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Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition

As I write this, twenty-five years have passed since an early morning firestorm roared across the hills above Pasadena, California, and left a smoldering swath where hundreds of houses had stood. It’s difficult to believe it’s been a quarter of a century since I stood in the rubble of my former home and gazed out over the valley below from a spot that didn’t have a view the day before. Two dozen trees had gone up in smoke, and in their place was an unobstructed vista over Los Angeles and all the way out to Catalina Island. The winds had carried all the smoke east, leaving no evidence in the air of all the fire had destroyed. It was a crystal clear view, a view long enough to reveal the curve of the earth.

I wish I could say that my own vision was as clear and as long as the view that day from our smoldering citadel. I know it felt that way at the time. Perhaps the promise of freedom always feels that way. It’s what makes horizons so appealing, and open roads so alluring. They stretch perfectly into the distance, uncluttered by the mundane and unblemished by mishap. On a road untraveled, nothing shows except adventure and independence.

Hitting the road was the only idea that occurred to me that day. I was immediately convinced that there would never be a better time, and that if I didn’t seize the moment while it was fresh, my feet would soon sprout new roots, and my “stuffless” status would rapidly disappear in new accumulations of humdrum possessions. I had nothing left to lose, and it would be a fleeting gift if I didn’t accept it on the spot.

That day was October 28, 1993. Bill Clinton was winding up his first year as president, and people were still talking about the amazing effects in the first Jurassic Park movie. I remember those things well. What I did not know was that 1993 was the year that Mosaic, the first real Web browser, was released. For that matter, I didn’t know what the Web was, and “browser” was still just another word for window shopper. Some people were using email, and just as many were hoping they’d never have to. We all knew change was in the air, but few of us realized we were already in a state of revolution. While I had no idea that a virtual firestorm was gaining strength the day a real fire burned my house down, I look back and marvel at the synchronicity. The fire that tore through the hills above Pasadena in October, 1993, just happened to wreak its havoc when the virtual world was igniting, too.

While I was on the road, I enjoyed reading books by and about travelers. Kerouac’s On the Road led the list, but also at the top was Mark Twain’s Roughing It. In his descriptions of traveling in the Wild West in the years after the Gold Rush, Twain captured the energy and entrepreneurialism that defined that other era of discovery and rapid change. I found it to be the perfect analogy for the vortex I found myself in as I traveled in the 1990s. No chapter illustrated this more perfectly than Twain’s account of riding the Overland Stage. In it, Twain captured the experience of traveling by a means that was created by overwhelming demand and that ended abruptly with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Twain also described the Pony Express, another short-lived phenomenon rendered obsolete by the transcontinental telegraph.

As I look back now, the years I traveled the country were a little like the short span of years when a stagecoach was required to travel from Missouri to California, and messengers on horseback relayed mail across the continent. In 1994, people were just beginning to grasp the enormous potential of the Internet and wireless communication, and technology had only just begun to deliver on the promise. When I struggled to use an acoustic coupler with a pay phone, it reminded me of Mark Twain getting hit on the head with an unabridged dictionary every time the Overland Stage lurched across a stream.

As much as this book is about the beginning of the Internet revolution, it is equally about STUFF. Everything began with a great and sudden loss of stuff and a desire to enjoy the vacuum for as long as possible. But as anyone who has ever lived in a motorhome can tell you, stuff is a big issue. Too much won’t fit, and even if it does, you have to make sure it won’t break an axle. Looking back, I realize that Mark and I worried about our stuff just about every day we were on the road.

Even digital possessions took up quite a bit of room. When we hit the road in 1994, computer stuff was, for the most part, stored on floppy discs. Later on, it was ZIP discs, followed by CDs. Because we were fully aware that disaster could happen, we kept backups in places other than our motorhome. We didn’t need a storage locker for household belongings, but we did need a repository for boxes of discs and CDs. What stands out as I reflect on the progression from floppies to ZIP discs to CDs is that as storage got smaller and smaller, it also got cheaper and cheaper. A floppy disc back in 1994 cost about a dollar and held as much as a megabyte. ZIP discs held 250 megs and cost maybe $12. CDs were a huge breakthrough, offering capacities three times as large as ZIPs and costing a fraction. And the trend has continued. If the price and size of storage had remained constant, a 5-gigabyte thumb drive would cost $5000 and outstrip an elephant. But the price went down along with size until we got to the point where it all evaporated into a cloud. Which brings me circuitously to a realization that occurred to me recently. I lost all my stuff in a cloud back in 1993. Now all my stuff lives in a cloud. It’s a full circle of a sort I never could have predicted.

Some might say the revolution is only just getting started. I’m one of those, too. In years to come, it will be easier to gain perspective on the profound changes the birth and growth of the Internet have wrought. For now, we’re still in the trenches, still connecting dots, still surprised by the physical effects of invisible phenomena. Who would have guessed that smart phones would have an effect on the car-buying habits of a new generation? Who could have predicted that an app could challenge the very existence of the taxi industry, or that a guy named Craig could wipe out classified advertising with a single website?

As fascinating as it was to observe the Internet hatch and grow during my years on the road, it is the travel itself I am most grateful for. Thanks to my years on the road, when I look at a flat political map of North America, I no longer see just a vast expanse bookended by two oceans. Even if the map is just an outline, my mind automatically supplies the mountains and rivers and cities and towns. I see canola fields in Alberta and potato fields in Maine. I remember a sculptor in Idaho, a singer in Big Bend, a juggler in Seattle. I see the dogwoods in Yosemite and the eagles in Minnesota and the alligators in the Everglades. I do hope you enjoy a trip down Internet history lane, but my sincerest wish is that reading about the journey makes you want to hit the road.

Megan Edwards

Las Vegas, Nevada

December, 2018