Looking back to 1994!
I came across this interesting reflective post looking back at 1994, The Internet Year in Review - 1994, which was one of the most definitive years in my life. I found the Internet in 1992 at NC State, Go Wolfpack!, and just could not get away from it. In fact the first official date I had with my wife I spend an hour showing her how to find things online. Why she stuck with me after that night I do not know.
I remember using Archie, AltaVista and this new directory called Yahoo back then to find things. You could find files on Gopher (much like Napster used to be), and news groups were hot. Believe it or not I was tagged by my fellow students and the faculty in my college to write a book on how to use the Internet for every student on the college to reference. It was about 100 pages and pretty quickly outdated by the end of the 1995 spring semester, but hey it was my first book.
Believe it or not I actually met and formed a little pen pal relationship through the ACC News Groups with a wide reciever at Florida State that year. That may seem odd to everyone, but I was a player for NC State's team and so we sort bonded a little about our experiences. Not sure where he is today, but he was computer science major a year behind me.
1994 was the year I finished undergrad and started grad school. I had access to a 10 Mb pipe, only limited by the network card, and a whole university of engineers that really embedded a strong desire to push this Internet thing. I also had an office/lab for my graduate research with my own computer and I would stay in my lab some nights until 4-5AM hunting things online. I even started building my own pages and started working up potential solutions for plant floors based on what I saw I could do with Internet technologies. I even got to pitch it to a potential invester one day, but he did not have a clue what I was talking about, so that did not go far.
Today, things have progressed nicely. Some of the things I saw potential for 13 years ago still have not come to be, but we are getting closer. As a wise 35 year old I can understand why some things have not taken hold, but others I just do not understand. I miss 1994, graduating, meeting my wife, starting for a major college football team, watching OJ clog traffic on the LA freeways and the beginnings of www.ESPN.com, what a year! Let's hope 2007 is as good of a year for me and you.