chased by the Pac-Man monster

How to grow up before the internet:

Eighties, in primary school: first encounter ever with a computer when we were offered computer classes. Which meant learning simple programming, like If-Then-Else. Never got much further than that. Pac-Man was fun, though.

A boy in school had a computer at home. A Commodore 64. He was considered the nerdiest of the nerds because of this.

Nineties, starting university: we were offered our own email accounts on the university server. This was something we had never heard about. You weren't supposed to apply for one unless you needed it for your studies but we all applied anyway, out of curiosity. Email became wildly popular for writing silly messages to your friends. Nobody owned a computer yet but you could log in on any of the terminals scattered throughout campus.

Then everything started to happen. Windows came, meaning that using a computer was actually easy and not only something for programming geeks. No longer did we have to know commands by heart or get stuck in WordPerfect when we forgot which function key to use. The mouse was invented and now it was all point-and-click. The internet and the romantically named World Wide Web arrived - there wasn't much on it at first, but information about anything and everything soon started to flood it. We took the few basic computer classes available and learned the rest from friends and through trial and error. More computer labs opened on campus and we were encouraged to use them instead of writing our essays with the help of a pencil or a typewriter.

I was given someone's old computer, then somebody else's slightly newer one and used them to write my essays, but they were slow and prone to crashing and there were always compatibility problems when I saved my work on a floppy disk and brought it to campus to use the printer there. Being online at home wasn't really something to consider - modems were excruciatingly slow and you were billed by the minute. But you could always play Solitaire, Tetris or maybe even Need For Speed.

The 21st century, once we survived the dreaded Y2K bug: by the time we left university we had got ourselves hotmail addresses that we could access anywhere, not just on the campus computers, and knew the basics of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The internet was by now stuffed with both useful and entertaining information. Most businesses were getting computerized and the really cool people had their own laptop or Nokia Communicator.

The rest of us used computer rooms in the public library, or the internet cafés that started popping up everywhere. I could spend hours in them on my days off - emailing, reading fanfiction, looking for jobs. There was great coffee to be had, lots of other cool people around and the wonderful feeling of having the entire world at your fingertips.

Now, with a laptop and a smartphone, I never really get over that feeling of having conquered a world nobody expected me to manage. Neither the slight insecurity nor the triumph. I was on Facebook just a couple of months after it opened to the general public and signed onto a number of other social media - just because I have to prove to myself that I'm still on top of this computer thing.