“I fondly remember respectful arguments with Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett on CIX”

As I approach my retirement – more on that later – I’ve been having a bit of a clear-out. Partly this has been physical: getting rid of old work-related stuff such as computer hardware and stationery, plus boxes and boxes of paperwork, all of which have cluttering up my home for far too long. But it’s also been an “online” clear-out, going through and deleting emails from about a million years ago (I exaggerate, but only slightly) and closing down countless old online accounts that I’m no longer likely to need, but which I’m sure are responsible for much of the stuff that ends up in my spam folder.

This exercise got me thinking how I’ve been online for quite a long time – certainly since way before the internet even existed. In my mind I separate this term “online” into two piles, the first of which contains the likes of websites, e-commerce, online banking, Google and Wikipedia, plus services such as FTP, Dropbox, VoIP, video streaming and Spotify. The second pile contains communication tools: social media, email, forums or, going back further in time, things such as bulletin board systems (BBSs) and Usenet newsgroups. I suppose anything on the internet is a communication tool of sorts, but the latter are places that allowed me to write as well as read – to communicate.