I was reshelving my collection of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines the other day and an address label fell off one of them, with a street name that I had forgotten and had been trying to remember ever since the last time I drove through San Anselmo and realized that although I knew I’d lived there for a bit I could no longer point out the street I’d hiked up and down so many times. I must have still had my subscription going when we moved there. I looked the street name up and traced the path on the map between there and a few other landmarks and it all started to come back.

Just before the turn of the century, I was about to start college, and had just signed on to continue my summer job on a part-time basis as a contractor, answering tech support emails for an hour or two each day while I went to school.

To be able to work from home I bought my first PC, a Dell Dimension, and I signed up for the finest residential broadband that Pacific Bell had to offer. I was the first person in our neighborhood with broadband; I know this because they had to make repeated service calls to upgrade a mile worth of copper phone wires until they’d support a DSL connection, but after a month of that, the lights on the modem finally stayed green, and I officially entered the Internet Age, with such bounteous bandwidth that I was able to stream foreign films from CinemaNow in glorious 480p.