Discovering MP3's and the Internet

I don't know why, but I just thought back to the very first time I heard an mp3. It was sometime during my second semester of my freshman year of college (Jan-May of 99). My roommate had a computer and one day I walked into my dormroom and he said "Come here, you gotta see this!!" Being a computer nerd, I went up to him to see what he wanted. He started playing a song. I asked if he had a cd in the drive or something, and he said no. He said it was a new file format for music, and that he had downloaded the song for free. The song was "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith. It was hard for me to believe that he had downloaded that song for free and that he could store it on his computer. Now look at where mp3's have gone to. I have over a thousand songs on my computer at home, and if I were to play them all end to end, I could have constant music for over 3 days.

This memory takes me back even further, to the first time that I ever got on the internet. This one's a bit harder to remember, but I'm pretty sure that it happened during my sophmore year of high school. This would have been in 1995 or '96. It was my sophmore English class and we had an assignment that required looking up articles on the internet. Nobody in my class had ever used the internet before. Our high school didn't even have internet. We had to walk over to the middle school library to log on. The middle school librarian came to our class and taught us how to use the search function at www.yahoo.com. I was so confused and thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. She taught us how to search for lyrics of an Elvis song. She told us how to use quotations, and to type in a phrase of the lyrics that we knew. Who knew it would turn into what it is today?