When the Internet first came to our house in the early 19 nineties, so far as I could tell, the Internet was inside of a box.

The box required a bunch of technical skill to install.

And then once my dad got the Internet, working, the Internet was green letters on a black screen.

I remember my dad showing me the things the Internet could do, like Look, the Internet can show you what the weather is like right now in Beijing or with the Internet.

You can download the apology of Socrates for free.

And now I understand why all that stuff must have been so cool to my dad.

Like one of the weird solipsism sze of us life is that the news almost never talks about the weather outside of the United States unless there's some natural disaster unfolding.

And it is pretty cool that the apology of Socrates is available to anyone with an Internet connection.

But of course, to 13 year old me, all of that stuff was just stupid.

But then Dad showed me that on the Internet you could talk to people.

He wanted me to practice my French So he showed me a French forum and I was like, This is pretty cool.

And I started asking people co Mohs Eva and you, Ava Bibliotheque.

And then, pretty quickly, I started to wonder if there was an English language version of that service and it turned out there was, and that changed my life.

I made friends, including many of the most important friendships of my childhood, and I met a girl who I eventually fell in love with and dated for most of college, even though when we first met in real life, and this is still astonishing to me, neither of us had ever seen a picture of the other because the Internet was still green letters on a black screen.

I even got something called an email address, which was a series of random digits at compuserve dot com.

Back then, the Internet charged by the hour, which became a realist you because I wanted to spend many, many hours on it.

My parents wanted to be supportive, but they also needed to like pay the mortgage.

But just as they were telling me that I was going to need to decrease my Internet usage a lifeline appeared calm.

Fuser figured out that their student forum needed moderating.

And because I was always in that forum, I was hired as one of the moderators and by hired, I mean given free Internet.

That moderating experience did teach me a little bit about online community building.

But mostly it just gave me all the Internet I could want, and I wanted a lot of it.

I still think of that first summer as the summer of CompuServe.

Like if a single event in my life occurred outdoors that summer, I do not recall it like I don't have the physical vigor required for proper exploration.

But that summer I felt all that magic of discovery as I uncovered every wonder and terror on the Internet.

Now I don't wanna wax nostalgic about that Internet.

It had all the problems the current Internet does, albeit on a smaller scale.

My point is only that I loved it and that it gave me friends when I really needed them, and that I fell in love and that I found out Beijing had weather these days.

After drinking from the Internets Firehose for more than 25 years, I've begun to feel more of its negative side effects.

I don't know if it's my age or the fact that the Internet is no longer plugged into the wall, but now contractual with me everywhere I go, but more and more, I find myself reading that Wordsworth poem that begins.

The world is too much with us late and soon.

But this weekend, Hank, the Project for Awesome reminded me how the best of the Internet feels This year's Project for Awesome has raised more than $1.5 million for charity, and the fund raiser is still up.

You can go to project for awesome dot com slash donate until midnight tonight and get great perks.

But money aside, I felt so grateful this weekend to be part of a vibrant and joyous community that is working together to try to make the world suck less.

In the end, what I love about the Internet is also what I fear about the Internet.

We can do so much more together, then we can do alone.