The Exigent Duality
Firsts - 19:36 CST, 11/22/19 (Sniper)
The stuff you can find on YouTube... what I wouldn't give to have been here! It's incredible to me that someone with a camcorder has preserved this footage digitally.

I've always maintained that I was born exactly ten years too late. I looked up the exact date of that event, and it was in July-- so I was only four years old at the time. Fourteen, and we're talking: I probably could have talked my metal head uncle into going and taking me with, provided his age was adjusted with mine.

I also totally missed the microcomputer era of the late-70s and early-80s. I did use my grandfather's various PC XTs and ATs in the 80s, plus my dad and I built a 386SX kit in 1989, so there was that. But I missed the "Speccy / C64"-style computers almost completely, until I bought an Atari ST just a couple of years ago.

On the flip-side, I was one of probably the first thousand people, or even less, to ever play a first-person shooter over the actual internet-- so, excluding "Doom" or "Duke3d" dial-up pools. I was playing "QTest" like an hour after it popped up on their FTP server. To think if you made a chronological list of people to land a "frag" online, my name would be there right at the top of hundreds of millions of individuals is pretty sweet.

I also surfed the web with the original Windows port of "Mosaic", back when that was the web browser-- as in, the only one. So I've been around the internet pretty much since the very beginning. And I also taught myself HTML shortly thereafter, so I was a first-generation "script kiddie".