This (or something very close to it) was the first computer I remember having at home:

It didn’t do a lot.  I could type stuff and print it out.  I could save the work to a disk (yes a disk, not a thumb drive or a cloud).  Mostly,  I played a lot of Donkey Kong on it.  There was also this math game I liked which involved Cabbage Patch Kids swinging in trees, catching numbers.  This machine didn’t really do much else.  The internet?  Well in the 1980’s (Yes, I was a child in the 80’s), not a lot of people were using the internet.  In fact, fiber optic cable was just being invented.  This would allow more data on the internet.  Until this point, it was mostly email, which was developed in the 70’s.  Now, my dad may have been using this contraption to send emails.  I was too busy playing the Cabbage Patch game to care about email.

By the time I was a teenager, using a computer in school was becoming a thing.  Not every student had one like today.  I had to sign up to use the computer.  We had a computer lab in high school, but there were maybe 30 computers for all of the students to use.  Back then, we had to take classes to learn how to search for things on the internet.  Ask Jeeves was a big one.  Google wasn’t around until I was already getting ready to graduate from high school.  As a teenager though, I remember this:

Yep, good old dial up.  So basically (for all you youngsters) you could not be on the phone AND on the internet at the same time.  My mom was smart (I guess) and got a second phone line.  That way we could be online and on the phone at the same time.  What I really remember during this time is using Instant Messaging and ICQ to connect with friends.  Remeber, we didn’t have cellphones with text messaging or Snapchat.  I also was using the internet to do school assignments, research mostly.  Outside of that, there wasn’t much use for it, at least not for my teenage self.   Keep in mind, when I graduated high school Google was just catching on, Myspace, Facebook, blogging… they were not created yet (blogging came out the same year I graduated high school).  I did have an email Agent077@aol.com … Agent007 was already taken.  I seriously used this from about 1993 until sometime in the 2000’s.  We’ll just leave it at that.

So up until this point, unknowingly, I was growing up with a technology that would quite literally change the world I lived in.  Now, when I fire up the computer I click on one of these little icons (chrome is my favorite) and I am seemingly magically connected to the internet (and with a little help from the Verizon guy who spent hours installing a box of some sort in my basement).

So here it is. 2016.  I went from playing Donkey Kong and not even knowing that the same computer that allowed me to be a gorilla throwing barrels… allowed my dad to communicate with other people through email ( In fact, my dad was in the military, so he was probably using the internet before most people even heard of it since the military laid the ground work for the internet back in the 60’s.) To a person who now uses the internet every. single. day.

So what am I doing on the internet every day?  I catch up on the news, I watch Presidential debates, send work emails, check the weather, talk to my friends in other countries, send flowers, plan parties, go to school, do homework (mine, not my daughters), write blogs… I could go on for hours.  The truth is, it’s so ingrained in my everyday life, it would take me forever to really analyze how I truly use the internet everyday.

I watched the internet seep into my career as a TV News Producer.  We went from have little online presence to hiring people who solely worked on our websites.  We went from bringing back tapes with footage on, to uploading it to the internet from the field so producers could “grab it” back at the station.  We went from linear editing (which was super fun) to using computers and downloading editing software from the internet.  Now news stations have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.  All the news personalities do too!  Reporters are steaming live to Facebook and Twitter from the scene, meaning you don’t have to wait for the 6 O’clock news.  At my last station, our motto was “digital first”.

I can access the internet from my phone, I don’t need to carry around books anymore and my daughter has never lived a day without mass use of the internet.  So what’s ahead?  Maybe in my lifetime I will be sending an email or Skyping with my friends who live on Mars.  I can’t wait to find out!