The Web Has Just Begun…
Monday, November 5th, 2007
It hasn’t been that long since the web started to take off.
I turn 30 today. Like many people, I tend to look back on my birthdays to see where life is taking me. It reminds me back 10 years ago, when I was a student at The University of Texas.
It was about 10 years ago that I registered my first domain name. I paid $70 of beer money to Network Solutions to register the domain.
In retrospect, those were the early days of the web. Consider my freshmen dorm. The web was taking college campuses by storm, and everyone tried to connect to the internet over dial-up modems. There were only a hundred outgoing lines at my dorm of 1,000 students. We would dial-in on our computers with auto-redial turned on and then wait a couple hours until we got connected. All for a 28.8 connection.
Back then, it wasn’t cool to do much on the web. It was geeky to plan your weekend by going to a web site to look for events. And you certainly wouldn’t try to pick up a girl online. Compare that to today, when college kids hookup via Facebook and MySpace (not to mention dozens of dating sites). I remember talking to my friends online via some old-school chatroom software. Or if someone was online when you were, you’d e-mail them back and forth constantly. Instant messaging? What’s that?
I’m not trying to sound like a grouchy old man. After all, I’m only 30. But it makes me realize how far the web has come in only a decade. And, for all intents and purposes, the web as we know it has only been around for a third of my life. But it is quickly becoming central to our media intake and our social outlet.
That trend is only going to intensify. That, my friends, is good news for those of us that are investing in the “maps” that lead us on the web.
No related posts.
Happy Birthday!
We all remember our first domain name.
And where the Web and ourselves have come along way, the journey is truly beginning…
mp/m
Happy birthday, Andrew!
wish you a very happy birthday andrew!
its itneresting that i celebrated mine jus a couple of days ago and am pndering voer the new course ont he web i have charted for myself and the possibilities it has in store for me. Reading your post today jus makes me realise how magnanmous the whole opportunity is.. and how we are on the threshold of something big..
we’re both scorpio’s Andrew.. my bday is 10/31..
-peter
You share a birthday with Daniel Mejia Ruzini of DomainsBot. Two great people.
I remember having a Compuserve account when the internet was all text based (no graphics yet). Wasn’t much to find on the web at that time so I dropped the account. There were so many opportunities available then to register quality domain names. If I only knew then …
Thanks for the birthday wishes.
Carlton, didn’t Compuserver charges something like $5 for every hour beyond 5 hours a month that you used the service? And all for a chat room and some “channels” of content.
Happy birthday!
I started registering domains before I even had a computer by making domain lists and running over to a friend’s house to check them. That was back in 1995.
But I’m older than you – 38 