I bought my first computer, that is, my parents bought me my first computer, like many of you, making Mr. Slim richer: In Telmex. You paid a monthly amount on your telephone bill and thus you got a computer with a giant CPU and a monitor like a television from the seventies. Well, from the eighties. Although I also had Printaform computers, those that after two months of use the plastic turned yellow and the horrifying green screens with yellow letters ideal for leaving you with permanent vision problems, my first computer was an Acer of a model that already I do not remember.
The day it arrived was like the Christmas that every child expects, and although I was far from being a child, the technician opened the box, mounted it on a makeshift wooden table in my living room and connected it to the telephone line! Oh yes, what times are those when to connect to the internet you had to tell everyone at home: «Is anyone going to use the phone? Because I’m going to connect. Not? No one?” And there you went. Click on the connection, two or three minutes of strange noises and there it was, the paradise of information before your eyes.
That collapsed when someone picked up the phone and you had to connect again.
Like every good son, I sold to my parents the idea that the computer was necessary for my educational development, since the teachers asked for the works on the computer and that I could not be the only one in the classroom who continued to deliver their elaborated tasks on my writing machine. write Olivetti. Mechanics, of course. There were also electrics, but they didn’t buy me one of those. Nothing more false than the story that of education. The tasks however: The porn! Sorry, the chat! Yes, chatting at that time was what all my friends did at night. Wait, some will say here: “Chat? Like on WhatsApp? » Exactly! But before there was no WhatsApp, or Telegram, and what you more or less arrived at is the phone text messages that charged you for each one. You think this will start with the famous MSN Messenger, right? The one where things like: -, .- ‘¨¯¨’ · -. (_ ¡0§ € | üí§¦T0 _) -, .- ‘¨¯¨’ · -. just logged in, and you were in and out fifty times to get the attention of your connected contacts. Well no, we won’t start there. Before we had ICQ, an instant messaging service where you didn’t even have a name, they gave you a number and then do whatever you can. Its sound was characteristic every time a message arrived and also, when you wrote, how vintage, it sounded like a typewriter. You could connect with people from all over the world and presume that you knew someone in Spain, in Italy or in any country you imagine.
Today, they are saying that people do not sleep because they are glued to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok on their smartphones. Newbies. Years ago, a good LatinChat green zone session did not end before four in the morning, you arrived at school with the afternoons of the night, but showing off your new conquests, contacts or whatever. Photographs? No, that was totally out of the question at the time, but boy was it fun. I could explain here, if you don’t know, what LatinChat was, but trust me, it will be much more fun for you to ask your parents or uncles or aunts. You will see their faces of happiness, nostalgia and maybe even you will make an emotional sigh from them.
I do not know if someone did homework taking advantage of their computers, from time to time to mislead our parents, you put the pirated disk of the Encarta encyclopedia that a friend had given you, but that’s how it was. The real goal of our brand new computer equipment from the late nineties was to conquer the world from the comfort of our bedroom. Ah, it is that after I changed the computer to my bedroom, that world was not prepared for the conversations that took place there.
Thanks to those chats I met people who until today are part of my life, it was, then, a new way of relating, the beginning of those close, intimate, but distant relationships, exactly the same as today.
But no hum.
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