Also, I treat all my writings like public domain software: that is, use at your own risk. You can read it, you can laugh at it, but if you quote it, do so at your own risk unless you are sure what is real and what is fictitious. (Even I am not sure where the line between real and imaginary is. But what is real? A tagline from a frequent Fidonet poster says "The universe is a figment of its own imagination".)
What made me publish this confession? Well, almost everyone in first (and not so first) world countries has heard about the Internet. Everybody is trying to get on it, whatever it is. The US of A President promoted it. Our Prime Minister talked about the information superhighway. It's the hottest fashion and almost no one wants to miss the bandwagon. Look at the number of members who applied for access to (and use?) our group's Internet access! But is all this Internet access a good thing?
Since everybody is doing it, it must be good. Well, people praised and used asbestos, cars are by definition good, the industrial revolution was good, smoking was good, alcohol was good. (it was good to me, at least until I joined the ranks of the NAs). Now I think that nothing is good unless it is used wisely and in moderation (another tagline: "nothing is worse than excessive moderation"). This is a dialogue from the Internet connection clinic. After a successful cure, the chief doctor asked the satisfied patient "Did you sleep well last night?". "Yes, thank you", "Not any more". Loud laughter indicated that it was a well known joke, but I sincerely hope that the new members of the Internet don't forget that the joke implies a potential risk: Don't overdo it or you could end up among the NAs, like me.
Then one day, I logged on to search for a utility program but could not find it on the local BBS. Instead of logging off, I spent a little bit of time looking at those message areas that I had so far ignored completely. In the area listing, I saw a "C Conference". As a C maniac, I could not help reading some of the messages, and unfortunately, found them interesting. After that fatal day, I started connecting to the BBS two or three times a day, reading the messages in two C conferences.
Most BBSs have a limit on connection time, so that other users can log on. Our BBS has a time limit of one hour, so it was impossible to read all the messages I wanted to online. My next step was switching my communication software (the program that came with the modem) to Capture mode, to save all the text on the screen in a file on my hard disk for later reading. I was hooked.
Another major turning point in my life occurred spontaneously. I saw a message asking how many header files there were in the C standard. It was the early days of the standard, and I did not care much about it as long as my programs worked. So I replied, talking about GODs (Good Old Days) before the standard. What a surprise I had a few days later when I was baptised with the notorious Internet flame! Having not learned the netiquette, and still having thin skin, I replied in kind, triggering a small religious war (there were some people who actually supported my stand!). This is a bad thing. A warning to people who are going to join the internetworked world. Please read the messages (or articles in the Internet newsgroups) for a while, and try to learn what can and should not be said. After a few weeks of reading the flames against "netically incorrect" messages, you will know. Learn my lesson and try not to "put foot in mouth, echo internationally".
Another incident happened at the wrong time. A friend of mine was writing a harmless viral program which would restart the PC. He copied the code from a book but it did not work, so he asked me for help. A very untimely question because he asked me while I was reading the messages on the BBS. So instead of reading his code, I posted a message asking for help. A few days later, I received more than half a dozen replies. A guy in Brisbane posted a one-liner which did not contain any functions at all. ("What?" I hear some C programmers shouting. <g> "How come a C program does not have a main function?" I leave it as a puzzle for you and if you give up, send me an e-mail. <G>) I framed that program and hung it on my electronic wall.
I was still posting my messages online. It was not good enough. Someone suggested an offline reader. I chose the program that requires the least effort to install <G> and moved to another level of addiction. I was able to automate the process of getting messages and sending my postings. The connection time was reduced significantly but the time I spent reading and writing messages increased exponentially. I followed every thread of messages in six heavy-traffic conferences.
I spent about four hours a night, seven nights a week "talking" with strangers, building good and bad relationships with people I had never met and probably never will. It was a new world. My PC stopped being a toy and became a door leading to a whole new world. The modem became my most valuable asset. It was happiness: being helped, and helping others. Once I learned the netiquette, I knew how to insert off-topic messages to "friends". I started using netmail for more privacy.
The first thing I did was send email to my friends around the world to advise my new email address. It was much quicker than netmail on the Fidonet (normally a BBS would call another BBS once a day to pass the messages, so it could take two or three days, sometimes a week, for a netmail to reach the destination). I received the replies within the same day.
