Born in 1995: The Internet Teen
One Modem at a Time
Born in 1995? Then you remember the screech of the dial-up modem, feeding your Neopet before it starved, and learning HTML just to fix your MySpace page.
The story
Rina Macaraeg's first screen name was RinaBina95, and she picked it herself at four years old, one letter at a time, while her father stood behind her and spelled. R, like Rogelio. Like Daddy.
Born in 1995: The Internet Teen is a first-person life story of a Filipino-American girl born in March 1995 in Everett, Washington. Her father, a Navy veteran, works as a machinist at Boeing. Her mother is a front-end supervisor at Costco. Her Lola came from Quezon City and lives with the family. Rina grows up with one eye on the family computer and one on the people who love her.
The book follows the first generation that never knew a world without the internet. There is a school morning on the West Coast in September 2001 that begins before anyone wakes up. There is a Boeing phone call that saves a family's year, a Wii that makes a grandmother the best bowler in south Everett, and a night in a dungeon in World of Warcraft with a healer named Marcus, whose real face she does not see for three weeks. A Seahawks playoff game, a Super Bowl win, and a summer of Pokemon Go have her father walking four hundred miles for a game he has never played.
Then there is an acceptance letter from DigiPen that her mother opens at the mailbox in the rain, a lockdown that begins ten minutes from home, a grandmother who moves into care, and the early morning that Rina's own game comes out and her father goes to work as usual.
Chapter titles come from video-game language, from Press Start to Boss Fight to Continue? A timeline of 1995, famous people born that year, and a look at what the year means in other cultures are included at the back.
It is a warm, funny, and moving gift for anyone who has been online since before they could spell.
A few things that happened in 1995
- 1995-01-17 — The Great Hanshin earthquake strikes Kobe, Japan
- 1995-04-19 — The Oklahoma City bombing
- 1995-05-23 — Sun Microsystems releases the Java programming language
- 1995-07-16 — Amazon, a new company in Seattle, sells its first book online
- 1995-08-24 — Microsoft releases Windows 95
Also born in 1995
- Timothée Chalamet — Actor; Call Me by Your Name, Dune, and Wonka
- Kendall Jenner — Model and television personality; one of the world's highest-paid models
- Dua Lipa — Singer and songwriter; "New Rules," "Levitating," and three Grammy Awards
- Nikola Jokić — Basketball center; three-time NBA Most Valuable Player and leader of the Denver Nuggets' 2023 championship
- Patrick Mahomes — Football quarterback; led the Kansas City Chiefs to three Super Bowl titles