I’ve been reading a lot of blogs by people who’ve been around a loooooong time. Like Zeldman. His site’s been online for 6 years. That seems like a long time. How could anyone have been online that long? Then I remember… I’ve been online for 6 years too.
I haven’t had a site that whole time, but I’ve been building sites for four, and have had my own site off and on since I started my members.aol.com collection of animated gifs (why do I even admit that?).
When I started with AOL, we were doing the final beta tests of AOL 2.5, the first client with a web browser. 14.4 modems were brand new, and faaaa-aaaast. We worked on 486/66 machines with 16 megs of RAM and Windows 3.11. I used Netscape 2.0. A SoundBlaster 16 was the cutting edge. SGI was still the king. I had never heard of Linux. Windows 95 was in the future.
I remember when Win95 was released, I ran to Egghead (they used to have real stores, you know), bought it and Pittfall and spent the weekend installing and breaking it on my Pentium 60.
I remember the first site I built for anyone other than myself. I built a site for the Volunteer Center of Tucson. It had a FORM on it that sent mail. I thought I was SO cool, and what’s funny, so did they.
1995 is when it all really started happening. I’m glad I’ve been around this long and can’t wait to see what happens next. You know what’s funny… this makes me sound and feel old. I’m only 26. Go figure.