The Good Old Days before the Internet

So, Matt Mikalatos invited his readers to share their memories of The Time Before The Internet for the benefit of the young'uns that might not understand what life was like without it. Since that called up some amusing memories, I'm reproducing - and cleaning up - my response here.

All right, here you go: I remember dialing in to a BBS server on a 2400 Baud Modem - man, that was waaaaaaay faster than the old 1200 Baud models used to be! And once there, you could post messages and read other people's messages - in plain text, no avatars. No graphics at all, in fact: if you wanted graphics, you had to make them out of ascii characters.

Let's see if that still works... No, not in the blogspot editor. So I'll use a jpeg graphic of a text graphic - how's that for irony?



There you go: St Basil's.

Dragging and dropping to move files? Nope. Anything you wanted to do, you did with text commands. Even our video games were text-based.

Oh, and that server that we dialed into? It had a 1 MB hard drive. Yes, you read that right. It was really that big - I mean, absolutely huge, we were never going to be able to fill up that much storage space.

Well, you know, until we did.

We didn't share URLs for sites; there weren't any. We shared phone numbers for BBSs and other servers. Search engines? Ha! No such thing.

Ah, the good old days...

The Pinnacle Of Awesome

Anyone who's been on the Internet for any length of time is aware of Internet memes: LOLcats, for example. Or strange and wondrous phrases ("All your ____ are belong to us.") Ninjas. Pirates.

Mostly, they're amusing. Every once in a while, though, an Internet meme gets out of hand.

I'm thinking, in particular, of bacon.

Bacon is awesome. Bacon is wonderful. Bacon is the best thing to come along since, well, ever.

Bacon is so awesome that it must be incorporated into everything. Thus, we now have bacon-flavored salt. Freeze-dried survival bacon. You can even purchase your very own talking, plush bacon to hug and cuddle between bites of bacon. I am not making this up.

You can get bacon-flavored mints, bacon-scented air fresheners, bacon flavored popcorn, and baconnaise. And I have to admit that those things are, well, pretty freakin' awesome.

But I have something better. The ultimate expression of bacon-loving. The pinnacle of awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

...bacon-flavored bacon.

I ask you, can it get any more awesome than that?