In the not too distant past, the Internet used to be a place. It was a physical portal to a virtual world and to access it, you needed to be at a computer station like the one on my homepage. If you were lucky, your parents had one of these set-up at home. If you were even luckier, they had a dial-up modem connected to a landline telephone which meant that you could go online.
Back in these days, people didn't really live online. They logged on to check their email, maybe message some friends on AOL Instant Messenger or in a chat room, and make fun websites like this. And then they logged off.
It wasn't until the introduction of sites like Friendster and MySpace in the early 2000s that people started to actively live online.
