These were the days before there were smileys to convey every conceivable human emotion and facial expression. The Talker bar is also where I learned to roleplay, which basically meant that people weren’t just talking there like you would talk to someone over the phone, but they were conveying their actions and creating entire scenes, like an impromptu screenplay. Thus, I upped my age to 24 and named myself $MERCENARY$, because that awesome screen name just screams maturity, doesn’t it? Thus, it was destiny that I would spend some of the best weeks of my youth occupying a stool in the Talker bar.īecause most of the people who hung out there were older adults of somewhat higher moral fiber than the average degenerate on mIRC, I felt it necessary to make a concerted effort to be mature and fit in. It was just the type of community I was looking for, a place where everybody knows your name. If mIRC was Gotham City, Talker was Smallville. I found Talker in some kind of an Internet directory and immediately signed up. Worse yet was that for all my time, I did not have one single anonymous pal 4 life. The immature pranks got kinda old, and the thrill of getting banned from people’s channels wore off quickly. But the simple truth is, I was never cut out to be a bad boy… not even an Internet bad boy. Now, because of the Internet, I had complete freedom to be as irritating as I wanted to with the same invulnerability as Superman. Supes spent a good 10-15 minutes of the film flying around the world and releasing his frustrations through juvenile acts like straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa and breaking beer bottles with peanuts. MIRC wasn’t working out like I hoped, so I got bored and decided to go bad just like Superman did when Richard Pryor gave him the home-made kryptonite in Superman III. Unfortunately, none of them had pics, and most of them were only interested in hooking up with hot “lesbains”. It was also nice that the girls outnumbered the guys by a 3-1 margin and 100% were young and beautiful. I dare you to find another place with such a high concentration of young, sexy people who are all single and seeking meaningful relationships. But the best thing about mIRC was the people. There were channels dedicated to every conceivable topic of interest, and even 24/7 trivia game rooms. Still, in its defense, mIRC wasn’t all bad. Yet on mIRC, porn trafficking was pretty much the #1 past time. Prior to mIRC, I thought that porn was something you could only find on TV’s in cheap trucker motels and seedy gas stations. I also discovered that mIRC had quite the seedy underbelly. I dug deeper in the guts of mIRC until I figured out that I could connect to other servers filled with millions of people who lurked in dark corners, waiting to found by naive newbs like myself. While that had me rolling the first 10 or so times, I quickly grew bored with Jamie and his wet trout slapping macro That friendship was obviously not meant to be, as we only had one conversation, but I was undeterred from seeking out other faceless people with whom I could bond. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I remember how much he liked to slap me with a wet fish.
Was I supposed to be using the program to talk to my dad’s coworkers? Probably not, but Jamie seemed happy for the diversion. My first mIRC conversation was with some guy my dad worked with named Jamie.
I have no idea what the “m” stands for and I don’t care. Thankfully, it turned out that we needed that particular chat software, called “mIRC”, installed on our home computer for my father’s work. Thus, I asked what needed to be done to get this Internet thing in our house so that I might set out to find as many anonymous people of questionable moral character as possible and form meaningful relationships with them. Fascinating.Īs an introverted lad who hated nearly every living person, the prospect of being able to sit behind my computer, look like a slob, and meet people with whom I would have literally zero personal contact was highly appealing. Apparently, one could also hold conversations with random anonymous people from parts unknown.
CYBERTOWN EARLY INTERNET INSTALL
In those days, he actually knew more about computers than I did, but all he knew about the Internet was that somehow they were able to install some kind of program on his computer so that he could type and receive messages from other people in the company. I was 16 years old, and I’d only had a computer for about a year, when my dad was telling us about how his office had just hooked up with this Internet thing. The first time I heard the term “Internet” was in early 1996.
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