The First Thing I Saw On The Internet

[elfs]

The challenge of the day is to write The First Thing You Saw On The Internet, in which Lauren Modery writes about falling deeply in love with X-Files Fanfic. To be fair to her readers, Lauren points out that X-Files fanfic wasn't really the first thing she saw; the first thing she saw was Alta Vista's home page, but things get awkward and sticky from there, in a very good way.

The first thing I saw on the Internet wasn't fanfic, and it wasn't X-Files. It was 1991, and I went specifically looking for erotica. The first thing I found was, Cthulhu consume me first, a Brady Bunch sex story. It wasn't even fanfic. It was a nasty piece of work, but what made it all the worse was that I'd been a literary erotica reader for years already when the Internet became available to me. I'd read The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, and The Happy Hooker, and just about everything else I could get my hands on; I'd even started to find the racier romance, like Bertrice Small and Catherine Coulter (at least, before she went mainstream). And this awful piece of trash, this A Very Brady Sex Story, was so horribly written, with so many grammatical and spelling errors, that I couldn't even enjoy it.

Part of that may have been because I wasn't at all familiar with The Brady Bunch as a series, and had no idea why it may have been funny that Marsha was being banged by the family dog.

I was actually so upset by the tragic quality of the story that I chose to write my own. The rest is pretty much history.

Comments

[solarbird]

I was online before it was the Internet; I was there for the merging of Edunet and ARPAnet and BITNET that created the Internet, via BITNET. So my first BITNET thing would probably have been some sort of computer e-newsletter, because I was really into Commodore machines. After that I started publishing a Commodore rumours newsletter that I can't even remember the name of - oh wait, Frostbit South, I guess I can - and an online SF fanzine, The Rational Anarchist.

I have no copies of either of these, but I do remember that I'd written up rumours of the Amiga 5000 which never appeared - and that much later I found out that rumour was a completely accurate summary of an internal counter-proposal to the Amiga 3000. But the A3000 design was a lot faster to develop, so they went with that. My source, turned out, had been pretty good!

Before that I was on CompuServe and BBSes, and... the first BBS would've been an SF and tech BBS called... Ovanet, I think? I couldn't afford to be on CompuServe much (like, hardly ever) and so I think I would hang out in some gaming chat rooms. I know I read some sort of D&D game thing on there.

And before that, you're getting into the non-networked era of machines actually called Univac and such. So.

PS: I remember the infamous Brady Bunch fuckpile story. It was terrible. I think that was at least somewhat intentional, because it was also hilarious.