At the beginning of the second era of my involvment with computers. That is to say in December of 1997. I had access to a PC that had WordPerfect 5.0 installed on it. Yeah, that is right. You older computer jocks will know that 5.0 was a DOS version. It was obsure brand with a 486-SX33 and 16MB of RAM but no Windows of anykind. It was running MS-DOS 6.0 I believe. Of course, I didn't know any of this stuff at the time but was quickly learning.
The other computer I had access to at that time was at the Missoula Public Library. It was connected to the Internet. In fact, it was set up so that Netscape Navigator 3.0 was the sole purpose of the machine. There were four of them there and they were right popular. So, they had a time limit of half an hour. My schedule was such that I could only get over there one day a week. What I would do is quickly surf the sites on a list I would prepare. Without taking the time to read them I would 'save as' to floppy disk.
Then using sneakernet I would head back to where I was living and fire up WordPerfect 5.0. What I would see is the source for the webpages I had saved. I then had to wade through (and delete) the tags to find the text I was actually interested in reading.
Later when I began working on my own website this familiarity with seeing tags came in handy. My first site was on geocities(Note: This was long before Yahoo bought Geocities.) . I used their beginners editor (in those days it was pretty primative) and a template. Then about May I built my own computer. I had found download.net and downloaded tons of software. At that time all the money I could afford to spend on computers was going into hardware. What I would do is install demoware. Then when the stuff stopped working I would scrub the hard drive and re-install. It was good practice. As a result I have installed Windows many, many times.
As I was saying, I was using demoware and to be specific Hotdog HTML editor. I was also going to webmonkey (Note: This was before lycos bought hotwired) , geocities help files and links, as well as using Yahoo to search.
Note: I am currently using Google as my search engine of preference. I seem to get much better results with a lot less effort.Then I found NoteTab. I started writing everything in HTML file format. My journal, letters, email, everything. If I need to put it into dead tree format I use a browser to send it to my printer. It also makes filing easy because I simply put links in to connect it to related files. Additionally I figured it would only be a matter of time until I could get my hands on a search bot that I could point at my local files. Ta-dah, a nifty interface for searching all my files.
Since I am still in the midst of the second era it is no longer history from this point forward but current events. Which is partly what this website is all about.
Return to About This Website
Last updated on December 19, 1999