I was born in 1970, a year after ARPANET was invented. The prototype internet, the one designed to be redundant, designed to route around catastrophe, technically existed a year before I was born. I did not arrive before the internet. I arrived one year into it.
A man on Threads this morning worked hard to make me older than I am, so let me put the record down plainly. None of my computers ever used vacuum tubes. I did not use punch cards. I did not borrow time on a mainframe and read my output off thermal paper. My computing life starts with machines on desks, screens with prompts, and modems, and it runs in a straight line from there to the terminal window open on my desk right now.
Twenty-three, with a browser
I was 23 when I got my first Mosaic browser. That was 1993, and it matters to me that the date is 1993 and not 1989. The Web was proposed in 1989 and the first site stood up in 1991, and almost nobody's life changed. The Web counts from Mosaic, from 1993, when it was deployed and ordinary people adopted it. An invention in a lab is an event. A technology in everybody's hands is a fact. I apply that rule to everything, including the things I defend and the things I criticize, and I was there for this one: I was working at the media lab at SRA when the Web moment happened, close enough to watch a proposal become a medium.
Before the browser
Before Mosaic, my internet had no pictures and no pages. It was Usenet, where the arguments lived in threaded text. It was Gopher, menus of menus, a whole world organized as nested lists. It was talk, splitting a screen with a stranger in real time. It was telnet, logging into machines in other states and other countries as if distance were a rumor. Virtual messaging on other people's computers, in text, at speeds that taught patience. That internet was not a draft of the real thing. It was the real thing, complete, and the Web grew up inside it.
Still there
Here is the part the nostalgia charge gets wrong. I still love my command line. I still love the terminal, telnet, pine, Usenet, and vim, and I do not love them the way a man loves a photograph of his youth. I have an active account on a newsgroup, I read it in Alpine, and I can have a Usenet experience this afternoon, the same experience, on the same network, that I had before the browser existed. Pine became Alpine and kept walking. Vim opens every day. The terminal is not my past. It is my desk.
Does Gopher still exist?
I asked this morning whether Gophernets still exist, and the answer is yes. A census of Gopherspace taken in January 2026 counted 411 active servers and roughly 5.86 million selectors. Floodgap has run as a community hub since 1999. SDF, the public access Unix system, still serves Gopher alongside everything else it has carried for decades. It is a small country now, a few hundred servers where there were thousands, but the protocols never got switched off. The menus still open. A man can still walk the whole of Gopherspace in an afternoon, which was true in 1992 and is true again now that it shrank back to human size.
The insult this morning assumed my history is a costume I put on. It is not a costume. It is a continuous record: born a year after the network, raised on its text services, present in the room when its picture layer arrived, and still typing into it tonight. The internet is not older than me by much, and I have never once lived outside it.