Back to the 90s — Part Five: Fruit Wine and the Information Superhighway

By the spring of 1994, I thought I understood the limits of technology. My digital world was local, predictable and safely contained within the magnetic tracks of 3.5-inch floppies and the isolated cables of our college Novell network.

Then came the weekend I went to visit my cousin, Stuart.

A Weekend in Bradford

Stuart was two years older than me and studying engineering at Bradford University. For a 16-year-old still living at home, stepping into his world was like landing on another planet. I spent the weekend on a spare mattress on the floor of his room in halls, surrounded by a rotating cast of weird and wonderful people. It was my first real taste of independent student life.

Saturday Night

The highlight came on Saturday night. About fifteen of us, a mixed bunch of lads and girls, ended up crammed into a sparse room belonging to one of the students. We sat propped up against the four walls, beneath the staple student posters: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

Stuart had brought along his Philips portable CD boom box, which blasted out Queen’s Greatest Hits I while we chatted about absolutely everything under the sun.

The refreshments were a case of 24 bottles of cheap, brightly coloured fruit wine in every synthetic flavour imaginable: strawberry, raspberry, banana and blueberry. To keep them cool, the bottles were stored in the room’s sink, filled to the brim with water. We only opened a new bottle when the last one had run out. The rule was simple: take a few swigs, then pass the bottle anti-clockwise to the next person.

It was a wonderful, chaotic, mesmerising night.

The weekend left a bizarrely physical impression on me. When I finally got home, I’d subconsciously picked up a rather posh Received Pronunciation (RP) student accent that definitely wasn’t present at my local college. Like a holiday suntan, it faded over the next few weeks.

The Hangover Cure

The weekend also introduced me to the darker arts of university survival. On Sunday morning, in the shared kitchen, I witnessed the ultimate hangover cure. The student who had hosted us the night before mixed together a concoction of stale fruit wine, sprinkled in some unidentified herbs, blasted it in the microwave for a full two minutes and then drank it down, desperately.

But between the passing bottles and the questionable home remedies, Stuart took me somewhere that would completely change my idea of what computers were for: the university computer lab.

The Mouse Mat Problem

Stepping into that massive lab was a culture shock. Instead of the beige rows of 386 PCs running Windows 3.1 that I was used to at college, Bradford’s lab was full of Apple Macintoshes. To a PC lad, they looked sleek, integrated and completely alien.

The older students navigated them with ease, but my first hurdle wasn’t the software. It was the mouse.

As I remember it, these were optical mice. Unlike the heavy rollerball mice I knew, which constantly choked on desk fluff and carpet lint, these had a visible red light underneath. It felt like pure sci-fi. There was just one catch: they only worked on a specific, custom mouse mat.

The mats were metallic and reflective, printed with a fine grid pattern. If the mouse wasn’t on that mat, the cursor simply wouldn’t move. Nudge or rotate the mat, and things went wrong. It was a curious paradox: cutting-edge technology, chained down by a piece of plastic.

The Floppy Disk Mystery

Once I’d got into the system, I popped my trusty 3.5-inch floppy into the drive to open some files. When it was time to leave, I hit a wall.

I looked all over the front of the Mac. There was no eject button. No lever to push. Nothing.

Slightly panicked, and convinced the machine had swallowed my disk for good, I swallowed my pride and asked one of the older students how to get it back.

He gave me the classic, slightly smug look reserved for uninitiated PC users.

“Just drag the disk icon into the Trash Can,” he said.

I stared at him. To an MS-DOS user, dragging a drive into the bin sounded like a guaranteed way to wipe your work. Trembling, I dragged the icon to the Trash Can and let go.

Instead of a deletion warning, the Mac gave a motorised whir-clunk and spat the floppy out of the slot at me. The logic felt completely upside down, but it was incredibly cool.

Glimpsing the Web

But the real magic happened when Stuart helped me open the browser. This was my very first experience of the internet.

We didn’t type in a URL, because we didn’t know any. Instead, we navigated from a custom link page on what I could only assume was an early university intranet. Clicking through, we landed on a primitive website that I’m almost certain was a brand-new directory called Yahoo!

In 1994, Yahoo! wasn’t the search engine we know today. There was no clean, sparse search box. It was a human-curated directory: a text-heavy tree of nested categories. If you wanted to find something, you clicked your way down through the lists, hunting through links that had been collected by hand.

It was slow, it was text-heavy and it was entirely mesmerising. I was sitting in a lab in Bradford, looking at information hosted on a server thousands of miles away. The boundaries of the computer lab had evaporated. The information superhighway was real, and even though it would be another three years before I had proper, permanent access at home, that weekend planted the seed.

Coming Next

Next instalment: Hacking the College Swipe Card System

Back to the 90s Series