Surfing from the Louvre to the Haunted Mansion: When the Internet was New
My nieces are digital natives. They wouldn’t believe it, but in 1995, before they were born, the Internet was a riveting new world of information and entertainment. There were no smartphones then, and you needed a clunky computer to surf the Internet. The term “surf the Internet” is now hopelessly anachronistic. Today, we just “go online.” While some owned personal computers by the mid-nineties, I did not. To access the Internet, I had to use my work computer, which was the size of a microwave oven. My boss, a jaded, seen-it-all, done-it-all New Yorker and editor of Esquire magazine, gushed one day to anyone who would listen about how his first forays into this fascinating new digital world had taken him to the Louvre galleries in Paris. That evening, I stayed in the office late, doing something I had never done before. I followed my every whim, checking out this new Internet thing. I, too, "surfed" to the Louvre, but also took in plenty of random thi...
