Heads in the Cloud

For several summers in a row, starting in 1994, I attended a science and technology camp a few hours away from my hometown. Among the cutting-edge toys to delight and mesmerize were a space shuttle simulator, Estes rockets, wearable heart-rate monitors, Apple’s original digital camera, and, above all, the still-young internet. It was at this camp that I first heard a modem handshake, that I first downloaded animated GIFs from distant FTP servers, that I first surfed the web using Netscape Navigator (that would have been the second year), and that I first sent and received email.

The camp had a twice-weekly magazine, which, portending things to come, I readily volunteered to edit. I don’t remember much about what the three or four of us on the masthead published, beyond a bit of preteen romance gossip, but I distinctly remember the room where we laid out pages using ClarisWorks and diligently proofread our issues.

Those were the halcyon days — long before...