My Online Journey * Dec 14, 2002
I've sometimes been asked about my online journey -- how I came to have the Emerson/Thoreau material online, for instance (and why it places well in search engines and directories). I have a 6-digit ICQ number, which says something about being a pioneer!
Following is a relatively-short version of the very long story of my online journey -- it's done primarily from memory, so there may be some discrepancies in dates. In Internet years, I've been around forever -- even though on the calendar it's not so long.
Yes, I have a couple of those .us domains -- but don't use them separately. The purpose was mainly for keeping them from others. (My mother would NOT have approved of such hoarding.) jone.us, jonelewis.us and nashcat.us (the latter being my husband's nickname since the 1960s). Someday they'll be of use, I'm sure ... like the many boxes of junk in the storage room in Manassas, but they don't take up nearly the space. ;-)
My online journey:
1) In the 1970s, I was able to "check out" a suitcase-sized terminal and take it home from work, when I worked in the computer department at Sears, and "go online" through an interesting system called CompuServe. That meant I could do some overtime work from home instead of going downtown on a weekend.
2) I was first online personally in the 1980s, with CompuServe and some bbs's. (Never tried to "pluralize" that before, I guess. Not sure if that's the right form!) I just threw out my 1200 baud modem -- a great leap over the 600 baud modem it replaced, and it was so much smaller, too!
3) Also had email at work in the 1980s -- it started out as a kludgy system with all caps only and only could reach people on our system. But it was wonderful when I was managing a department that had offices in three widespread states. And it was very nice when the support department figured out how I could call in and use my Compaq luggable computer as a dumb terminal over the phone line, and keep in light touch every couple of days during a 2-month maternity leave -- my boss was not exactly "up" on what our department did, nor was he of the management type that most of the people in my department wanted to work much with. Most of the people worked relatively independently, so this worked out to about 30 minutes three times a week.
4) I got AOL in 1993, and then found out about the Internet. At AOL I quickly ended up volunteering as a forum and chat host after paying a $300 bill one month before AOL went to a flat-fee-per-month scheme.
5) I found out about the Net, but couldn't figure out how to get onto it directly for a while. But there was an email gateway -- you requested a page via email, and then when the email came back, there was a way to indicate with an X which link to "click on" by return email, and get that page sent. Very slow, all text, but at least I was "on the Net." I still have a few floppy disks with data I saved in case the Net went away. Well, "a few" is recent -- I just threw out about 90% of a box of 5.25 inch floppies with data on from that time.
And yes, in those days I was going through an early and kludgy version of Windows using Trumpet Winsock.
6) Then I got an account for a now-defunct-because-absorbed local access provider. Within two months I had a small web page up and running -- I had written something about Emerson and Thoreau, was amazed that there really was info on the Net about them, but it had been very difficult to find. So I put my bookmarks on a page, then played with the new toy of HTML to get them to display in an orderly sequence. I was so excited -- there were actually 3-5 people a day who found the pages, and often wrote to me to tell me they were useful! I felt it was SO worth it to have done that work! I even opened a web site there for the religious denomination that I work for, as a directory on that personal account. I also put up one of those neat new "in" things -- a personal home page, which didn't change much in design until December 2002.
7) On June 17, 1996, I bought a domain name, pbat.com, from a place called iserver.com. I began moving anything there, including my email. (I still mainly use an address at that domain name for my personal email.)
8) The following April I added a domain name on the same server (virtual hosting was great) for the religious denomination -- and was able, because we were early, to get a three-letter abbreviation that's the right one. Almost impossible to do that anymore. In 1998 they got their own virtual server, and I also added to the account a couple of other domains/servers resold to others, making the account subject to a nice discount.
9) Also in 1997, I think, I put my Emerson/Thoreau sites on Geocities. I figured out how to get around their one-site-per-person rule, because it was really one-site-per-email-address, and experimented with web design by putting up several more sites there, including my quotations that had been gradually accumulating on my local system. When I put a page counter on the quotes page, I discovered it was even more popular than the Emerson/Thoreau pages, though I'd done nothing to promote it. (T&E were now getting about 50 PVs a day -- I also thought that was pretty cool.) A virtual server had very tight storage limits, and Geocities was, most importantly, free. And in the early days, practically ad-free -- just a banner ad which seemed fair. It was especially nice when they came up with a point system that I eventually cashed out for $1200 in gift certificates -- totally "found" money since I hadn't intended to make anything back for my efforts there.
10) Eventually, virtual storage space became cheaper, and the ads on Geocities became more obtrusive, and they cancelled their point system. I transferred my quotations page to Tripod where they were paying for PVs and for a couple of months was making $200/month on something I updated once a year. Talk about "making money while you sleep." That, plus signing up as an Amazon affiliate, soon payed the virtual server fees so at least my hobby wasn't costing much.
10a) I moved The Transcendentalists off of Geocities sometime in 1999-2000 -- can't remember exactly when. At that time, I also created the Emerson Texts site, when a site that had had the only complete set of the texts disappeared. So I took an out-of-copyright version of Emerson, did some editing to correct obvious errors, and made them searchable, separating the different essays.
11) I also began taking in some consulting work -- since 1993 I've been paid half time at my ministry work, with 18 months off looking for a new position and leaving my marriage and old home. But that ministry work remains my first love, first commitment, and, most months, pays as much or more than the consulting and other work I do.
12) My About Women's History site started in 1999. I had actually been recruited the year before for another site, but didn't apply. Women's history as a topic appealed more, as it seemed to hold more potential for a wide range of topics (different times, different places, different fields).
I'm sure someday I'll look back on 2002 as a milestone when content management came into vogue, as well as weblogs and blogging software (like this Movable Type). I'm sure that December 2002 will seem someday like a significant shift in homepage format! (Almost all the "content" from my old homepage is now in the links column on the front page of this site -- and there's now more there, too. Plus, I wasn't keeping that old page up much -- it still had help links for Windows 95 on it!)
Related items:
• A Warning: Don't Install Earthlink's Pop-Up Stopper - Feb 07, 2003• Another of those 'which are you' quizzes - Feb 06, 2003
• Getting rid of ad-ware - Feb 06, 2003
• Google is a Harsh Mistress - Jan 21, 2003
• What IS a Weblog? - Dec 14, 2002
