I found my first Internet friends through the text adventure games hosted by the local university’s Telnet bulletin board. I only ever met one of them in person, in a computer lab on campus, and to this day I remember her handle but not her real name. When we moved, one of the things that upset me most was that I could no longer log in because using the modem would have accrued long distance telephone charges. It was an awkward phase during which the Internet as we typically understood it was not yet actually World Wide in its scope, trapped in the raw mechanics of connectivity—I remember once being unable to access Yahoo because I’d forgotten to append “.com” to the end. When user-customizable fonts finally started to arrive in later tools with broader reach—webmail, browsers, AOL—I was always inclined to stick with the defaults, in the hopes that this might help me appear just as native and coherent as I imagined I had in my earliest chats. No matter what you do to your links with <font> tags or stylesheets or rich text editors, they are still painted that original blue underneath, by now as much a way to wander and visit and escape as skies or seas.

Vijith Assar is a writer and software developer with lots of feelings.