First website is 25 yrs old

An interesting favorite early interactive camera on the net was the Rome Labs Snowball Camera. Not quite 25 years old, but it was a big "hit" (no pun intended).

Did you ever come across the coffee pot?

Some guy had rigged a camera to view the coffee pot in the lunch room. He was tired of walking all the way down only to find an empty pot.
Somehow the link was made public and everybody world wide could check the coffee.
For me that was the first wow factor, the possibilities etc.

Working in high tech at the time I was also an early adapter. Went to an internal seminar on the web in early 90s and a few weeks later I wrote my first web page for the intranet we were running in the building. No one outside of the company could get to it but it was kind fun to have my own private Home page with my favorite links on it. Taught my Son how to write simple html to create his own local Home page in early 93 (High School Senior). He works in internet service now for a big IT company that bought his small IT company a few years ago.

Back then there was a web site that listed all the new websites that came online each day/week. Can you imagine that those numbers were so low that you could scan through them every once in awhile to see if anything interesting had been added.

JIm...

What is this WEB-thing, and why would I want or need it?

Look here, Uncle Jeff, you can go "on-line", play games, search the WEB, and spend hours on "forums" talking to others from around the world.

OK....I guess it is pretty cool, but there is no way I am spending my hard earned money just to surf, talk, and play.

Fast-forward a couple years....thumb broken, middle of winter, I am stuck at home, bored out of my ever-lovin mind. I used my good hand to run a phone line over to that old computer taking up space in the basement, popped in an AOL disk...

whirllllll, beeeep, piingggggg, chirrrrrrpppppppp.

WELCOME JEFFREY.

The most useFULL and useLESS item I now spend WAY to much money on, ensuring that my FIOS QUANTUM keeps me connected.

I didn't need a SMART phone either...of course I now have a love/hate relationship with it. I love the instant access to information, I hate the instant access to ME. Beepers were much more usefull...no matter how many times you sent a message declaring a 911...I could still claim I wasn't near a phone to call you.

I first went online in 1993 using CompuServe and Prodigy with my homebuilt Intel 486 DX2 66Mhz PC.

RV.net on May 11 2000 :


Google in 1998 :

I miss the NeXT computer. The UI of it was black and white, even when color monitors became the norm, functioned extremely well, and was very responsive. It could do multimedia E-mail well before the days of MIME.

Even with security, NeXTStep (the OS that it ran) was leap years ahead. It used E-mail encryption called FastECC which had 2015-era security/encryption back in 1992.

thanks
interesting reading

And before that I was wasting my time calling up bulletin boards with a 1200 baud modem.