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This morning, from my internet-enabled mobile phone, I tweeted, "2012 is the 20th anniversary of my online life. Probably deserves a blog post, eh?"

Then I started thinking about that 20 year journey it took me to get there, between my own life and the technology it took to share that with 1,886 of my closest friends in mere seconds.

1992 was the year I graduated from college. In the midst of the first Bush recession, there weren't many jobs for new college grads, so I took a job working in a cell biology lab on the University of North Carolina campus. My lab partner from chemistry class had vacated the job to attend med school. I got to do whatever people asked -- autoclaving, growing cells, creating slides for my boss's presentations (shot on film! with real film slides!), black and white photography and developing the film, grant preparation, sending faxes, and many other tasks. Most of my biology classes had been in marine ecology, but the professor in charge didn't seem to mind, and I learned a ton working in the lab.

Upon joining the lab, I was immediately dumped into a world of technology both strange and wonderful and incredibly cool. A cell biology lab is always populated with lots and lots of microscopes, decked out with lasers, mirrors, and filters. To collect data and publish results, you needed lots of cameras. In 1992, we occasionally used film and analog video cameras hooked to VCR's to collect data. But with the new CCDs (soon to be called digital cameras), we were learning how great it was to collect many images over time, by connecting a camera to some super-duper amazing computer hardware running Windows 3.1 and with a massive 500 MB hard drive. We'd never fill it. (Nor could we back it up.)

To share those results with distant colleagues, my boss used something called email, in addition to the letters I'd type up for him. Email allowed him to write quickly to colleagues in Europe and Asia, as well as within the US. I had to sign up for an email account as well, something I saw little point in doing since no one else I knew had an email account. Eventually I had a friend or two who might send email, or the boss would send me something.

A few months later, a lab tech friend from Cold Spring Harbor told me about this thing called a MOO, and informed me that I had to check it out. He pestered me about it for months, telling me I had to get on this thing, how much fun it was, the interesting people I'd meet.

Finally one day I did sign up for an account over at LambdaMOO. Today, it's likely one of the oldest social networks still in existence. It's a text-based virtual reality, where you can interact with other users. It's instant messaging, but up a few notches, in that you can also interact with objects in the room (resulting in more text messages), travel to other rooms (more text messages), and so forth. You can program in the object-oriented MOO language as well, creating interactive objects, like the famous Wind-Up Duck.

To get online, one generally had a university affiliation -- there were few, if any, commercial networks then. You had to own a computer (my Mac LC with System 7, with a 40 MB hard drive I'd never fill up or back up, cost $3500), hook it up to some blazing fast modem, then dial up to your university connection, hoping that one of the 32-odd phone lines into the network were free. This meant you needed the geek skills to configure all of that. Remember that while the web had been invented, there was little on it, and there were no search engines for finding help. You could hop on Gopher to see if you could find anything useful, but for the most part, without search engines, the internet was a series of loosely connected islands of information, with little sharing in between them. You had to know where to go to get information because there was no way to search it all.

In 1992, this was absolute magic for a geeky girl who wanted to meet people without going to a bar. Because the standard was so high to get on the internet in the first place, you knew the random person you were talking with was likely well-educated, literate, and had a geek streak. At the same time, it was impossible to know who you were talking with. We were all very protective of our privacy in those days, hiding behind online names that did not suggest our real names. There were no pictures on the internet, and even if there were, we had no way of getting our film photographs onto the computer... there were no scanners (or they were very expensive), and the consumer digital camera was not yet popular.

If you decided you liked the person you were talking with, you might share your real name, and later, send a stack of paper photographs by mail. Perhaps you'd talk by Unix Talk (Linux was in its infancy). It was fascinating, watching someone type each character on a screen, backspace to fix spelling errors, and erase sentences they decided they didn't want to "say".

When we shared nothing in 1992, strongly separarting our online lives from IRL (in real life), we now share photos, addresses, whereabouts, and deeply personal information with the world, without a second thought. How many of your Facebook "friends" are people you've never met in real life?

I've long said one calendar year is the same as 7 technology years (rather like dog years). In the last 20 calendar years, or 140 technology years, a few highlights:

• The 40 MB hard drive on my Mac LC died. I replaced it with a SCSI-connected Zip drive with a 100 MB Zip disk. This improved the computer's speed.
• Thumb drives which hold more than the computers did back in the lab in 1992. And we still don't back them up.
• The first commercial spam email, for an immigration law firm.
• AltaVista.
• Compuserve, AOL, Juno, and many other commercial networks.
• Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel struggled to understand that internet thing.
• "Digital Dirt"
• The Newton.
• Cell phones like bricks.
• Cell phones that only made phone calls.
• "I'm calling you from my car phone"
• Internet-enabled cell phones more powerful than the computers we used in 1992.

What are your highlights from the last 20 years? How did the internet change you?

now you're telling me
you're not nostalgic
then give me another word for it
you who are so good with words
and at keeping things vague
because I need some of that vagueness now
it's all come back too clearly
yes I loved you dearly
and if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust