the Internet, and it's going to change everything." And, of course, the first thing I did when we got connected at home was search cheat codes for Doom II. We had Mosaic as a browser, but I vaguely remember using Gopher protocol, which was an alternative to the World Wide Web to retrieve documents, hence the cheat codes for Doom. I played a lot of Microsoft Golf at that time, but I digress.
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