From Santa to Spuds: My First Steps Online

At the clinic where I worked, we’d just had one terminal hooked up to the mysterious “Internet,” and nobody but me seemed overly interested. They put it in the far corner of the basement conference room — not exactly the glamour spot for a global communications revolution.

The IT guys had set AltaVista as the homepage in Internet Explorer. On my lunch break, I snuck down, curious about these “digital highways” everyone talked about. I typed in Santa Claus and was rewarded with a huge animated Santa, reindeer flying across the screen. It was delightful… but not quite enough.

I’d heard about something called chatting — the idea that you could talk to real people around the world, in real time. I had no idea how to do it, but that weekend, a newspaper article caught my eye. It included a strange string of letters and slashes (though I didn’t know to call it a URL). I jotted it down for my next trip to the basement.

The link worked — but the chat was all fellow countrymen and women, and I wanted the world. Someone there gave me the URL for WBS — the World Broadcast Chat Server (or Broadchatting, I never quite knew). I signed up, dictionary in hand. My English was so limited I didn’t even know what gender meant.

I picked a room called “Irish” because the night before I’d watched a documentary about a friendly dolphin off the coast of Dingle. Once inside, I learned that most of the people were in the US, not Ireland. My first conversation was with a woman in Idaho, Angharod, who taught me the word spuds. We said goodnight — she went to bed, I went back to work — but that was the start of a friendship that lasted until she passed away. May her memory be a blessing.

I was hooked. I started coming in on weekends, when the place was empty. Soon I met Tipman, a firefighter from Philadelphia; Liam S. (who would later become my husband); Glenstal from Tasmania; Uffling, a Swedish-Dane; Stargazer, a florist in the US; LadyHawk from Nebraska; Cmore (still in touch); and LadyB45 in Maine. There were Gaelic names too — Saoirse-something — but the details have blurred. What hasn’t blurred is the laughter. I never even tried another WBS room.

Then came a miracle: the clinic upgraded from Windows 3.2 to Windows 95, and I was given one of the old computers to take home. Imagine — I could now chat, drink coffee, and smoke all at the same time! I even took a week off work to revel in my new freedom.

Getting online was its own saga: no CD drive, so I had to wait several days for 25 floppy disks to install the Internet. Once connected, I immediately installed ICQ (“uh-oh!” became the soundtrack of my nights) and then Netscape — which took four hours to download overnight.

I’ll never forget the sound of that dial-up modem or that my husband’s handle back then was Liam Seamroighe — “shamrock” in Gaelic.

And just like that, the world had cracked open — through a flickering screen in a basement, on a connection slower than a sleepy snail, but faster than anything my heart had ever known.