Posted by
Hardcopy on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 7:20:29 PM
Ok, everyone has a blog, or a home page, or a you tube page or whatever. Except me that is, which is pretty ironic given the givens. I first got onto the Internet before it was even named that, before Gore invented it. I hacked into it (yes hacked, though I really wasn't aware it was until many years later when I realized that the method I used to get in was a back door to it all.
Those first years I didn't do a whole lot, there wasn't a whole lot to do after all. Then Gopher was invented (think the WWW which lists instead of pages), then the WWW. Then everything for me changed in 1995 when I started work at an ISP locally. He asked me if I had experience with Unix, I said yes, even though the reality was I had use Unix to read my email and use Lynx (precursor to Internet Explorer). He needed me to know how to edit html, I told him I could even though the only thing I did was edit my bookmark file a little bit.
The first day I started he sat me in front of the main server and said "redo our home page". I sat there in front of an expensive server that held everything for the company. (small company to be sure, but still I was scared). I proceeded to do what I had always done with a computer. I learned as I went. I recreated the home page, then the site. Over the course of the next few years I learned it all.
In the late 1990's I was working for an online auction company (ebay wannabe) with no real future. I had created a brandable portal (think Yahoo with your company's logo but quite a bit more simple) in my spare time (yes that is the type of stuff I do with my spare time, now shhh and let me finish my story, it is boring enough without interruptions). A company called dotNow was offering free internet access but their home page said "coming soon". I called them up and offered them my portal. Within a week I was driving to Iowa (I have never seen that much corn before in my life) and collecting $4,000 in the parking lot of a bank. I was then given their dialer/ad software. I rebuilt it from the ground up (once again not knowing a bit of Visual Basic it was programmed in at the start). I spent the next several months working for this spastic guy who always had a lot of money and paid me a lot of money and had me travelling all around to meet with investors. It was crazy and exciting. I took $10,000 and bought a house. I got an office overlooking Lake Michigan. It was a sweet time.
Of course it had to end. It quickly became apparent the guy was as crooked as global warming. Stuff he said just didn't quite add up. Finally we cut ties with him entirely. I then bounced around writing search engines, content aggregators and other techie stuff. Then I did a WYSIWYG version of Geocities and a few other things. At the end of 2002 I was burned out on the whole dot com thing. Every single dot com I worked for stiffed me for my last check. Once I wasn't working anymore they just stopped returning calls and money. It was ridiculous and a bit sad.
I decided then I wanted a product that was tangible, none of this nebulous "We'll figure out how to make money later" mentality that fueled the dot com explosion as well as the bust that inevitably followed. I started a video store. Now the whole internet thing is just a hobby. I still write ridiculously complex programs for no other reason than the idea strikes me. I still have never had a home page of my own. I have created pages numbering in the thousands for other people and I have never had one of my own.
Ok, that brings you pretty much up to date with my professional career such as it is. Now I am going to spout off my opinions here. Should be interesting because one never knows what I am gonna say.