More Ancient History Review

cth: "...We finally got internet briefly..."

I keep coming back to that line. I think it's hilarious. As the saying goes, I do not understand those words in that order! Briefly?? How could you not have the ubiquitous Intrawebz?? howl the young'n's. It's as if you said, yeah, we tried that new-fangled electricity stuff for a few days….

I had been on CompuServe. They (finally) opened up an email portal to the net. Through that email portal, a correspondent friend kept encouraging me to "get on the web." (Thanks, Matt!) I did not get it, though, until CompuServe opened its own web adjunct, SpryNet.com. That's when I finally left the sheltered confines of CS and launched out into the ungoverned seas of teh innertubes.

The URL for the first Mindful home page was something like home.sprynet.com/~mindful.

CompuServe, always just a side business of H&R Block, was becoming buggy whips in the motorcar age, so as they burned out, they sold SpryNet to MindSpring.

MindSpring had a big ceremony about how the companies were "merging," when they got gobbled up by Earthlink. Then Mindspring vanished for good.

Throughout, I kept my original URL (and mindful@sprynet.com email).

IIRC, it was with Earthlink that slow-learner I finally registered the mindfulwebworks.com domain. Eventually, I changed hosts, dropped Earthlink, and lost the original SpryNet website. By then, it was nothing but pages redirecting to the domain, but, lost those historic weblinks. Somewhere, out there in webland, on some ancient webpage, someone clicks a link to my SpryNet site, and gets a 404. *sads*

Earliest graphics and webpages, I worked hard to make sure they were 16-color, low-bandwidth friendly, and CGA viewable. Later, I figured 256-color and VGA were common. Nowadays, anyone with a blog can embed hi-res videos and most folks can run them on their HD cells and laptops. Hi-res immersion interactive game-playing is a common thing! I've built self-reproducing virtual chickens in Second Life! (Answer: Chicken came first.) A long way from my first web pages!

What will it all be like in another 20 years, Gods willing and Ragnarok don' rise?