09
66
05
92
FF
24
16
FF
16
DOS taught me the word “cyan.” #66FFFF isn’t quite DOS cyan—it’s got a bit more red, the way Windows had a bit more everything. They built Windows on top of DOS, like a second-floor addition, so they had to keep the first floor intact. If you wanted to go downstairs and hang out with fewer, simpler colors, you could do that.
But Windows connected to a third floor. Windows had AOL, and AOL wanted you to think it was all that your modem could do, but you could trick AOL into showing you more. I know there were a lot of middle-school kids like me, reaching beyond their physical homes and sampling the wider world through processes they understood better than their parents.
My friend who got the web first said it was “like an interactive CD,” a line I’d now swear he picked up from his dad. It was a place built for grownups, where you could commit minor credit-card fraud years before puberty, where twenty minutes of hunting could earn you the manic ten-minute spectacle of a single naked picture getting progressively less blurred.
That was my 1995, when the comforting past and the dangerous future lived together inside the same beige cinderblock. Just two different shades of cyan.