It was 1988

The internet seemed to be an intriguing, yet scary place to be in 1988. Now that information was at our fingertips, the media hype led one to believe that our lives would be revolutionized in a matter of years, if not months. For me the reality seemed to be much different.

In the spring, I was working full-time and attending junior college on a part-time basis. Looking to the future, I decided to purchase my first computer, which was an IBM PS2 model 30 and I chose to stick with the 20 MB hard drive, not believing I would ever use that amount of space. Boy was I wrong about that!

My news information was gleaned from the online presence of the Fort Worth Star Telegram. This was a DOS type interface that resembled the mainframe connection program I used for interacting with the college. Not the easiest thing to 1) connect to, and 2) navigate. Sure it was faster than waiting for the paper, but after the novelty wore off it seemed to loose its cutting-edge feel.

Soon there came a time when an email account seemed to be a necessity. I chose AOL for my first online provider. During the sign-up process I was suddenly faced with choosing a user name. What to pick? My name was not even a consideration. The internet was too scary. I didn’t know what kind of weirdoes were out there, but they didn’t need to know my name.

In my mind, this user name had to be something that I could identify with and remember easily. After thinking on this for some time I realized that each time my wife and I traveled back to visit her family in the great northwest, my drink of choice was always a vanilla latté at Starbucks. Hence the shortened version became my user name: Vlatte.

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