Back in the ’90s, any time the conversation turned to “that guy on Seventh Street who could turn your one-hour prints into JPEGs”—well—pretty soon you were talking about me.

I was an early adopter: 56k dial-up, and I knew how to use it.

I spent hours exploring the early web, following random links until the only way out was the way I came in.

I was surfing, I suppose—but there were no search engines. My only navigational tool was the one I bought and lugged home from BookPeople: a hardbound copy of The Internet Directory by Eric Braun.

That edition—now out of print—was a hit-or-miss collection of long, cryptic URLs. And even when I typed one correctly into Netscape, half the links were dead.

The sites that did open were an ugly lot. Making objects spin was all the rage back then. No doubt some of those pages are still flashing and rotating 30 years on.

And yet the internet was MAGIC LAND to me. I couldn’t help being drawn to it. My future is in there somewhere, I thought. Eric Braun was definitely onto something.

Sometime in the mid-’90s, I remember pointing to a browser full of whirling GIFs and telling my mother what every geek already knew: “This will change everything.”

The point of no return for me came in 1994, in the form of a video download—my first.

For over two and a half hours, I coaxed a 30-second RealMedia clip from Interview with the Vampire through my phone line. I watched the progress meter like a heart monitor: 20%, 30%, then 20% again.

Finally, a beep. “Your download is complete.”

Cautiously, I double-clicked the file. A tiny screen appeared, and there they were—Tom Cruise dropping a glum Brad Pitt into the bayou.

What once lived out there was now in here: decompressed, uncorrupted, sitting on my desktop. Part binary. Part magic.

I was hooked.

In the months that followed, the file I’d conjured out of thin air remained on my desktop. Occasionally I’d give it a couple clicks and release the genie inside. 

Speaking through Lestat, it always asked the same question: “Had enough, or do you want more?”

More, I thought. I want more.