In 1991, I was in graduate school for the first time.

My professors kept chattering with enthusiasm about something called “Hypertext”.

So one day I asked the smartest hippest youngest one of them: David, what the eff is Hypertext?

He didn’t actually know, but because he was a Professor, that didn’t stop him from trying to convince me that he did know.

The clearest thing I was able to glean from his non-answer was that it was, he claimed, a way of linking one document to another document.

To me, a document was an object printed on paper, like a grocery list or a novel. I had already produced many such documents myself. In fact, I was required as a student to produce them, and the teachers insisted that they be typed and not handwritten, even though there were already very few typewriters around.

So I had produced them via “word processing”, on a tiny desktop Mac, in a computer lab on campus, a lab that wasn’t networked at all, except to the lumbering tractor-feed printers that mechanically produced acceptable hard copies of … documents.

How were these documents supposed to be linked?

I didn’t know. Beyond idle intellectual curiosity, I didn’t care either. I thought it had something to do with footnotes, and I let the question slide away utterly.

1991 was (as things turned out) also the year Saint Tim invented the Web, and HTML. Hypertext. Markup. Language.

Thus we eventually got the formulation:

http://wwww … hypertext transfer protocol, networked over the world wide web.

Linkage, of documents.

Only problem with the whole idea was that no one, not even my hippest professor, had a browser, or any idea about how or where to get one. Much less a live network connection.

Three years later, Netscape Navigator began to change that, and a year after that, Windows 95 came out, bundled with another browser, called Internet Explorer.

We have liftoff.

Well, maybe you did, that early. Personally I was driving trucks with fiftythree foot trailers all over 46 states and two provinces at the time, and I had no environment in which to experience the slowly building storm of hype.

I quit the trucking industry on New Year’s Day in 1997. I had a fat stack of cash. I bought a van and put my futon in it. I bought a new Walkman for my cassette tapes. I bought a very fine analog camera. And I bought a computer. A real live laptop computer.

Trying to economize, I got one with a black and white screen. And no modem, because what would I want that for anyway? I literally and honestly had no clue.

Most of a year later, I was broke again regardless, and living in the van, and went back to a city to grudgingly seek employment, god dammit, again.

I was selected from a pool of 42 applicants to be the new paraprofessional librarian at a community college in Albuquerque. Because of a fond reference check from a lovely someone I hadn’t seen in a decade.

My new employer, the Library, had computers. The computers were networked. And they had browsers too.

I hit the freshly paved cyberbricks with a lustful, hungry vengeance.