The internet grew out of ideas that people started implementing in the 1970’s. The first web browser appeared on my old operating system of choice, NeXTSTEP, in 1991. It grew slowly into something useful, and by the end of the 1990’s had already become an indispensable part of our lives.

I had grown up around Apple ][’s, even though my parents never owned one. By the time I got out of high school I had a TRS-80, which I never found particularly useful, and much preferred spending my time with game consoles. I missed the whole Commodore/Amiga thing. If I hadn’t, perhaps I would have fallen in love with computers sooner.

By the end of the 1980’s I had a 386, running MS-DOS. I have to admit that aside from playing Wing Commander and Leisure Suit Larry games I never did find it very useful. The mystique of the text based adventure game was lost on me, and I much preferred the arcade for games. Of course, I had owned every videogame console since the Mattel Intellivision, and by 1990 thought the Sega Genesis provided a vastly superior gaming experience to my clunky, expensive 386.

So for the next few years I let my 386 languish on the desk and confined my human-hardware interfacing to console gaming. By the time Sony’s Playstation came out, I was feeling pretty good about it. This is why I liked games all these years, and I felt somehow vindicated, because games were becoming mainstream and I didn’t feel like such a loser for liking them anymore.

Every now and then during those early years a computer game would come out that would interest me, but I would just wait. The big hits usually got console ports, which usually sported superior graphics anyway, at least during the Genesis-SNES era. In ignorant bliss I missed the whole Doom phenomenon.

All that changed when I started coming across screenshots of id Software’s Quake. I don’t know what it was about those screenshots. It was like looking at pictures of some exotic, foreign locale, like a planetscape from a distant galaxy. I had to have that game.

So it was that in the early months of 1997 I purchased a Pentium 200 and the very first 3dfx graphics card and plunged headfirst into an 18 month long obsession with all things Quake. I would wake up early so I could play before work. I would stay up far too late playing. I would fall asleep in my recliner in front of the computer, wake up and play some more. To this day, I have never had as much fun playing an online FPS as I did playing classic Quake those first 18 months. There was actually a debate back then, and people were falling into two camps: Quake vs. Duke Nukem. Please. Duke Nukem? heh, ok whatever.

The internet was a side effect of Quake for me, and I’m sure for many others that dove headfirst into computing just so they could play Quake online. Like many of my peers, it wasn’t long before surfing, irc and free unix-like operating systems had become a big part of my life as well. It was early 1997, and the web was still pretty primitive. Amazon was around, but they were an online bookseller back then, not the gargantuan global market they have become. Ebay was there as well, and let me tell you, it was great before the herd came. You could find anything, cheap, on Ebay back then. All the big businesses had an early web presence as well.

As for the rest of the web at that time, it seemed largely comprised of BBS’s and mailing lists, warez sites, porn and computer/console gaming sites. All the things a budding geek needed, I guess. Nobody had broadband yet, most people were on AOL, Compuserve or Prodigy, and those lucky few who were on university T1 lines were like pirate captains, swashbuckling across the internet like titans. I was booted off my first shell account, a Digital Unix server named “Thor” at the University of Nebraska for running BitchX and an eggdrop bot, after several warnings. I had the processes well hidden, but to my misfortune the sysadmin actually knew what they were doing and I didn’t fool her for a minute.

Anyway, after 719 words of meandering reminiscence, back to the topic. There are two sites I have had bookmarked since 1997 that have always been among my bookmarks, and are still required daily reading 11 years later. There was no such thing as a weblog back then, but I’m sure these two sites had as much to do with the evolution of the blog as any sites that were around in the beginning.

The first, Bluesnews, was the best of the Quake-devoted websites. Unlike the others, the proprietor Steve Heaslip has managed to keep the site the same, but change it enough that it remains relevant in a post-Quake world. Steve may also be one of the first guys that managed to make a living off his website, paving the way for all the others who would follow. His site layout is simple, easy to navigate, and it is easy to find what you’re looking for. He also religiously updates every day, throughout the day, making it one of those sites that warrants hitting several times a day, and you will hit it several times a day, because he still has no feed.

The second site, Slashdot, started in September 1997, meaning I must have been reading it from the very beginning. This site is the model for the blog. All things tech, with a nerdy, computer/IT slant, gaming, unix and unix-like operating systems. Slashdot is your portal for everything that matters if your are into that sort of thing, and I sure was. Slashdot may not have introduced the idea of comments and community to the web, but I can’t remember anyone who was doing it before they were. Like Bluesnews, Slashdot updates throughout the day, making it a must frequent visit. Their design won’t win any awards, but it’s always been clean and good, and they very well may have created the first content management system. The guys behind Slashdot deserve every bit of the success they’ve enjoyed. They were the pioneers that created the formula we are all using today. When I started my website, my original goal was to be Slashdot for the audiophile and home theater enthusiast. If you want to see where all of this started, just go poke around on Slashdot. It hasn’t changed that much since 1997.

The web has changed a lot in the last 15 years, and in ways it hasn’t. It’s now mostly a collection of blogs instead of BBS’s and mailing lists, torrent sites instead of warez, porn and computer/console gaming sites. Of course, a lot more is happening on today’s web, and it is a source for just about any piece of information you need at the moment, in addition to being a world market.

Blogs aren’t going anywhere. They allow everyone to create something in a way that personal web pages and MySpace never did. Being an arrogant, disdainful prick, as much distaste as I had for blogs early on, I now freely admit that the most of the information I’m looking for nowadays is more often than not derived from blogs, and the blogging community gives me a chance to connect to real people whose knowledge I can draw upon and share knowledge with. Thanks for creating something useful, and hopefully I’ve done the same.

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