The Early Years (1993 - 1996)

My experience with the internet goes back to the early 1990's. My first webpage was one of those lame sites with my picture, my hobbies and some rainbow colored graphics. I was in college, majoring in Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan. We were just starting to learn about the web and creating pages.

At the time, I wish I saw it coming because we were perfectly situated to get in early on the gold rush. During those years I tinkered in Java, Visual Basic, some very early Microsoft web server technologies (IDC?), O'Reilly's web server was also a popular one. We were building dynamic websites that pulled data from Oracle databases before we even knew what we were really doing. Everyone used Netscape. IE didn't even exist early on. I think it popped up around 1995.

I remember one class we were given an open assignment to develop something, anything we wanted. We just had to do it as a team. Our team built a java version of a news reader that pulled headlines from popular sites (sound familiar?), and scrolled them as clickable links. Yeah, we had no clue at the time... ;-)

I eventually graduated and left the exciting research world to enter corporate america.

That leads into my next post... The Time Machine...