When we got America Online in the house my life was about to change and I had no idea. I would spend endless hours on the computer, surfing the web, visiting with friends, playing games, (I used to play Euchre from Yahoo all the time... I still play sometimes, this is a long had addiction.) and just navigating around the computer. My life drastically changed when many of my friends got AOL also. Now we would all communicate with each other through instant messages and email.
My first screen name and email adress was Aqua2577571@aol.com. I was about 13 when I created it, I kept it for about 5 years. When we got aol I put it in the screen name I wanted, and the computer told me that it was taken... but it suggested this one- so I just took it. I know it has a lot of numbers, and they were computer generated- so they don't even mean anything to me! But this is a sequence of numbers that I will never forget.
Many times my mom would stand behind my shoulder on the computer to see what I was doing, and most of the time she would see something like this:
My commmunication with my friends through online discussion was amusing and fun, and kept most of my time occupied during my early adolesence.
Everyone who was anyone had AOL, and if didn't... you would have Aol instant messenger (a free download from the america online site that allowed you to communicate through AIM with people who had AOL).
Now this can become dangerous, when you have a school of people communicating with each other without any actual human contact. I have personally had a bad experience with this situation, talking to a friend online who I thought was one person, when in all actuality, it was someone else on the other end. It was very easy to do (and once figured out) a lot of people did it. I am guilty... I had a screen name that no one really knew about also, and sometimes I would talk to people that I knew and pretend I was someone else ( ya know, to get gossip and also to find out what people said about me) High school gossip can be vicious! I went to Lewiston Porter. graduating class of 2001.