| December 8, 2000 The Early Days
I met my first e-mail friend in 1992, on Prodigy.
Nick and I happened across each other on the Beverly Hills, 90210 message boards.
I think we may have been the only people posting there over the age of 15. We both watched
the show with a kind of tongue-in-cheek attitude, finding it a guilty pleasure, and we
enjoyed making comments on the board that probably seemed oblique, at best, to the other
members. It wasn’t surprising that we started writing to each other privately.
Prodigy was an interesting thing in 1992.
It was a little world of its own. Back then it was basically e-mail (only between Prodigy
members, though, not to the Internet), Prodigy bulletin boards, and rudimentary shopping
and information services. User IDs were assigned, and not particularly user-friendly; ours
was something like HGX519RT. The Prodigy e-mail interface was very memorable. The messages
showed up on the screen in what looked like 24 point arial, and message length was limited
to 6 screens. Don’t forget, monitors were a lot smaller back then, so these messages
were probably about 150 words long, max.
The bulletin boards were fun, but Prodigy
was just learning how to deal with mature content. It was hard to monitor what people
posted, and there were lots of kids posting and reading. So they opened up the “Frank
Discussion” bulletin boards, for more adult topics, known familiarly as Frank D. Nick
and I used to make jokes about “Frank D” and his mature interests. Even Frank D
couldn’t compare with the freedom (read: anarchy) of Usenet, but I think it marked a
change in the overall feel of Prodigy. Somehow things didn’t feel so small and
self-contained anymore.
The shopping on Prodigy mostly seemed
like a novelty. We couldn’t believe we were buying things through our very own
computer. We first bought airline tickets online through Prodigy when we went on our
honeymoon in 1993. Marty bought a mug shaped like a baseball, which we still have
someplace. From shopping on Prodigy back in the early 1990s, I could never have imagined
the Web and what it would become. It’s quite astonishing to see how things have
changed in the last 8 years.
Nick and I used to write e-mail
regularly, every day or so, and we soon exceeded the “monthly limit” on Prodigy
messages (20? 25?). He was a nice guy, about 5 years older than me (I was 23), with a wife
and two young daughters. He was an engineer but he longed to be an English major. He was
fascinated by my experiences as an English grad student (ah, the glamorous life!). We
found we had more in common than 90210.
After we’d been writing e-mail for
about 8 months, he and his wife invited us to visit them for the weekend. Marty and I
drove down to Collegeville (just outside Philadelphia) one Friday after school (we were
both grad students back then) and spent the weekend with Nick and Monica and their two
girls. People couldn’t believe we went to visit someone without having met them
before. This was 1992, after all. But it seemed perfectly reasonable to me. We’re
still in touch with Nick and his family today.
Nick was my first online friend, but I
was on the internet before Prodigy. My first experience with it was a VM account on the
Penn State system, which I got in 1990. My first e-mail address was sxm13@psuvm.edu.
(Later, they switched me to sxm20.) Unfortunately, in 1990 I didn’t know another soul
in the world who was online. So I mostly just accessed Usenet, lurking around the
newsgroups. I kept my VM account until 1996, when Penn State closed most of the VM
accounts out, and I checked out a lot of newsgroups during that time. But rec.food.cooking
was the one I went back to again and again. I was shy, and I didn’t post much, but I
enjoyed reading it. There were some amazing cooks posting to that group. And some amazing
personalities, as well. Sometimes there would be huge flame wars over things like the deep
fried turkey recipe or the ethics of bread machines, and I would give it up for a month or
two, then I’d come back and find that things had gone back to normal.
I didn’t make any friends on
rec.food.cooking, but I sure enjoyed lurking there for five years or so. I had my
favorites among the regulars, although they never knew who I was. I remember their names
fondly and still use their recipes: Mimi Hiller
(whose turkey recipe—not deep fried—is the greatest ever), Anne Bourget
(amazing chicken corn chowder), Mary Frye (who always had the cutest ascii kittens in her
sig file), and Susan Hattie Steinsapir. Hattie, a California lawyer, was famous on
rec.food.cooking for her amazing, original recipes and her great sense of humor. I still
make her goat cheese torta (her
signature recipe) and it’s always a hit, no matter where I take it.
Hattie,
or Susan, is the one I remember most, these days, and it’s no wonder. In January 1996
she underwent a heart transplant, after about three years of suffering from congestive
heart failure. During the time leading up to the transplant, and while she was in the
hospital, she opened up her life to the world in a way that I had never seen before. It
was through this that I really began to understand the power of the Internet, and its role
in allowing people all over the world to come together.
It’s hard even now to explain what
this was like for me, as a reader. I can remember reading the updates on rec.food.cooking,
the way we followed the ups and downs of Susan’s hospital stay. I remember how
hundreds of people responded, sending cards and wishes from all over the world. I was
amazed. Yes, I had seen that you could make friends on the Internet, but I had never
realized what it could feel like, that you could experience lives so intensely through
e-mail and Usenet (I was not even accessing the Web yet, that wouldn’t happen until I
got a new computer in the summer of 1996). It was like becoming a part of someone’s
life, seeing something that one hardly ever gets to see, and it is still one of the most
intense experiences I’ve had online.
I can’t explain this. I know I
can’t do this story justice, but luckily it’s all still online. Andreas Ramos, Susan’s
husband, keeps it on his site. Until today, I hadn’t reread the whole thing in a
couple of years, but after reading it again I have to say it still moves me as it did when
I first experienced it in real-time. I am proud, now, to have been a part of this, even if
my part was extremely minor. I am glad that I found out early on how humanizing the
Internet could be. I am still inspired by Susan and Andreas, and their generosity in
sharing their lives with the world. Read
it, and see for yourself.
I am making Susan’s goat cheese
torta next week for my office holiday luncheon. It is, as she said, a “killer party
item,” and I always end up telling people about Hattie when I make it. As Andreas
says, “Serve it with a toast to Susan.” I do, every time, gladly. |
