Hello, ASL? : My Internet Story
Life before 1998, the phrase “Hello, ASL please” meant nothing to me. I didn’t even know that ASL was a conversation starter. Then the Internet took the Philippines by storm, we find every household owning at least one modem connected to their personal computer that’s linked to a phone line. We began with a dial-up connection that had very limited access that we even had to list down our usage to make sure we won’t go beyond the allotted hours. Back then; all we did was to create an email account, surf via Yahoo.com and to log on to mIRC where we met online friends here and abroad. Thus, we learned that ASL actually stands for Age, Sex and Location -- the first three things you ask someone in a chat room. When our dial-up connection would frequently become intermittent, we would buy a handful of prepaid cards from our neighborhood convenient store to make sure that we can still connect to the Internet especially when our homework would call for some research. Little did we know tha...