Blast from the past

One of HME News's favorite social media buddies, provider Chris Rice, recently posted some old photos of the HME News website… It got me thinking about how much the Internet has changed in our lifetimes.

It's hard to believe that there are whole generations out there who've never had to live with dial-up Internet.

My dad is a computer guy, so we were one of the early families to get a computer, sometime around 1994, I think. I honestly don't remember what we did with it… there were probably games…and, of course, word processing before printing on those long reams of paper connected by perforated, tear-away edging. I remember those giant floppy discs… I wonder how many of those would hold what my iPhone holds now?

The computer I do remember using was around my middle school years…watching educational videos on the Encarta Encyclopedia CD, saving homework files on smaller floppy discs and playing some game where you were in a human body as a white blood cell, zapping germs.

Even as far back as that, there was the Internet. You'd click connect, and no one could call your house while you hogged the phone line for hours. After a series of static sounds, beeps and boings, AOL would launch. It was all about email and AOL Instant Messenger. Websites then basically featured one large graphic, followed by lots of text. I mostly used those old websites for homework research and to look up song lyrics, from what I remember. The only moving images to be found were animated GIFs…something so advanced then, and so simple now that elementary school students make them.

Of course, with the Internet so advanced and so prevalent now, the question has to be: Why do so many HME providers still not have websites? Leave comments if you have any answers.