Letters from Vietnam normally take from three to six weeks to arrive. OTOH, I got a reply in three days via e-mail. I wrote the messages in Vietnamese (English alphabet with many squiggles) and used a special program to encode and compress them before sending them through the Internet.
A word of warning. It is very easy to fake the e-mail address of the sender. The only way to make sure a message is real is by sending a reply to the sender for confirmation. [Even this is not really good enough. Trust an email message about as much as you would trust an unsigned letter. -Tech Ed] Many data communications students have caused chaos on the Internet.
Mailing lists are another aspect of e-mail, and are a semi-public forum. Messages are distributed to people who have subscribed to the mailing list. I find the messages on mailing lists more constructive and less abusive than those in the public newsgroups. E-mail can also be used as a less efficient way of transferring files.
My next inevitable step was to browse the newsgroup list and subscribe to my favourite groups at that time. There were too many newsgroups! Someone said that there were more than 30,000 groups in the world including the local groups. When I checked the list recently, there were over 5,000 newsgroups available on a server. Heavy-traffic groups such as comp.lang.c may have 200 articles a day. At the peak time, I had subscribed to 5 comp.* groups, 2 rec.* groups and 2 soc.* groups, plus 3 mailing lists. The average number of articles I read was over 1,000 a day. I preferred sending my replies via e-mail to posting to the newsgroups, so that I didn't have to check and re-check the messages to make sure I wouldn't get flamed.
People participating in the Internet newsgroups are less tolerant than those in the conferences on the Fidonet. They demand that you know netiquette. If you ask a question already covered in the FAQ, make sure you have a hole to hide the next day. OTOH, there are many high quality messages. There was a guy who was writing a commissioned book. He posted each chapter and asked for a public review. In short, the signal-to-noise ratio is low (?? I meant too much noise) but if you ignore the noise, some signals are very rewarding.
At one time, I had been searching high and low for a Japanese C compiler. I knew it was somewhere on the Internet but could not find it. So I posted a message to the appropriate newsgroup. A few days later, I received a reply from the author himself who told me that the compiler had become a commercial product but he would make a special version available for me to ftp.
There are many utilities to search for information on the Internet. They allow you to search by a combination of keywords. My Internet host provided a link to the National Library, and also subscribed to a special server in America. One day I'd like to reserve a book in the local library via the Internet.
I did some bad things too. I did not play MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) or use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) because it was banned on the host, but I did something which was as bandwidth wasting as those. I carried out an fun experiment by telnetting around the world. I contacted my friends around the world and borrowed their accounts in advance. Then I called my host, from there I telnetted to Purdue Uni in America, then to Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, then to a host in Helsinki, then back to another host in Canberra, and watched my keystrokes travel around the world.
On a cloudy day, I was passing a host terminal and discovered the World Wide Web. It was Mosaic in the early days. My first thought was "What a waste of bandwidth! As bad as my telnetting experiment!". After a few minutes of playing with it, I had a second thought: "Can I have it on my PC?". The answer was a definite no. My modem was too slow! But wait. One day, I would buy a faster modem, a larger hard disk, a sound card and a few extra programs, and I would be able to enjoy this WWW. I would play a song on a page in Berlin, view the paintings on the Webmuseum in thousands of colours and ignore all the texts :-)
I also became less patient. Instead of thinking and looking for the answers, I posted questions on the Internet. Well, it was the easy way to get what I wanted but I started to worry that one day, I might lose my researching skills. Someone called the information superhighway the infobahn. The analogy is good in many sense. Everybody wants to drive on the autobahn occasionally to enjoy the experience, but would you commute every day at 200mph.
And last but not least, the withdrawal symptoms. I had not enjoyed my annual holidays during those years. There I was, sitting on a beach, and yet my mind wondered what was happening on the networks. I made excuses to visit friends who had a PC with a modem. I always carried with me a laptop and a modem on the business trips. I had to give up this habit. Suddenly, netsurfing became as bad as marijuana, heroine, cigarettes, alcohol and gambling. Help!
My real life slowly got back to its pre-net level. My beloved girl friend has gone, but I am making new friends. You hear of Internet marriages. You may hear of an NA marriage, one day... My final warning to those who may follow my unfortunate path: it is OK to surf the net when you are new (admit it, it is a new toy <g>), but please be careful because the Internet is an anarchy, an unforgiving wilderness. Be as careful as you would be if were alone in a jungle at night. You can send email (no flames please, and don't expect reply) to: ntran@pcug.org.au