Back in 1995, I got onto this internet thing — perhaps you’ve heard of it. They say it might catch on.

My favorite part of the internet, almost from the first time I used it, was e-mail. What fun it was to type out little messages that most of the time actually made it to the person I hoped would get them.

Sometimes the messages got lost in cyberspace, but even the post office misplaces a letter or two every now and then.

I had a big clunky laptop back then that I could hook up to a phone line and connect to the internet. This was especially useful when …