Web

Me and the Web

Long story. Skip it and look at the links to the left, unless technical odysseys and historical perspective intrigue you.

The internet entered my life in college. The email account associated with my computer science minor allowed me to communicate with people around the world. But I didn't. I had no idea how to find any of them, or what to say to them when I found them. I was too busy trying to figure out why VAX/VMS was so cryptic when my roommate's Macintosh was so easy....

Long after college, I subscribed to the "walled garden" of CompuServe, carefully constructing my sessions to save connect time charges, enjoying all the services offered in that closed little world (except the pricy ones). Sending email to another system, say MCI mail, was an interesting puzzle that could kill an afternoon. When the worldwide web began to play host to genuinely interesting sites, the spectre of connect charges prevented me the luxury of extended exploration. I became aware of local service providers through acquaintances with other internet fans. They didn't have all the bundled content that CompuServe offered, but I began to realize that the web was growing fast enough to soon make that a moot point. Eventually, CompuServe figured out how to make web access easier and cheaper, but by then it was too late. I was tired of having a pair of unmemorable numbers as my email address. And I was ready to see what the internet had become.

My Interaccess account allowed me to see the web more often for much less. And the web quickly grew to satisfy the information needs CompuServe had once provided me.

I'd sworn off programming after college, hating what it and my perfectionism could do to me. Several morning programming sessions ended in a scene from Dorian Gray in the wee hours of the next morning, always without me having eaten or having visited the "water closet" (or the "Winston Churchill", as the Kurds like to say). I've learned that most programmers can tell this tale. But the simplicity of HTML made me want to try again. Unlike Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Scheme and PL/1, it couldn't possibly subvert my expectations in subtle ways and relentless drips and drops! So I dove in.

I was fine until I learned Perl.

But one thing has led to another and now I keep seeing that painting in the wee hours of the morning. The bright side is that I've rediscovered how much I enjoy my perfectionism.