Remembrance

Not long ago I came across the box and sales receipt for the first piece of wireless networking hardware I ever bought. It's an 802.11b PCMCIA card that I still have but hardly ever use anymore, its having been supplanted by 802.11g and laptops with built-in wireless capability. Finding that receipt, however, led me into thinking back to the beginnings of my interest in all this-and contemplation of much more.

All that summer, I'd been gleaning everything I could from the Web about this strange new thing called Wi-Fi by some, intrigued by the possibility of accessing the Internet away from home without having to find a phone line-indeed, without resorting to wires at all. The prospect of going online in a library without having to sign up to use one of their computers-or leave a convenient seat near the bookshelves or microfilm machine to do so-was of particular interest. I couldn't help but wonder how long it would be before any of metropolitan Kansas City's public libraries would have this. Reading about what was happening on both coasts was fascinating; how soon would it be before there were local coffeehouses or other establishments offering free Internet without wires? And would a volunteer group arise here in the metro, as had one in New York City, for instance, to make a quixotic effort to unwire the entire community? One soon did, listing what it said were numerous locations open to anyone with a wirelessly enabled laptop.

Which explains why, when one of the big-box electronics retailers advertised that card one Sunday for a jaw-dropping $80, less a mail-in rebate as I recall, I went there straight after work the following afternoon. Right there in the parking lot after the purchase I pulled my two-month old laptop out of the trunk and fired it up to install the card and its drivers, so eager was I just to see if it would pick anything up. It didn't. Undaunted, I drove home with the laptop running on the seat beside me ("wardrivng" at that time had not yet earned its now well-deserved disrepute), but it didn't find anything then either. Once home, I went online to find and print out the listings of all the local sites where free Wi-Fi was said to be available, to take with me in the morning as a guide for a planned expedition after work.

I would leave work many hours early the next day, but I would not take that side trip-not then, and not for a very long time. Indeed, in the weeks and months afterward, I sometimes wondered if anything as trivial as wireless Internet would ever matter again. And to this very day I shudder at the memory of how the world changed so much in the course of only a couple of hours that next morning, every time I think of the date on that receipt.

You see, I bought that wireless card exactly five years ago yesterday, on September 10, 2001.