a/s/l?
If you grew up in the ‘90s, like I did, these three letters will mean something to you. Switching on the home computer, pressing the button on the cathode ray monitor and hearing it boing into life, listening to the hiss and bleep of the dialup modem, the you’ve got post of AOL, logging onto Yahoo! and finding the Friends chat room.
Everyone messaging at the same time, different colour text scrolling endlessly. People join the room; others leave. You type a message and watch it appear in the queue, rising up the screen as more people contribute, and you scan them all to see if anyone is responding to what you said.
If they do, you might start a private chat, which always seemed to start with a/s/l?
16/m/coventry. u?
17/f/new york.
The next day, you get home from school and go on your dad’s computer again and open MSN messenger, waiting excitedly for it to load to see who is online.
You chat and nudge. You send a message to your crush and wait with bated breath for a reply, and watch in dismay as they go offline a few minutes later.
In the days before emojis there are emoticons: the basics are :) or :(. If you are angry it is :@. I made up one for myself:
=Bc)
Spiky hair, sunglasses, for some reason a turned up nose. My cousin, who lived a mile away, had #:>). We would ride around on our bikes a lot until it got dark.
If you had to leave the keyboard for a moment, you wrote brb for be right back. If you’d be longer, it was biab (back in a bit).
Nowadays, there is no brb or biab. We are all online, always. Never be right back because we’ve never left.
I sometimes think about ditching my iPhone and buying a basic Nokia, or a flip phone. Hell, even going back to my very first phone (a Motorola m3788e, if you’re interested). The allure of being offline is intoxicating, of not constantly reaching into my pocket to see if I have any notifications, of not always consuming content.
But I can never take that step. I rely too much on Apple Maps, on Spotify, on podcasts. The need to be contactable. What if there’s an emergency? (There never is.)
And maybe that’s not it, anyway. I don’t want an old phone. I want the feeling that comes from logging on for a few minutes a day: the anticipation of who might be there, the conversations that paused because someone had something else to do, the nostalgia of checking your email. The days where the internet felt like somewhere you visited, not somewhere you lived.
Oh ! Those were the days. When your mom had to come tell you to "get off the computer" because she had to make a phone call. When the sound of the dial up modem made you giddy with excitement. We were quickly drawn in, and never left. BIAB. Love, Virg
I think about this ALL the time! And that absolutely sums it up – a place you visited and not somewhere you lived. We were living in the real world, but we had fun visiting – also I remember it as a more optimistic place? Maybe that was just the Internet sites that I visited. I also remember d/c constantly. Disconnected. Usually after a parent had the audacity to use the phone.