Random Access - Friday, March 26, 1999First Net
It changed my life, and then someby Chris Gulker
My desktop computer chimed as it re-booted... a happy-computer icon appeared on the screen.I was getting excited. A few minutes before I'd added some software to the machine, a free control panel, which had required typing some mysterious-looking blocks of numbers separated by periods. It was the spring of 1994.
When that Macintosh came back up, it could see the Internet. I'd arrived.
And I was very, very curious. Connected through an expensive, state-of-the-art 9600 baud modem, I watched as the mysterious Internet, in the form of a Web page, downloaded for the first time, slowly, in buggy, crash-prone software called Mosaic. My Net journey had begun.
It's not that the experience changed my life: the surprise is that any shreds of my pre-Net life are left. My job changed, my life changed, even my dog changed. For years I'd been more or less happily making my way in the newspaper business. Less than a year after that event I was in a new job, in a completely different industry and a very different tax bracket.
More changed, and changed more quickly, in the 10 months after I connected to the global network than had changed in the previous 26 years of my working life. And I'm not alone - lots of my colleagues are in jobs that didn't exist 5 years ago, like webmaster and Web site developer.
At first I was a little timid while going forth in this strange new domain. The 1994 Net was still a stronghold of scientists, academics and computer geeks, and there was a whole new jargon to master. Net denizens feared being pegged for a dreaded "newby". One didn't want to breach "netiquette" for fear of being "flamed". Acronyms abounded: http, WWW, ftp , IRC, smtp, TCP/IP.
But, slowly I mustered a modicum of confidence, and began emailing the authors of some of the interesting Web pages I saw. One email went off to a Stanford student named Jerry Yang who'd begun keeping lists of interesting Web pages on his school computer called yahoo.stanford.edu.
Another email, and I was invited to Palo Alto, California where kids named Kim Polese and Patrick Naughton showed me something called HTML, or hypertext markup language. It wasn't so different from formatting codes that early word processors had used, like the ones that had run on my Apple II.
Last year, Jerry Yang funded a chair in computer science at his alma mater. Kim Polese, a member of the original Java team, has been on the cover of Time magazine. Patrick Naughton's startup was bought by Disney for millions.
And it wasn't long after that Palo Alto visit that I was writing Web pages of my own and pestering the boss to put up a Web site. And it only took a couple of months for that Web site to register more than a quarter-million hits a day.
New worlds opened - when I heard there'd been an earthquake in Kobe, Japan, I turned to my Web browser, not the TV set. While reports by conventional media were still sketchy, I watched as students at Kobe City University put up first eye-witness reports, then horrifying photos frame-grabbed from a video camera, while telephones and other communications link were still down.
I had the sense that I was witnessing a powerful new medium coming of age. If only I'd known just how powerful!
My life began to move at Web time. I met people on line, shared ideas, collaborated on projects. I discovered that people who wouldn't take my phone calls happily returned my email. New ideas, and new people, sprang into my life at an ever-increasing pace. Every new batch of email brought surprises.
I started to travel more - to meet the people and exchange ideas about the uses of this new medium. I've read that there's a positive correlation between email and travel - emailers travel more. My morning train rides to the office were swapped for frequent airplane trips to sometimes-exotic locales. So much for predictions of isolation born of online usage.
I discovered that it was easy to meet like-minded people - just put up a Web page (and thus was www.gulker.com born). I, and thousands like me, could publish and reach thousands more, without owning press machinery of broadcast towers.
As the Net grew wildly, there was a scramble for expertise. If you knew only a little, you knew a whole lot more than most. Opportunity was afoot. Friends began taking jobs with little companies that rose with astonishing speed. Finally, while standing at a computer event that I'd heard of through email, an offer came that was just too good too pass up.
From first Net connection to a whole new life, seems like an eyeblink. I've never looked back - I haven't had time!
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