Eugene, OR: November 12, 1987.

A friend at school tells me about these things called “BBSes” and loans me a Vicmodem, a cassette tape of Victerm… and some phone numbers.

Up until that point, the Vic-20 I’d bought at the age of 10 had been, well, a bit of a fad, mostly used to play games off cartridge and type in short basic programs, then consigned to generally gather dust.  My interests had almost completely given over to pen and pencil RPGs, reading “Doc Savage” novels and collecting baseball cards.

My community was, well, school, and the only people I interacted with were people at the school.  The conditions of entry into high school are, well, “Be a teenager”, so you’re surrounded mostly by people your own age with similar life experiences.  You get similar inputs.  You have common experiences.  You’ll grow up at the same rate as everyone else.  You’re in a very small world.

Then I found a parallel community, full of people of all ages, races, genders, social backgrounds… nothing in common except two things:  They had all found this community, existing in parallel to THEIR little worlds, and they all wanted to talk… about technology, television, politics, religion, things they liked, things they didn’t like, lessons they’d learned in their lives, mistakes they’d made that day… the kinds of things I didn’t, as a rule, have access to in my world.

Pen & Paper RPGs, Doc Savage novels, baseball… they didn’t last very long after that.

A year later, I was volunteering at a local computer user’s group.

A year after that, while my friends were just thinking they ought to give up their paper routes and think about getting that crucial first job at McDonalds that gets you in to the real workforce… I was doing low level IT work for a local software developer.

A year after THAT, while gleefully abusing my employer’s CompuServe access… I accidentally stumbled onto something called “anime”

And four years after that, visiting an online friend at his job, I met the woman who eventually said “yes” when I asked her to marry me.

I could go on – I won’t.  I’m just going to say that, we all get opportunities in life to be happy, to grab lucky chances when they’re offered, to move our lives in a way that is satisfying.   Some of these opportunities, if we take them, open up more opportunities, and so on.

And an awful lot of the opportunities I’ve had to be happy all stem from a screeching carrier wave and stark text on a black-and-white screen…

Twenty years ago, today.