1992 - My first e-mail address

In 1992, I was hired by University Computer Services as a student employee of Bowling Green State University.  At this time, of course, the concept of electronic mail (e-mail) was largely unknown to the general public.  However, e-mail had been in use at universities and scientific and military institutions for about 30 years at this point.  By 1992, e-mail had started to be used by undergraduate students for personal communications.  Still, one needed to show an educational purpose to use e-mail (for what was, by that point, archaic reasons).  So I used my position at UCS to obtain the address This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

I sent my first e-mail to a fellow Windham High School alum who was at this time a computer student at Youngstown State University.  The lucky recipient was Steven Randlett.  Steve, like me, still works in the IT field; therefore, he might be considered my first colleague.

1993 - I learn about the Web

UCS was rare among university computing departments in that it chose to use Macs instead of PC's for desktop computing.  This proved fortuitous to my early involvement in this medium.  At the time, Apple led Microsoft in developing hypertext for use in software applications.  This was accomplished mainly through HyperCard, which was to the MacOS roughly what Access is to Windows.  HyperCard used hypertext-like functions to allow database users to move from one data "card" to another, much as web users move from web page to web page.

Because UCS used Macs, and because Macs used HyperCard, it wasn't long before UCS obtained other software applications which utilized hypertext (or, in the case of Gopher, hypertext-like functions).  Among these was Gopher, which was a way to present information over the Internet in a format not unlike the data "cards" of HyperCard.  Gopher, as the name suggests, was developed at the University of Minnesota.  The Gopher project claims to predate the Web.  This isn't exactly true:  Although Gopher was in widespread use before the Web, and although Gopher developed faster, researchers at CERN in Switzerland had been working for two years to develop a way to transmit documents in true hypertext over the Internet by the time the Gopher project was initiated in 1992.

Having taken an interest in HyperCard, I likewise was fascinated with Gopher.  However, I didn't like what I perceived as limitations in how Gopher was used.  It's not that these were limitations in the protocol itself, but it seemed to me that Gopher was not used in the same way as HyperCard was on local computers.  When the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed Mosaic, I finally discovered that the World Wide Web could be used to transmit graphics just as HyperCard included graphics in its database application.  And so it was that I learned about the Web.

Pizza!

Jeremy Zawodny was a co-worker of mine at UCS.  Besides the fact that he is now a Reader at the Search Engine Roundtable, as well as being a technical consultant for Yahoo!, Jeremy is an influential person for me personally.  He was, in essence, my first Internet Service Provider- ISP.  Jeremy connected his personal computer running Linux to BGSU's Internet connection using a static IP address, better known by its DNS record:  pizza.bgsu.edu.  He let several friends and co-workers connect to Pizza, and I consider myself very fortunate to have been one of them.

Sadly, Pizza is no more.  The machine has been offline for years, and I understand the original hard disk met an ignoble fate somewhere in the vicinity of Findlay, Ohio.  Fortunately, the Internet Archive has kept an incomplete copy of Pizza (linked above) in its famous Wayback Machine.  Jeremy may also have a copy, although I suspect he has more than a few projects which, by their nature, must take priority over any plans to put Pizza back online.  My pages on Pizza, which included what was very likely the first website (certainly the first fan site) for the Bowling Green Falcons football team, are likewise gone.  The experience I gained producing those pages, however, is invaluable.

I should mention before closing that the BG Falcons mini-site on Pizza did gain some amount of fame for one reason:  It was an early attempt at linking together all of the websites devoted to college football teams.  It was thus a prototype of today's web rings, and would probably enjoy a very high page rank on search engines today had I kept maintaining it.  This leads me to online/life lesson #2:  If you do something well, keep doing it.  Eventually, people will notice.

...and aardvarks!  [Oh my!]

As my college days drew to a close, somewhere around the Spring of 1995, my friend Michael Haynes and I thought that businesses could use the Web to market to consumers.  It sounds prophetic now, but really at the time it was painfully obvious.  Plus, by that time businesses were already getting online.  Yahoo! went from being a directory project at akebono.stanford.edu to being a commercial directory.  The Internet was going commercial, even despite the protests of my fellow young idealistic college students.  So why not join them?

Anyway, Michael and I decided we could make a living developing web sites for mid-size companies.  Now mind you, I was setting out to do what my friend and colleague Joe Rinehart had already started doing-- successfully-- the year before.  In my defense, I will say that I didn't know Joe in 1995, even though he was founding config.com in the same county where I grew up.  To our fault, Michael and I didn't know a lot about the early ISP's and e-commerce providers when we launched our company.  We also didn't know much about trademark infringement.  What we did know was that we needed a catchy name to attract businesses from the phone book.  We thought the normal trick of running together a bunch of A's for no apparent reason was seedy, so we considered the name Aardvark Internet Consulting.

Now because there is an Aardvark, Inc. which then was operating as Aardvark Media Productions in nearby Findlay, Ohio, I should state that when we first developed the name, we were unaware of this other Aardvark.  When we discovered Aardvark Media, we naively thought they would not be operating in the same trade as we were operating.  This brings us to online/life lesson #3:  If something is worth doing, it's worth knowing what you're doing.  We're fortunate in that we were able to release the name of our business to the present Aardvark, Inc. without any bad repercussions to either of our businesses.  I understand that Aardvark started providing Internet services in 1996, and that they're doing rather well now.  Good for them.

1997 - My partnership with Yahoo!

I had an account at Yahoo! before the company even provided its legendary free e-mail service.  If you look at my profile on Yahoo!, you'll see that I've been a member since 26 September 1997.  According to this article by Newsbytes News Network, Yahoo! began offering e-mail on 8 October 1997.  As I mention above, I'd been using Yahoo! since its days as a directory on Stanford University's servers; some time in 1994 was when I'd started using Yahoo!

Why?  The reason is simple:  They offered a good service at a reasonable price (in this case, free).  It's important for people in business to know that customer loyalty comes from offering your customers the best deal you can, and doing so over time.  If you can do it at an extremely low price, that's great; but in most cases, businesses need to be mindful of their ability to offer the service to customers at that price for long periods of time.  Yahoo! has offered the majority of their services for free since 1995.  They've set that expectation.  The so-called "information highway" is littered with dot.com bubble businesses that thought they could set customer expectations and change them quickly.  Yahoo! is still in business-- and still has me as a loyal customer-- because they lived up to their expectations, not because they offer a cheap service.