Thumper's Internet Experiences
My start with the Internet came in 1994 when I was able to gain access to various text based resources through my high school. I used various transfer methods for obtaining weather information and satellite maps as I had taken an interest in meteorology at the time. Through FTP, Gopher and other such methods I also started to learn how to use the Internet for research for papers and school projects which certainly helped with getting good grades in a few classes.
After graduating from high school and moving up to Portland, I had much better access to the Internet. Various local BBS Sysop started offering SLIP or PPP dialup connections through their systems which made way for use of web browsers and other graphical tools that brought a new dimension of the Internet to my experience.
Of course I immediately got back into my Sysop mode and wanted to learn more about running various Internet server applications and used my dial-up service to start running a web server on my home PC. I always had a hard time getting the connection to stay up long enough to actually drive to campus (I was in college at the University of Portland at this point) and use their lab with web access to view my server at home. Once I had the server working I started on learning HTML which didn’t take long to pick up, as at the time HTML was still incredibly simple.
So I went with my usually take something simple and get crazy tendency and set up dedicated dial-up service with a local ISP and registered my first domain name, thumper.net, and set up a web server on my home computer. I have been asked why I only own the dot net variance of the name and not the dot com or dot org. When I first registered it in 1996, Internic still did all the domain registrations manually and required applications for registration and purpose. They actually refused me the other two names since my computer was being used as a network hub to other computers I had at home. Of course when domain registrations went crazy and they automated the process, other people registered the other two names before I was given a chance to request them again myself and they haven’t come available since. At the time of writing this, the other two sites are blank, as they have been since they were registered. I don’t know if they’ll ever use them for anything, but I don’t think I’ll ever get them.
The first instant messaging style application I used was a program called Powwow. It required a server side for chat rooms so of course I set one of those up and it rapidly became the most popular powwow room maxing out at the allowed 75 users almost 24 hours per day. It eventually became to much of a bandwidth consumer for my poor 28.8 dialup connection so I shut it down after moving away from Powwow and spending some time on the ICQ project instead. I was user number 324 in the first beta test program for ICQ thus my very low ICQ number that I have.
I got bored with HTML pretty quickly and needed a more robust web server so in 1997 I picked up Website Professional 1.1 made by O’Reilly which was a very nice web server. It included the first release of Cold Fusion (so far as I know only referred to as Cold Fusion 1 or 1.1 back then). I started writing dynamic web applications that stored and retrieved data from access databases. This was pretty exciting for me as my experience with dynamic web content up to that point required offline scripting to dynamically create web pages then upload them to the server. To have a tool that allow it to be dynamic in real time and interactive to the user was very cool. I had a feeling back then that dynamic web applications would take over the web in the next few years since that is what really would make web sites useful. As it turned out I was right, but I didn’t know how many dynamic languages would become available over that time. I kept up with Cold Fusion until version 5, but have been too busy since then to work with it often enough to be an expert in the more recent MX version. I could probably still be considered an expert in Cold Fusion though.
My home adventures with running servers actually led me to nearly $5,000 in venture capital to start a competitive inexpensive web hosting operation. I had over 100 clients lined up and the servers ready to go, but delays from US West in getting connectivity to my parents house where I was running the servers pretty much doomed the business from the start. Over the next couple months of delays the web hosting business exploded and I found myself a small fish in a rapidly growing ocean of inexpensive web hosting providers. By the time everything was ready to go, I had lost too much of the client base that was prepared and after 6 months of operation fell short on operational goals and had to return as much of the capital to the investors as I could. I lost about $12,000 in the venture but learned a whole lot about business, telecom companies, web servers and much more in the process. After getting the clients I had left over to a new provider, I sold my company’s domain name (wehost.com) to another provider who also gave me hosting space for my own domain as part of the name sale. It has been there ever since and my attentions shifted to other areas of learning technology with my new job in the computer services department at Concordia University where I was then going to school for a business degree.