It was only a bit more than a decade ago—about twelve years past, as I remember. My eyes always light up in joy whenever my dad arrived home, because along with him, he took home every night his trusty 386SX laptop—then top of the line, state of the art gadgetry. The laptop had an external add-on 2400 bps modem—then already mid-range, since that was before the introduction of the 9600 bps modem into the mainstream market.

Back then, there was no Internet to speak of, at least not as we know it now. I happily anticipated my father’s arrival because that would signal that I can already log in to my favorite Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes. You see, I had no desktop computer of my own back then. I did, but that was an old PC/XT—you know, the one with the 640 kilobytes of RAM, and the 20 megabytes of hard disc space (I was one of the lucky ones with the hard discs).

Back then, I would imagine logging on to the network and chatting or messaging away while in a remote location, and not connected to the telephone cables. Ah yes, the innocence of childhood.

How should I know that only ten years on, that dream of mine would become a reality, with this nifty technology called WiFi.

We shall continue my saga …