It was in the early nineties that I came into contact with internet. I worked at the Free University in Amsterdam as a linguistic programmer. We wrote computer programs that were able to process natural languages. One project we worked on was the automatic expansion of a lexical database. We had contact with a few people from TNO and they asked us to mail our lexical database to them. A few weeks before, our system manager had just informed us about a new facility that our Unix computers were about to provide. We could send a message to anyone who had a mail address. So, we wrote:
$mail -s "Lexicon" jaap@tno.nl < lexicon.txt
The TNO people however replied that the file we sent wasn’t complete… I wasn’t surprised… this new facility couldn’t work properly, I thought. Only later we found out, we made a mistake… The program we made that produced the lexical database, was full of bugs. It was us, who made a mistake, not the mail-tool….. That moment I didn’t realize that internet would play such a huge role in my life.
Browsing the internet
A few years later, in 1994, I started a new job at the University of Amsterdam. My colleagues were very excited about something they wanted to show me: Gopher. Gopher was a program that allowed me to explore maps and documents on computers all over the world, connected via a network, my colleagues called the Internet… Gopher gave me the opportunity to read scientific document and databases from universities from the States, and from (a few) other European countries! I now was able to find the most recent scientific results in a wink of an eye! I was thrilled about it.
But that wasn’t all. Only a few months later, something new came up: Mosaic, the first graphic browser. Mosaic did more or less the same as Gopher, but the navigation went by hyperlinks. By the use of the hyperlinks, you were able to click from site to site, from database to database, across the world. During those days I wasn’t only a programmer, I was also a young mother, looking for information about parenthood and breastfeeding. I found the first American site about breastfeeding, that nowadays has grown into the biggest and most complete site on the world; I found a mailinglist of nursing mothers which I joined, and I made my first own website, the first Dutch webpage on breastfeeding.
Internet Friends
During the first years online I made a lot of friends. First I got international friends, later I also got Dutch internet friends. We informed each other, supported each other or just chatted. In 1997 I made a journey through the States and Canada with my 15 months old son, to visit a few of my internet friends. This wonderful journey was enlightening and interesting, but it also created a turning point in my life online. I came to realize that you do not know online friends as well as you think you know them. With online writing you do not get insight into their real life character, their way of life, their attitude. I visited women who in real life would never have become my friends. For instance, because they were extremely shy, or because they were from a very high class, or orthodox religious. Some moments I realized I had nothing to say to them…
And now
I’m still thrilled about the internet. I cannot imagine having a life without internet. I find all the information I need, I have made friends from all over the world, buy a lot of goods online and am still enthusiast when a new internet application conquers the world. I am even becoming an internet nostalgic, who is thinking about the old days online and who is trying to find back all these old friends from those pioneering days online…. But though I still spend many hours online, I know now that if I really want to relax or really want to spend time with friends, I should turn off my computer, and step into real life…
