by Okay, some thoughts back on 1995…
I got my first real job after graduating from law school; I moved from one coast to the other; I found an apartment and made new friends. All a bit of catching up on my otherwise delayed embrace of adulthood I guess.
I had an email address at this point — it may have been moving that precipitating me switching from AOL to a ISP account and getting a non-AOL address. It may have been IBM.net, I’m not 100 percent sure anymore. (Remember when there were like 10,000 ISPs to choose from?). I was a bit late to cyber stuff — I had friends in law school who had honest-to-gawd real accounts on the Internet but it was a bit beyond my patience to figure out at the time. AOL really was pretty easy to use and if it was what you had you didn’t know what you were missing.
I got a GEOCITIES account at some point – either that year or maybe early in 1996. REMEMBER GEOCITIES? As ugly and primitive as those sites were, the idea of free, simple to use hosting was a big deal in 1995. It’s weird to remember that GEOCITIES organized its URLs around the idea that the websites were organized into “neighborhoods” just like a bunch of houses on a street. I guess it kind of made sense at the time as a means of explaining cyberspace to the great middle mainstream of the population.
I had gotten a very basic PC desktop computer when I started law school. It was seriously creaking when I got out of school and started work. Back then I actually worked on upgrading it myself. I remember having a big copy of COMPUTER SHOPPER and I think I bought most of the new parts from TIGER DIRECT. (That’s how we rolled back then before you could GOOGLE exactly what you wanted and then order it from a gazillion different online vendors.) I don’t remember exactly what I upgraded but it must have been most of it. Back then WINDOWS was still simple enough for anyone with a little patience to figure out how it all worked. It wasn’t perfect but the continual improvements in computers at that time was dazzling enough that I never really grumbled about the work of making it all work (and keep it working).
I had been creating a comic strip for the law school newspaper which I continued to make sporadically after graduation. At first I made copies and mailed them to friends — totally unsolicited. I’m not sure they were appreciated really but it wasn’t too long before I figured out that I could post them on GEOCITIES and hope random strangers clicked their way to reading them.
