Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

How I came to love the Internet (again)

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:3/23/1999; 6:41:04 AM
Topic:the first time i ever saw...
Msg #:4400 (In response to 4397)
Prev/Next:4397 / 4401

My first experience with the Internet was in Madison in 1977, sending email to people at Bell Labs in New Jersey and doing my first net application, Bells-for-All. I got to meet one of my heroes at the time, Dennis Ritchey, and eventually talked with him on the phone to tell him about my project to do a structured editor for Pascal running on his OS (Unix).

My second first experience with the Internet (after drifting off to PCs where networking was a joke) was at a conference in southern California (Esther's? Stewart's?) where I got a demo from Doug Michels from SCO. He showed me the NCSA site and explained how the web worked. I laughed at him when he showed me a URL. I said Mac users would never go for that. (I was thinking to myself, "That's a Unix file name!" and "Oh my god, they're back!")

I went to see him a few weeks later, and then went to see Sally Atkins at Stanford. Doug showed me how HTML works and Sally showed me the Palo Alto Weekly website. It took a few weeks of puzzling to figure out what was going on, and then I knew this what I was going to be working on for the forseeable future. That was all in the spring-summer of 1994.

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