It would be really nice to have a community where everyone had household compute that was their “main” computer. They could be the hubs for communications that’s always on, and you could set it up to communicate with an otherwise anonymous public handheld, or just leave it until you get home and decide to get online. handhelds wouldn’t need to be repositories of sensitive data, they could just be thin clients that could be safely wiped and restored (without needing a corporate entity’s help or permission) in the event of damage or theft. Home networks could become overlapping network nodes, reducing or eliminating the need for regional or global internet provider services. We could really run the internet ourselves.

I lived in a very rural area and we had dial-up until 2010, so I had specific times where I could get on the internet because it wouldn’t interfere with telephone calls.

Brings back many fond memories of our hulking, beige family 486 with its EGA monitor!

BTW, the text scrolling against that suitably 1990s page background creates an odd and disconcerting visual effect.

Fond memories of the family computer, but man this website is nausea-inducing. 90s pages had some bad backgrounds but he scrolled WITH the text!