Ten Years Ago

The mid-90’s were exciting times. Screaming fast Pentium chips and Windows 95 were making PC’s do things they never had done before. 56K modems and ISP’s such as Earthlink, CompuServe, and AOL were making the World Wide Web accessible to more and more people. Online communities were forming around common interests. Web sites had more information and less marketing.

Back then, I was living in southern California and was in a less-than-happy place in my life. I spent a lot of time writing, and a lot of time surfing the nascent Web. Somewhere along the way, I submitted some of my writings to various web sites.

Fast forward ten years. The web has change a lot. Computers are faster, and dial-up is a curiosity. I carry more computing power and storage in my pocket than my entire PC had back then. I’m now living in northern California, and in a much better, happier place in my life. I’m still spending a lot of time on the net, blogging, posting photographs, and coding. But the WWW has a long memory.

I started blogging more frequently earlier this year in an attempt to get Google to recognize my name as me — not somebody else. Well, it has worked, which is pretty cool. While browsing through the Google hits on my name, I came across this old site. It’s one of the sites that I submitted my writing to ten years ago. This is probably one of the last remaining copies of anything I wrote back then. I think the original files were lost or destroyed years ago, and there are only a few paper copies of some of my writing. It was a strange feeling to suddenly be transported back ten years.

Which makes me wonder. Where will I be ten years from now? What kind of technology will I regard as a necessity? Will I be surprised to stumble upon this blog posting?