'90's Chat Rooms - I Met Strange and Interesting People
You might be too young to remember 90's Chat Rooms, but this is what I liked about it
This one has nothing to do with finance but I have nothing to say about finance today except "buy low, sell high." Today I'm going to reminisce about my time in some 90's chat rooms. It was brand new and a lot of fun.
Before the Internet? Can you even remember that time?
I had the good fortune to get my first decent job in 1993 and we didn't even have internet on the computers at work at that time. Hell, I didn't even have my own computer at home until I needed to find a new job after leaving New Orleans in 2001. The computers at work were only used for early spreadsheets and to run instruments with DOS programming. Then one day in the mid 1990's the company started piping the internet right to our desktops!
The culture was pretty loose around the R+D facility in those days so you can just imagine the early abuses of this new tool. You could suddenly get access to all sorts of stuff that was inappropriate and unprofessional right on your desk. My job often ran late into the evening as I was taking classes during the civilized work hours in order to finish up my chemistry degree on the company dime. Nobody seemed to mind how you entertained yourself as long as you were getting your work done and that often involved setting up chemical reactions that would run for hours while you babysat them and maybe turned some heat up or down or took some samples in the meantime. I'm saying there was plenty of downtime so long as you were in the room making sure no hot reactions were literally hitting the ceiling!
My First 90's Chat Rooms
This must have been around 1996 for our company and one day I discovered some oddball chat room and I can't even remember what the thing was called. I only know it wasn't one of the popular AOL ones from that time. It was such a novel idea to me at the time and I was bored at work so... I gave myself the name Rudy the Rabbit (from the runner kid played by Chris Makepeace in the summer camp movie Meatballs). I must have typed something ridiculous into the entry window and lo and behold somebody responded! Pretty soon I found myself chatting in a public forum with people from around the country and even some from other countries. This was pure entertainment compared to what had been available on FM radio (remember that?) or something like reading a book to pass the time.
You could get dates just by typing something interesting
The thing that was great to me about this form was that what you got out of it all had to do with what you wrote. Remember this was near the beginning of the digital age for a lot of people and well before loading digital images or audio files was common or even possible for the average person. Match.com (home of Tinder and Hinge, among others) and Facebook were still a long ways off in the future. With no verification available there was a lot of trust involved with the concept.
As a single guy in his 20's with time on his hands you can just imagine where this all went. You might have enjoyed what somebody had typed and decided to have a phone call or even arrange a visit. In the end that room brought me to visits and meet-ups in New Hampshire, New York, Tennessee, Georgia, California, and Florida. Two girls from Georgia and Florida even came to visit me when I first moved to New Orleans. My landlord hit on them but that wasn't the end of the world. They laughed and gave him credit for his futile effort. Nothing bad ever happened which is incredible but I came close to either death or a savage beating on one of those adventures near Nashville.
The evolution of the 90's Chat Rooms
It reminded me a little of blogging where if you're any good at it you connect with your audience on some level and make some friends. It's incredible to me still that a person could do that through just some characters on a screen.
Maybe you're saying to yourself, "So, what?" I have always thought it might make a nice series of stories or even a movie script where the main character messes up his home life by getting all wrapped up in this online world and all the available adventures. The public seems to enjoy those retro type movies like the Jonah Hill movie about the skate kids or even the early days of Silicon Valley. What do you think? Would anybody read or watch a story like that? Did you even join in one of those things in your youth and go meet up with a person or people from the infancy of the net? Did anything good or bad come of it? I viewed the whole enterprise like investing: there was no reward without the risk of putting yourself out there.