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 things that caught my fancy, including the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. I had been captivated by the Haunted Mansion since childhood, and I discovered virtual communities of others who shared that passion.

At around 9:00, the cleaning staff came in to empty my trash basket. At 10:00, I was the only one left, so I took a company car home, still wondering what else I might explore on this seductive new portal.

In those days, we trusted what we saw and didn’t second-guess it. 

I mean, come on! You could pop into both Paris's 1st arrondissement and Orlando's Magic Kingdom at will from an office on West 55th Street in Manhattan. You got the lowdown from anonymous strangers in chat rooms with other nerds from all over the world.

Today, entire organizations are dedicated to combating the misinformation and disinformation on the Internet. We easily find communities of like-minded individuals just by typing a few words into Facebook or Google. And we don’t need physical encyclopedias when Wikipedia, with all its pitfalls, is a few keystrokes away.

We did not know about digital addiction in the mid-nineties, but certainly, my staying at work until 10:00 p.m. to explore the Internet was an early sign of this. Today, my digital dependency takes the form of a nasty TikTok habit.

But for all that, listen to your creaky old Uncle Peter when he tells you, Maren, Sarah, and Morgan, that back in my day, there was no Internet. 

If you wanted to look something up, you went to the library.

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