More scrapbooking and archaeology. This is the membership card to Virtual World, which for a time in the early to mid 1990’s was a chain of networked game parlours. I remember that in the Pasadena branch they had a Mac there with an irc chat channel open, or was it an AOL chat window? Anyway, that was yet another very early taste of the internet.

Now, it looks like the first time I went into one of these was in 1994. I loved playing Red Planet. Everyone seemed to prefer the Mechwarrior games, but I liked Red Planet – it was a racing game – yes, you could blast your opponents, but you could also win by simply making the most laps. Wonderful game. I’m pretty sure all the machines were Macintoshes too.

As you can see, I used the handle “ArtLung” – which may be my actual earliest use of the term. That makes it roughly 7 1/2 years at least that I’ve been using the name.