an era ends

Some 14 (!!!!!) years ago, aided by my childhood best friend, I latched on to the Internet in the media center of Raa Middle School, and became one of the early pioneers of civilian Internet usage as we know it today. AOL, Prodigy, and innumerable BBS's existed but only as self-contained units incapable of connecting to anything but themselves.

The vessel was an old Mac Plus with a modem plugged into the wall, which connected me to Tallahassee Freenet.

A few years later, TFN was threatened with closure as Florida State University declared the project a success and withdrew its funding from it, and my friend Jonathan and myself launched a public effort to shore up support with the media friendly title of "S.O.S" -- Save Our System! We got profiled on the evening news for our community meeting to draw attention to the importance of public internet access. Some wrote us off as Star Trek geeks who mostly resembled the Comic-Book-Guy on The Simpsons, but others acknowledged that what we were yelling about was where the future of communications laid. Ultimately, our efforts were little more than superficial, as we didn't raise bucketloads of cash, but the exposure contributed to a public outcry, and eventually FSU and Leon County put up the money, and TFN continued operations.

TFN saw some of the earliest incarnations of blogging -- hand coded HTML pages with journal entries plastered across the screen as a means to communicate. I do take *some* credit for the early proliferation of web-journaling (arguably, mine was the first regularly updated journal published online in the southeastern United States), and many people who stopped in to read my page were spurred to create their own.

But, as with all things, TFN had to pass. The announcement was made this week that operations would cease as of May 31st. There will be no rallies for support, this time, as all involved will agree -- the moment has passed. TFN served a vital need at its zenith and was instrumental to bringing wide-spread internet usage to all people, connecting people who may otherwise have never met. My 14-year old email address, jaro at tfn.net, will cease to exist, too. It hasn't been used in several years, long since the victim of spam overload, but I've always kept it, in some cheesy way, as a reminder of where I started. I carry away life long friends, memories of parties at a warehouse, and a better definition of self.

Not bad for a little box with some wires connected to a phone.