A few years later, during a summer away from school, I got myself a real taste of the profound changes that the internet would bring to everyone’s lives in the next decade; and Nethack was involved. Somewhere I’d obtained eighty yards of phone wire and an equally long extension cord. I ran the wires out of the house, down the hill, and into the woods. There I set up a tent with a sleeping bag inside, and a pile of snacks, and a phone. I hooked a 1200-baud modem to the ends of the wires and fed that into a splitter, with one wire going into the phone, and the other connected to a WYSE-50 terminal borrowed from my pal Andy (I have absolutely no idea where he got it from).
So for the whole day and night, with the bugs chirping around me and the trees towering above, I played Nethack and slashed my way deep into the mazes, and chatted online with people in different cities, states, and even different countries (shout-outs to my Australian friends on the Undernet IRC network, in channel #dreams!). I was connected to everything - or at least I felt like I was - but at the same time, it was just me in the dark woods, with the glowing green symbols on the WYSE-50 terminal forming a portal to another world. The darkness in the woods outside and the darkness between the WYSE-50 symbols became part of the same space in my imagination and memory.
