Waves

Still looking through my childhood archives; this poem was written the year I broke my arm, which I think means I was about seven at the time. It was certainly before I went to middle school at the age of eight. [Edit: yes, from external evidence I broke my arm when I was seven.]

There are big waves and little waves,
Green waves and blue.
Waves you jump over,
Waves you drive through,
Waves that rise up
Like a great water wall,
Waves that swell softly
And don't break at all.
Waves that can whisper,
Waves that can roar,
And tiny waves that run at you
All along the shore.

I feel it shows considerable talent and delicacy in the choice and use of the rhymes, given the age of the author ;-)
I always did prefer rhyming/scanning poetry, although I wrote a bit of 'free verse' because our teachers heavily encouraged it and frowned on iambics. (I suppose they felt that anything else was likely to warp the children's spontaneous creativity into doggerel, but I strongly suspect that it was also the fashion of the era.)

My first encounter with the Internet

This is what the Internet (Usenet not the World-wide Web) looked like to a computer novice circa 1994...

The Internet is a sort of computer network which R__ and O___ keep talking about, that I finally managed to get onto. It reminds me of a sort of cross between a multi-user telephone line and the letters page of a newspaper. Basically people seem to post messages and remarks in appropriate newsgroup headings (like 'bonsai' or 'asimov' or 'british-accent' and other people put up replies and comments. It is full of Americans because apparently it extends all the way across the United States as well as reaching here.