I thought I’d do something different today.  I want to take a look back at my “internet history”, sordid as it may be.  (And it is.)  So the best place to start?  The beginning.

Okay, that’s probably too far back.  But, gosh, wasn’t I adorable?  You can’t deny it.  I sure had the whole “baby” thing going for me.  I wonder what happened.  Because somewhere along the way I went from “Aww, how cute!” to “Eesh!  Put some makeup on, woman!”  But looking at this picture, I can see influences on my own children which is pretty freakin’ cool if you ask me.

But yes, advanced as I was as a wee thing, the technology wasn’t there (not at our house, at least) and I was not quite yet on the internet.  Give it a couple years.

My dad worked for IBM so you would have thought we would have lived on the cutting edge.  Alas, this is not so.  My dad did at one point in the 80’s bring home one of those old dinosaur IBM computers and I remember for a while it was set up in my room and he would come in before I was awake in the morning and dial in to the IBM whatchamacallit and… do what exactly?  I don’t know.  But I remember hearing the phone dialing in the computer’s (extremely loud) speakers and the resulting beeps and boops as it connected.  WILD.

There was a small amount of internet going on in high school but for the most part is was learning all about Tetris and Solitare (all the computers in all the classrooms AND the library had Solitare!  SWEET!).

I went to Nevada to go to school and my friends… did not.  One stayed behind in San Jose and another went to school clear out in MICHIGAN.  That fall was rough as I would hike to the post office in hopes of letters.  And my dearest friend in Michigan began to urge me to get an “email account”.  WTF?  Email?  Why would I want to do that??  I had no computer of my own, anyhow, and was forced to use the computer lab for writing papers.  Finally, I signed up.

It was all downhill from there.

I think my first email address was something like mskurtz@unr.edu.  I could be wrong because it has been EVER SO MANY YEARS and I only have so many brain cells left.  I do remember we had to use “PINE” to access the email.  Graphic based?  Only in our dreams!  I think it was only the VERY NEXT DAY that I had some very helpful friends on campus show me what a “talker” was.  Do any of you out there remember “talkers”?  It was what they called chat rooms before there was chat rooms.  The one I started out on was called “Crossroads” and it was, as far as I knew, the biggest of it’s kind.  It wasn’t a game, like a MUDD (which I did get into along the way, never fear), but rather a big, text-based, multi-”roomed” program that allowed a bunch of nerdy college kids to chat with one another.  Essentially.  I became something of an internet flirt.  I was able to email and (once I talked her into logging in) chat with my friend in Michigan and I met new friends. We eventually migrated to our “own” smaller talker, “Eye of the World.”

I thought I was terribly clever.

It wasn’t long before I was trying out MUDDS and the like.  I got hooked up with one from some guys that I had actually MET in person.  They were decent fellows, which looking back, I realize is nothing short of a MIRACLE.  (Evie, don’t you ever THINK of doing anything I did.)  I lost a lot of my college existance in MUDDs, actually.  Between that and the talkers, it was a miracle I (eventually) graduated.

Lucky for me, I met someone my junior year of college and he sort of mellowed me out.  (I also used to wear a lot of baggy-ish clothes.  WTF?  I wanna go back in time and tell my dumbass self to enjoy the relative skinniness while I had it…)  But I turned him into an internet addict too.  Actually, while I tell people that we met on a camping trip, that’s not altogether accurate.  See, I had just learned about this awesome thing called “Geocities” and had spent a goodly amount of time in the dorm computer lab putting together my own monstrosity of a webpage together (I was located in Hollywood, I think).  And, for whatever reason, I bookmarked it on the computer I tended to use the most often so that I could go back and access it easily.  It just so happens that one day this older fella was using that computer and browsing the bookmarks and found this webpage of mine.

I was hunched over another computer at the time, talking feverishly to my friend in Michigan about something that was undoubtedly important.  I can’t remember NOW, of course, what it was but I do remember the urgency of the moment.  I hear this person, who I have no idea who they are, say “Marilyn!”  My head whipped around and I saw this older fella.  I think I glared at him.  “I like your webpage,” he said.  I grunted, perhaps a rudimentary “thanks”, perhaps not, before returning to my conversation.

Talk about your auspicious beginnings!  You can see why I stick to the camping story.

ANYHOW.  The point is, I got my dumb self on Geocities in the fall of 1996.  I learned how to fiddle with HTML and such things and got a real taste for having a presence on the web.  I LIKED IT.  I would continue for the next several years to maintain Geocities webpages and other sorts of webpages on other various servers.  At first, it was all about the FREE.  Free was good.

When that older fella (his name is Kile, btw) and I got married in August of 1998, I was still doing the Geocities thing.  And the MUDD thing.  What can I say?  Then I got pregnant in the spring of 1999.  I joined an expectant mom’s email group for gals due in November of 1999 and got embroiled in that.  I kept an offline diary of my pregnancy from virtually the moment I found out.  Why not online?  I don’t know, but I was something of a fuddy duddy and there was something about paper and pen that I enjoyed embracing.

I would continue to journal offline through my son’s infancy and the ensuing years where we tried to get pregnant (AND FAILED).  I would also continue with email groups and eventually an online message board group over at the Ovusoft Forums.  I still marvel at how I was STILL not journaling online at this point.  No, what I did instead was start playing The Sims.  And then, because I am a ginormous nerd, I started up my own Sims website.  See, you could “make stuff” for the game.  I joined an existing site for the purpose of selling my “wares” before eventually setting up my own site.  I had a friend help me through the process of signing up for my own webhost account and getting a domain name configured.  Enter: HOSTGATOR.  Gosh, when was that?  It was the summer of 2003, I think.  I’d already been in The Sims website game for nearly 2 years at that point. My first url was simlair.com.

It took about 18 months before I thought about blogging myself.  I had certainly heard of blogs by this point.  But, to be honest, I thought they were more for “kids”.  Teenagers and college kids.  I saw them as more of a social networking thing.  This was until a friend showed me some blogs of some infertile women out there, one in particular.  I was hooked from then on.  And it was via Julie’s blog and her awesome blogroll that I found a lot of the other blogs that I still read today.  And I was encouraged to start my own blog.  Which I did.  ON BLOGGER.

*bangs head on the wall*

It took me about 5 days to wake up from THAT and set up WordPress on my Hosgator account.  So my first blog url was inconceivable.simlair.com.  OH YES.  And I remember my first design too.  I had to do that because I couldn’t stand the default look and there was virtually NOTHING out there for chick bloggers that I could find.  I figured if there wasn’t anything available, I’d make my own.  By New Years 2005, I had a WordPress blog and my own custom design.  GO ME.  I (obviously) haven’t looked back since.

The internet has been a huge part of my life, that’s for sure.  Blogging has been an even LARGER part of my life.  I had to go through some painfully geeky periods of my life before I got here, but I got here.  And I guess you could say I’m STILL geeky.  And I would have to bow my head and say, “Yes, you’re right.”  But at least I’m geeky in the company of some awesome women.

BLOGGERS RULE.