тяжела и неказиста

When I was a postdoc at U.C. Berkeley, and first discovered the Web-- around 1992 and 1993, at exactly the same time everyone else did-- getting online was hard. It could take an hour to establish a TCP/IP connection-- an hour of hitting the redial button, and watching the little green lights flicker on the modem (why were there so many of those lights, I wondered? what were they saying that I couldn't understand?), waiting for that magic sound of the handshake between my modem and the network's.