One hour of internet

I must have been four or five when I realized a screen could obey a few lines copied out of a magazine.

My brother had a Spectrum plugged into the tube TV. Some magazines came with entire pages of code. You had to copy it line by line, without getting a single thing wrong. After a long stretch of typing, those characters I didn't understand turned into a game. And the game was saved on a cassette, like a song.

To me, that was magic.

Later my brother got a 486, with DOS and games like a black and white Pac-Man. I was obsessed. I used it every chance I got, almost always in secret, careful not to touch anything that would give me away.

Then came Windows 95. CDs arrived, and Word, and Excel (and Minesweeper), programs that felt far more powerful than anything before. I was about ten, and there was no turning back.

New words started going around too: email, web page, dot com. The internet showed up on TV and in magazines as some unknown place that was changing the world. I wanted in, but we didn't have a connection at home yet.

The Biblioteca Argentina did.

It offered free one-hour sessions once a week, but you had to book them a week in advance. My aunt Elsa lived nearby, so she would go to the library herself. She stood in line, wrote my name down, and made sure that every Monday that hour was mine. I called her every week so she wouldn't forget.

On Mondays, after school, I took the bus to the library. The ride was half an hour and I had a favorite seat, one where I could rest my head and sleep most of the way. Once or twice I missed my stop, or came close. But I almost always woke up in time and made it to my session.

The room had about six computers, though they never all worked. Usually three or four were usable. They shared a single 28.8 modem between them, so everything took forever. A page could appear bit by bit, line by line, while you stared at the screen praying the connection wouldn't drop.

I would log into Latinmail to check my email and browse with Netscape. I don't really remember what I was looking for. Probably computer news, games, software, anything to keep exploring. But I do remember the feeling: for one hour, the whole world was right there.

Since that was all the time I had, I couldn't afford to waste it. I already typed fast, barely looking at the keyboard. People were surprised when they saw me. I think that's where the nerd label stuck. It never bothered me much.

Around me, others were making their own discoveries. Some were trying to create an email account. Others looked things up, wrote documents, or waited for a page to load. We all shared the slowness, and the sense that the hour ended far too soon.

For me, though, the hour didn't always end at the library.

Next door there was a cybercafé. When I could, I crossed over and paid to stay connected a little longer. That's where I discovered mIRC and chat channels. Suddenly I could talk, in real time, with people from other countries. I didn't know who they were or what their lives looked like. I just watched their words appear on the screen.

Many of those conversations were in English. I understood little, but I wanted in. I started recognizing words, asking what they meant, finding ways to answer. I think my interest in English began right there, among strange nicknames, chat rooms, and sentences arriving from places I could barely imagine.

The internet stopped being a collection of pages. There were people on the other side.

It didn't take long for connections to become more affordable. Maybe a year later, a computer shop opened near the library. I vividly remember sitting on one of the benches, holding a box with a 56K Motorola PCI modem inside.

To me it wasn't just a computer part. It was the possibility of taking the internet home.

I installed the modem in my brother's computer. I opened the case, slotted in the card and, after plenty of trial, error, and settings I barely understood, we were online.

From there, the internet took me around the world. It let me learn, work, meet people, live in other cities, and build a life around technology.

But before all of that came the Mondays after school. The bus seat where I slept for half an hour. My aunt Elsa standing in line to book my session. The few computers that worked. One hour of Netscape and Latinmail. And, sometimes, a little longer at the cybercafé, talking to strangers from other countries.

Without my noticing, that weekly trip to the Biblioteca Argentina was changing the rest of my life.