The first time I ever used the Internet…

As I’ve said many times during the course of this blog, I first started writing Falling in the 1990s. Along with grunge music, Seinfeld and the Game Boy, the other cultural touchstone we’d see for the first time in that era was the Internet.

It was 1995 when I first witnessed it in action firsthand. I worked in recruitment advertising and we certainly had digital file transmission – I don’t remember the name of the system but I used to send the PDFs of the approved ads to our output bureau who’d then send them on to the newspapers and magazines.

I also remember looking through the folder of a bulletin board service and downloading rudimentary games, text of song lyrics and pirated software installers.

But the first time I ever beheld the World Wide Web was in my boss’ office. Being in a technology field I knew what it was and what it did before I ever saw it, but he’d had his computer connected to the internet (the rest of us were just hooked up to the network we used to transmit files, as mentioned above), so when I had a minute I went to take a look.

‘You use a search engine to find the stuff you’re looking for, don’t you?’ I asked him, fully aware that as what you did, just making conversation more than anything because we all thought it was pretty cool.

After talking about it for awhile I asked if he minded if I had a go while he left to do something else, to which he readily agreed. So what was the first thing I did? The first search – no, the first action altogether – I ever conducted online?

I looked up cars you’d find in Sydney in the 1950s. Why? If you’ve read the original draft of Falling (which you get free with your purchase of the ebook), you’ll know there was a long opening scene about construction workers making repairs to the Sydney Harbour Bridge decades before the story proper takes place.

In the story, I described the boss of the small work gang climbing rickety construction ladders to the site high up in the arch, watching Holdens and Packards roar past on the Bradfield Highway below.

I knew there were Holdens in Sydney in the 50s – my parents owned one in the years before I was born. But I also knew Packard was an American car brand and had no idea if you’d find them anywhere in Australia at the time.

As I went through several large rewrites of the whole novel (as well as decades of work as a freelance writer for hire, and in almost everything else I’ve done for work or leisure in the 30 years since as I write these words, just like we all have), I’ve read hundreds of thousands of pages of information sourced from Google, Wikipedia, social media and a thousand news and information websites that don’t even exist any more.

And it all started with a text search (probably ‘were there Packards in Australia in the 1950s?’) that turned out next to useless and didn’t answer the question at all.

It was probably made through Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves or one of those, and as I learned in an article about early metadata technologies that I only just read this week, as a matter of fact, there were only about half a million documents on the entire web at the time.

As of today there are 3.27 billion, and that doesn’t include all the videos, social media posts, Netflix streams and everything else, but back then search engines weren’t very successful simply because the breadth of information on every topic you can think of just didn’t exist yet.

Not like now – I just asked the internet the same question and the first link was a page on the Packard Automobile Club of Australia that details the history of the brand in Australia as far back as the 1930s.

So while Falling was originally written without the Internet (and on A4 notepads in handwritten longhand, no less), you could say I started at the right time for it to come along and make the job somewhat easier.