Hitchhiking the Information Superhighway
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“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I like beginnings. This is a constant. In primary school, I tried to re-invent arithmetic. My D&D characters were obsessively re-rolled and scrapped. On various computers, I’d start my games of Civilization over and over. I’d hope that if I could just get the beginning right that all that followed wouldn’t be so hard or boring.
There were three other constants in my life during my teen years: a loving family, a long-running D&D group and near-complete loathing of school. Before I hit twenty, these three constants had dwindled down to one. While my family remained (and remains) wonderful, but my D&D group evaporated – a dozen or so friends each fumbling their separate ways into life – and I had managed to drop out of school not once, but twice.
It wasn’t much change but it wasn’t much of a life and I still found myself adrift. I wandered from job to job, holding six different positions in the space of two years. Each time I’d quit in frustration and go looking for a new beginning to try and get right.
In early ’94, financial pressures mounting, I landed a job at a dental lab and clung to it for dear life. I liked the work. I made friends. I even survived my first evaluation. Thankfully, I had a kind boss who turned me into a project (and it seems that this later become his new project.) It was a good job. Some years later, I even met my lovely wife there. So, by late ’94, I was pretty sure that I would be a dental technician. Full stop. For the foreseeable future, I would spend my nights playing D&D and my days crafting false teeth while wearing a turquoise smock. Life would be good.
Then the province of Alberta drastically cut funding for senior’s dental care and, with it, much of the profit involved in running a dental lab. Waves of layoff swept the industry and, as lifelong staffers at the lab were let go, I was sure that I would be next.
One night in January, while I moped over my coming unemployment, my mother saw a segment on the local news about the Information Superhighway.* Around this time, my mother was taking a business course and one of the other participants told her about something called the Information Superhighway. The idea of the Net set a fire in her which quickly spread to the rest of the family.
I hardly remember the six months that followed — they are still a blur of days at the dental lab (I never did get laid off) and of nights exploring the Net with my family. As best I can recall, it went like this:
Dream. Dream a lot. Get quotes on web page development. Beat a hasty retreat from $10,000/page. Scrape some cash together. Buy a second-hand 286. Buy a modem. Find cheap Web access via a local BBS. Spend three days figuring out how to actually get to a website. Surf the awesomeness of the textual web with Lynx. Fail to understand the HTML spec. Buy a second-hand 386. Get Netscape Navigator. Freak out at the total awesomeness of the graphical Web. Discover View Source. Lose mind. Build hideously malformed web pages stitched together from the HTML sources of Netscape’s site, razorfish.com and hotwired. Work ourselves into a bleary-eyed, sore-fingered, sweaty, sleep-deprived lather. Repeat several times. Finally, in June of 1995, publish an online travel magazine with 20-something articles and, somewhat oddly, a satirical paperdoll of Canadian politician Preston Manning.
The first few weeks after publishing, we’d refresh our log files every few minutes to see who had visited, cheering as people worked their way from article to article. Good times.
I hold much fondness for this year. It still feels like we just wandered up to the side of the information superhighway and stuck out our thumbs, waiting in the bright sunshine for the future to pull up in a fast car. And when she pulled up, we were so naïve that we weren’t even surprised — with a nod of our heads we just got in.
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Posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 20:46
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December 29th, 2008 at 23:56
Your Mother did not see a piece on the Info Superhiway on the news. She went to a six-week course to gain business management skills for a project she was planning (some sort of guidebook to government services if memory serves) and there met a programmer named John Darraigh who told her about the ‘Net.
From this the Calgary Explorer was born, with Maw writing the pieces, you doing the mark-up (which Maw recognized and understood conceptually from her days setting galley type) and your brother doing sales. But you are absolutely right. We stuck out our thumbs and the first vehicle to stop was the ‘net equivalent of an old truck headed to the cotton fields with a load of migrant workers. We almost worked ourselves to death, and starved, that first year.
When we published our first issue you couldn’t yet wrap text around an image, the background was any colour as long as you were pleased with grey, and I don’t remember the font but there was not a big selection.
You’ve come a long way Baby!
Your Mother
December 30th, 2008 at 00:05
Heh. I’ve told that part of this story wrong so many times.
The lack of background colours may have been a mercy, as I still remember you and Ian making fun of my *ahem* inspired colour choices later on in 1995 when Netscape added them as a rogue outside-the-specs feature.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:03
I remember the first time someone made a table without borders, and I was all “Why would you ever want a table that didn’t show borders?”
heh.
TTFN
Travis
December 30th, 2008 at 16:52
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