Binary Memories, part III

When I started using the internet regularly, around 1995, the Brazilian web was wilderness. There was no Google. So how did you find a website? Through printed magazines, or because somebody told you about it. Imagine that.

That same year a Brazilian "search engine" showed up, called Cadê? (the late cade.com.br). It was more or less the Google of its time, only completely different.

Cadê? had a lot of traffic, and a good part of the Brazilian internet, which was still learning to crawl, went through it to find anything. Today's search engines send crawlers out to find pages on their own. Cadê? worked the other way around: you registered your page, it sat there in the catalog, and every now and then someone checked whether it was still online. Primitive, but that's how it was.

My very first look at the internet came earlier, as I told in Part I, watching my uncle Dirceu, the oldest nerd I've ever known. He reached other networks over Telnet. I don't remember which BBSes they were, but I remember him on IRC too. He was the one who taught me what IRC was, in the mid nineties. His network was EFnet, and later he moved to BrasIRC.

We also had BOL, a Brazilian service that was hugely popular in the nineties and the favorite of anyone who wanted an email address. The ones who knew a bit more went straight for America Online or Yahoo! The internet of the nineties was curiously personal, nothing like the industrialized, impersonal internet of today. If you wanted something, you had to build it and customize it yourself.

Then came my own first time on IRC. I was in my small bedroom, covered in band posters, with stickers everywhere. My friend Dionísio was helping me. That's when he asked me the question that would define me for a good part of my life. Not really:

"What nick do you want?"

Me? A nick? An alter ego was about to be born. A legend that would later change its name, hehe.

I had no idea what to answer. My eyes ran around the room and stopped on a sticker. It said "Wagon", the name of a clothing brand from the nineties. I looked at Dionísio and said that word, which only God knew the meaning of. Dionísio looked at me and, without a word, typed "Wagon".

That's how my first nick was born, and I used it on ICQ too.

On IRC, the busiest channel on BrasIRC was #brasil. I was amazed watching so many people talking at once, so fast. It didn't take long before I started slipping into #debian and #slackware, but that's a story for another day (some of it is already in Part II).

On ICQ you could search for people by region, by city and so on. You basically went around adding everybody and didn't give a damn. And that was fun.

Connections ran on 14,400 bps modems, and if your family was doing a little better, you could enjoy the blazing speed of 56 Kbps on the V.90 standard.

And all of it was amazing. Waiting until after midnight to connect, then spending the whole night downloading one song, or two if you were lucky, dialed into BOL or some regional provider.

Just as long as nobody in the house picked up the phone while you were online.

I sat down to write about something else, and it turned into a story. That something else can wait for the next one.

To be continued.