A Conversion Story (Part I)
(Coming in late? Start from the beginning!)
It all started in the fall of 1990. Anna Queen, a 16-year-old Latter-day Saint in Dayton, Indiana, had just suffered a wrenching heartbreak when a guy with whom she’d been corresponding online suddenly stopped writing her. Convinced it was because of the horrible school photo she’d recently sent him, she wallowed in the kind of self-pity that only a 16-year-old girl can muster. After several weeks, she begged her Heavenly Father to help her find a really good friend—preferably a guy, since she seemed to get along better with guys, anyway—that would accept her for who she was. Little did she know how her prayer would be answered.
Christmas Day, 1990. As we sat around the tree in my parents’ Pequannock, New Jersey home, Dad opened up a present from Mom and was happily surprised to find a brand new copy of Prodigy: the software for the Internet community of the same name. It was a couple more days before he actually installed it—and another day after that before I, his 15-year-old son—first got online, but Christmas is where my part of the story ultimately began. (Of course, I could go back to whenever the heck Mom bought the software, but I don’t know when that was, and frankly, it’s irrelevant.) ;-)
So anyway, on the afternoon of 28 December 1990, I logged onto Prodigy for the first time. It was a new and wonderful concept as I surfed Prodigy’s little microcosm of the ’Net, logging onto various bulletin boards and talking to people all over the nation about anything and everything I could think of. By the next day, I had posted scores of messages in the “Arts Club,” a bulletin board for people to discuss their interests in TV, movies, books, and—my personal favorite—music. One post I remember in particular was in reply to a guy that had purchased The B-52’s’ then-latest album, Cosmic Thing
(from whence came the timeless dance song Love Shack
) and wanted suggestions as to what to get next. As a die-hard B-52’s fan myself, I responded that his best bet would be to get (if he could find it) their European greatest hits disc, Dance This Mess Around
, which was released a couple of years before Cosmic Thing and therefore included a sampling of every album besides the one he already had. If I only I had known where that post would lead.
Tune in tomorrow for Part II!
“Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise” (Alma 37:6).
It all started in the fall of 1990. Anna Queen, a 16-year-old Latter-day Saint in Dayton, Indiana, had just suffered a wrenching heartbreak when a guy with whom she’d been corresponding online suddenly stopped writing her. Convinced it was because of the horrible school photo she’d recently sent him, she wallowed in the kind of self-pity that only a 16-year-old girl can muster. After several weeks, she begged her Heavenly Father to help her find a really good friend—preferably a guy, since she seemed to get along better with guys, anyway—that would accept her for who she was. Little did she know how her prayer would be answered.
Christmas Day, 1990. As we sat around the tree in my parents’ Pequannock, New Jersey home, Dad opened up a present from Mom and was happily surprised to find a brand new copy of Prodigy: the software for the Internet community of the same name. It was a couple more days before he actually installed it—and another day after that before I, his 15-year-old son—first got online, but Christmas is where my part of the story ultimately began. (Of course, I could go back to whenever the heck Mom bought the software, but I don’t know when that was, and frankly, it’s irrelevant.) ;-)
So anyway, on the afternoon of 28 December 1990, I logged onto Prodigy for the first time. It was a new and wonderful concept as I surfed Prodigy’s little microcosm of the ’Net, logging onto various bulletin boards and talking to people all over the nation about anything and everything I could think of. By the next day, I had posted scores of messages in the “Arts Club,” a bulletin board for people to discuss their interests in TV, movies, books, and—my personal favorite—music. One post I remember in particular was in reply to a guy that had purchased The B-52’s’ then-latest album, Cosmic Thing
(from whence came the timeless dance song Love Shack) and wanted suggestions as to what to get next. As a die-hard B-52’s fan myself, I responded that his best bet would be to get (if he could find it) their European greatest hits disc, Dance This Mess Around, which was released a couple of years before Cosmic Thing and therefore included a sampling of every album besides the one he already had. If I only I had known where that post would lead.Tune in tomorrow for Part II!
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