First Clicks

It was a small, red Acer laptop and probably the first one we ever had in our home. It was Mom's but it soon enough became mine when she opened up a new world to me by teaching me how to use it. Her idea was to use it to keep us entertained whenever we didn't have work to do, then she connected us to the internet.

I was probably eight years old at the time. I didn't really know much about computers, let alone anything about the internet. I loved video games, so the first thing I ever used the internet for was to play games online.

To use the internet back then, we had to use a USB modem—a white Starcomms model with a touch of purple, looking like something futuristic to me.

"Biker games to play online"—or" something like that—she typed into a box with a magnifying glass on the left of it and something that read "Yahoo!" on top of it. Honestly, I am not sure if it was Google or Yahoo at that time. But let's move on...

The next thing I knew, a bunch of links that led to biker games that I could play popped up. She picked one, and then I was playing a game over the internet. No CD-ROM, no game console, and I could still play a game in this book-looking machine. Sensational is an understatement for how I felt.

It took a few times to get the hang of it. Watching her bring out the modem from the side of the laptop's bag, sticking it into the PC only after Windows finished loading up, setting up the connection from the Starcomms modem app, and then opening the Internet Explorer. I often did this without her permission, like in the middle of the night when all my mates were burning the midnight candle to get into Harvard University.

As an unemployed eight-year-old with no ambition other than to become president of the universe, I quickly graduated from searching for biker games to other genres, like power rangers. That early access to the internet indeed opened a new world for me. How I went from video games to creating new accounts on 100+ social media platforms, I wonder myself.

Okay. Maybe it wasn't one hundred, but I was so curious about social media that I just got on random platforms and signed up. Many of them are likely obsolete now, but one of them was Twitter. Twitter then was just a place for me to look up my favorite Nickelodeon stars and gawk at my celebrity crushes. The 200 followers I had to me was like being on Mount Everest.

One of the saddest moments for me then was when the laptop's battery would hold up longer than a few minutes, and grid electricity wasn't regular, or when my parents would temporarily ban me from using the laptop for overly using it and neglecting some of my responsibilities. Just look at my life, all because I was unemployed at eight years old.

It's been almost two decades since then. That small red Acer laptop is still at home, although I doubt it works anymore, and each time I see it, the early memories of Jay's first experience online just make me sigh and smile.